Congressional District No. 9
Adam Smith is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, so naturally we started off our meeting by talking about what a fraud and a turd Trump is.
That took a little while, and then the subject turned to Smith’s record. Smith negotiated the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which shamefully did not include a one-year ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia. But it did include “the largest social welfare increase since the Affordable Care Act,” Smith said, “and that would not have happened if I had not been chairman of the Armed Services Committee.” The big thing in that legislation was paid parental leave for all federal employees, but there were also hundreds of other things, like fixing a problem with benefits for widows and widowers, giving service members the ability to sue for medical malpractice, sending $10 million in aid to Puerto Rico, and more.
His priorities if he’s given another term? “We desperately need to update, upgrade, and improve the Affordable Care Act to get better health care to people,” he said. He also talked about comprehensive immigration reform, fixing “glaring holes” in gun laws around background checks, systemic racism in law enforcement (“We have got to totally reexamine the way we do law enforcement”), equality in general (“I have always been very vocal about the fact that our society is fundamentally racist and fundamentally sexist”), climate change (he has signed on to the Green New Deal), and progressive taxation (he’s “excited about the tax that Seattle just passed, because I really believe that a huge part of the problem in our country right now is the concentration of wealth”). This one’s easy, mostly because no one is running to the left of him this time. Vote Smith.
