Over the format for tonight’s town hall. As you came to the room, staff with Congresswoman’s office handed out blank question cards. If you have a question you’d like the Congresswoman to address, please fill that out and return it to the staff in the lobby. If you have any follow-up questions, please talk to the Congresswoman’s staff about that. After Bernie gives an update on her work, I will read out your questions one by one for the Congresswoman to answer. We’re going to try to get to as many of your questions this evening as possible, so please help us by get to that by following these ground rules. I’m going to go over them. Ground rule number one, no signs. This is not a political event. It’s an official event. And the Congresswoman is here to answer your questions and address your concerns. Number two, please stick to the format. The format was selected to ensure that we are able to get to as many questions as possible, so please work with us to follow it. Number three, no questions or rebuttal from the crowd. Please reach out to staff afterwards if you’d like additional information or if you’d like to leave additional comments. We really want to focus on getting to as many questions as possible tonight. The staff is here to answer your follow-up questions and concerns as well. Number four, no offensive language will be tolerated. Enough said. Number five, refrain from disrupting the town hall. You are all here tonight to hear from the Congresswoman and get your concerns addressed. Please don’t impede the ability of your fellow community members from doing that. Number six, please be civil. Let’s keep the temperature as low as possible so we can have the most productive town hall possible. And finally, number seven, duplicate questions will be removed. We want to use this time to hear from all the constituents so that questions that are similar will only be asked once. Please follow up with the Congresswoman’s staff if you’d like more information. Now, I’m turning it over to the Congresswoman. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chair Nichols, for echoing the unfield task of moderating, but it is very much appreciated. Thank you to law enforcement who’s made it out. And sincerely, thank you all so much for being here. It is such an encouragement to be home with you all and see so many folks again. I was looking at the little digital wallet on my phone the other day. I’ve been on 192 flights this year. So it’s really good to keep my tail on the ground for a minute and catch up and hear from all of you and just spend time. It is obviously like, it is a complete rodeo, to put it kindly, in DC right now. And it’s just, it is really a profound encouragement to get to be home and meet people who are living their commitment to our country and their, you know, with their one and precious life, working to keep and build national health, to support our veterans and our seniors and our schools, people that are keeping the lights on and water clean, at our public utilities, our farmers. It is such an encouragement to just be with good people. And I consider all of you part of that fabric also. I think one of the really difficult or the real vulnerabilities of the current world that we’re in is this idea that everything is a consumer good, that you can buy a clean environment or you can buy health or that you can buy real community or a democracy. Democracy is not a binary choice that happens once a year on election day. It is a deliberative, or it needs to be a deliberative process where we sit down and talk with each other candidly and openly about what we think is worth having at the end of the day. When we get into this sort of bat race about just what you think you can get, it’s dead. When you get into this sort of thing of this scarcity mentality of it’s us versus them or it’s this fight, you get cornered into spending your life pursuing something that you didn’t want in the first place. And I’ve felt that and been thinking that a lot, especially thinking about, like, nobody actually likes health insurance, right? We want health. And we spend all of our time trying to nebate the minutiae and the criteria of getting out from under the thing that we don’t even like. We want health. We want to see our kids at night. We want eight hours of sleep at night. We want to be able to eat real food. And how do we animate movement towards there, towards those things that are worth having at the end of the day? And I kind of knifed my way onto Appropriations Committee. It’s rare for people in my pocket to make it there in their second term. I was up with the Arn Propes, and it’s been really interesting because you go through all the funding bills. And particularly, I sit on the AG subcommittee and also the Financial Services General Government subcommittees. And, you know, in the AG bill, it’s like, you know, we’re putting billions of dollars behind these programs that aren’t fixing things. Farmer suicide rates are going up. Farm consolidation is going up. National health is in decline. We’re importing 40 percent of the fresh fruits and vegetables we consume. Wildfire is one of the largest emitters of CO2 in our state. You know, we’re getting less sleep. There’s more suicide and oppression in young people all across. So what are we doing with this money? And we can’t keep trying to bring the same solutions to problems that are getting worse and worse. And instead talking about what we really want, let’s have a focus and an orientation on that. Electoral politics is not debate club. It is math. It is figuring out what are the areas of commonality where you can get a critical mass of people to stand together and pursue a reform or a program. And it’s wild being in Congress, one, not really having come out of politics before, and two, representing a seat that is, there are so few seats like this left in the country. There are so few seats that have not been gerrymandered into an inch of their life. And so many of us feel like our values are and our priorities aren’t pursued. And it becomes this sort of slick, focused group agenda that’s not what we asked for in the first place. And we see this when I talk to our teachers, when I talk to other parents, how difficult it is for teachers to be able to just do the job that they signed up for, how much standardized testing there’s been, the amount of time that is spent doing paperwork. Any nurse will tell you this, any doctor will tell you this. And how do we pursue the precursors of those things, strong families? And I think coming out of a, you know, there are not very many members of Congress who actually live in the rural part of the district they represent. And so it’s a different lens, and I think a necessary one of loyalty and detail. This is not about, you know, I believe it’s not about a broad allegiance to environmentalism as a concept, but to specifically loving the Gifford Pinchot, warts and all, and understanding how a federal policy would impact our woods. And when we bring that level of specificity and detail and intimacy to the federal process, if you can get 218 members of Congress showing up who know their woods, who know their rivers, you get much better federal policy when you’re talking about the thing itself, what you really want in concrete detail. And it’s crazy because it feels like it’s working. In some ways, right, I believe I have passed, I think I’m the only Democrat who, a first-term Democrat in a proposed who has passed amendments in the process. I’ve passed four amendments unanimously. I’ve had a few other things move through manager’s amendments. I’ve had one amendment opposed unanimously. So, you know, it’s the kind of independence and community and self-sufficiency that I think places like Scumania County generate. You know, we all carry a chainsaw in the back of our cars during winter because you know you’re going to need it. We all thank the PUD. We all know where our power comes from. We have a relationship that’s concrete and that values independence and reliance on each other. So it’s been a wild time and I’ll just touch briefly on some of the amendments I’ve passed. You all remember the infant formula shortage crisis? I was adding up, it was awful. And it’s basically because we’ve created a duopolistic system in the infant formula supply. There’s a program within WIC. It’s called the sole source contracting model. And it says that whatever manufacturer can give the biggest rebate to WIC for their program gets the entire state’s contract. WIC is about 70 percent of all infant formula purchased in this country. 90 percent of the market follows whatever supplier gets the WIC contract because you see the little sticker on the barcode of the grocery store. And so trying to unwind this, I gotten in this past that requires the FDA and the FTC to get together and re-evaluate the single source contracting model because it’s not working. I mean, it’s not getting cheaper and, you know, it’s an incredibly fragile system. I think there are fewer than 10 members of Congress who have a child in daycare, so it’s not real for them in the same way that it is for us. And so trying to bring that diversity of experience and thought to bear here was a real encouragement to be able to pass that. Another one that feels like small potatoes to a lot of people, but you all might know how everybody personally recognizes, but we don’t talk often in big groups about how bright headlights have gotten. So like the old HIV headlights, I just joined an auto repair shop before this, so the old HIV headlights, they maxed out at about 600 lumens. New LEDs max out at about 12,000 lumens, and it’s blinding, and it’s a real risk to safety. Safe driving is a team sport. You can’t do that if you’re blinded. Pedestrian deaths are going up. It’s a real threat to safety. And those standards that NHTSA puts out have not been changed since before I was born. The last time they were reformed was in 1985. And so having, I think the important thing here is that we have a body of legislators and a federal government that is swimming in the same water as all of us and says the things that are important to us are the things that should be important to them. Being able to pass that amendment unanimously is an encouragement because I think bipartisanship, there’s a muscle memory to it. And if you let it atrophy too far, you are in a bad spot as a nation. And so saying that there’s an external reality, there’s a necessity, there’s a correct place for regulation that is responsive to technology, and that driving safely matters. Those kinds of baseline things, I had another amendment passed. So I learned that only 30 percent of veterans are able to use their VA home loans. And Dean and I built our house here in Samania County. I gotta say, Marlon Morat is like a personal hero to me, the old county building inspector. I haven’t interacted as much with Philip. No, I feel terrible because I can’t. But, you know, we would not be homeowners if we had not been able to work with the county and build a house ourselves. We drew the plans with a pencil. We used the state prescriptive engineering standards. It cost about $120K for us to build our house. So, you know, homeownership is a real big way that people move wealth generationally and have security. And to hear that veterans functionally cannot use their VA home loans as an owner-builder was pretty upsetting to me. And so I got a piece of legislation. It was a pilot program to say, yeah, you can use your VA home loans to build your own house, recognizing that a lot of veterans get out of service with the skills relevant to self-sufficiency, and that this is a really good feeling to have agency in your life. It’s a really strong suicide prevention to have that kind of physical reality around you. What I heard back was that you cannot introduce visual information into bill text. So I was not able to have a blueprint in my legislation. And I think this is reflective of the thing that DC is a place made by lawyers for lawyers. And we’re not bringing all of the forms of intelligence to bear to fix things in this country. We all deserve a seat at the table. Whether or not you’re academically gifted, you have a role to play in making good legislation. So I was able to pass an amendment in approach this year that creates the pathway to have visual information in bill text so that we are all able to have a seat at the table and a place in building a federal policy that reflects our values and our interests and our gifts. So that was an encouraging one. And I would say the one that was unanimously opposed recently and appropriate, I’ve heard a lot from a lot of my neighbors about a concern that DC is run by staffers and not by the elected member themselves. You know, I used to sit on the Underwood Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors. All seven people who voted voted for me in that. And I remember going to these workshops about how are we going to keep farmland together? What is the plan of succession among families? And how do you handle that? Who gets the keys when? And we see this in every family business, that you have to have these kinds of conversations. When I looked at the ethics code about cognitive acuity and members of Congress, there was nothing. There are rules up down and sideways about what kind of baseball hat I can accept as a gift, whether or not my food comes on a toothpick or a plate. There’s different rules. But what to do when a member of Congress is no longer the one making the decisions has never been addressed. It’s a difficult subject. So my admitment directed the Office of Congressional Conduct to develop a standard that would allow them to evaluate, the ethics committee to evaluate whether a member is able to execute the duties of their office unimpeded by significant, irreversible cognitive decline. You know, I’ve been sitting in appropriations markup for the past several months, and they hang the portraits of the chairs around there. Kate Granger’s portrait has been staring at me for the past three months. Kate Granger was the member of Congress who was found living in an Alzheimer’s care facility while the sitting member of that office had not voted in eight months. This is not an amendment that should be easily exercised. I want to point out that the Ethics Committee is different than every other committee in Congress. It does not follow the majority, so it’s always 50-50 Republican and Democrat. It does not have the authority to expel a member of Congress. That is in the Constitution. That has to go before the full body. You have to get two-thirds of the body to agree. But there is no criteria to make these evaluations. And trying to have a transparent system to have these discussions about what to do when a member of Congress is no longer able to execute their duties in a way that reflects credibly on their office. I think that this is a conversation that we have in every other corner of the country and we have not seen in Congress a willingness to have these discussions themselves. And it’s about loyalty to your constituents and them having the information that they need. And also not a misplaced loyalty to a colleague, but to transparency and information that’s non-partisan. And so again, continue to work on this, you know, and the polling I’ve seen. I mean, I sent out an email and I think it was like 89 percent of respondents to my newsletter strongly support this amendment. And it’s something that I’ve heard from all of you, many of you, about across the district, across Southwest Washington. And so finding ways to animate that and build the strongest body possible to make these decisions, to animate our priorities and not just hold the line on loyalty to a colleague, but to really represent our districts as best we can. The last thing I’ll be thinking… And the last thing that I want to be sure to mention is that my office, I’ve made sure everything in my teens knows how seriously I take casework. And just to really encourage you, if there’s any issue that touches a federal agency in your life, we want to be there to fight alongside you for that. We take it very, very seriously. We’ve been really effective in being able to get those VA benefits, to get the records, to get passports in a case of emergency. We take it really seriously. And so when you hear about things, you know, whether, you know, if it’s FHA, whatever it is that you’re looking at, we want to be useful and we want to be here for you. And please don’t feel like it’s a narrow self-interest to bring an issue to my office because oftentimes what that does is then illuminates a broader systemic issue. And it’s a really important thing to sort of tighten that circle between the policy idea and how it’s actually experienced at the implementation level. So having that accountability and transparency really matters. And we’ve been, I think we’re at, Gwen’s here, Tabitha’s here, they’ve been really effective in casework. I think we’re at $5 million this year alone, in the past, this year alone, in getting tax dollars back to constituents. So, you know, let me get the letterhead to work for you. I take it very seriously, and it’s a privilege to get to take up that work. So I’m very curious to hear what you guys are thinking about and what questions you have. And again, thank you so much for being here. It’s a real encouragement. Okay, first question for this evening comes from Lisa from, I believe, the Prinville area. As the Skamania School Board Director, I’m interested in any update on the Secure Rural Schools Program funding. It is essential for the continued delivery of quality education for our community and for the county as well. Yeah, so if you, so for those of you who don’t know, you know, this is a, in the West, it is largely, we have a lot of federally held timberland. And that, the revenue that was generated off those timber sales portion went to our public services like schools, roads, law enforcement. And that’s one of the reasons we used to have some of the best schools in the country was those Title III dollars. And as we started to see constrictions in timber harvesting come down and federal policy, a program called Secure Rural Schools was adopted that starts to kind of backstop some of those losses in tax revenue. And we’ve seen the number of dollars allocated through security rural schools just atrophy over time and get smaller and smaller and smaller. And we haven’t seen a necessary reform in timber policy federally to make up for that. And so secure rural schools, so here’s the drama. So it passed through the latest budget bill in the House. It moved to the Senate. The Senate parliamentarians stripped it out as not germaine. Then the Senate passed their own standalone bill on secure rural schools through unanimous consent. And that’s where it stands right now, waiting for the House to again pass it a second time so that it can be signed into law. But the problem is that the Senate version only authorizes through financial year 2026. So this is just, again, it’s just a smaller horizon. The last time it was authorized, it was for three years. And so it’s just this dwindling pool of money. And we see this painfully and bitterly here. The Wind River Middle School was shut down because of this in part. You know, Wacah County is now down to a four-day school week. Here in Scamania County, we’re seeing bus routes consolidated. We saw a lot of para-educated positions ended. I think about 10 paraeducator positions, as well as some of the bus routes consolidated. I mean, it’s a bad situation. It is a terrible situation. And it’s been really frustrating to me to see how animated and how much momentum there was behind renaming the Gulf of Mexico. And I just want geography class. You know, I just want to know what kind of school we’re going to have here in the fall. And it’s, you know, every angle I can, I am bringing this up to my colleagues. I am pestering people all over the floor and just relentlessly pushing that this is real and concrete for us and trying to really rally my other colleagues who are from states that rely on secure rural schools for funding. But again, it’s one of these issues where it’s like there are so few members of Congress who have children in public school to begin with, and then you narrow that gap to who’s on the West Coast. And so it is a battle worth fighting, and it is a battle that I am very committed to pursuing every avenue we can because the consequences are too bitter of not pursuing that. And also, I think this is an and situation. And wildfire is one of the largest contributors of CO2 in our state. We need to have sustainable harvests. We need to have reliable family-wage jobs, single-owner households. We need to have, you know, everybody’s working three jobs, right? And so many of us, Brian and I were just debating this, I heard 80 percent, he heard 75, or percent of employed people in our county are employed outside of the county. And that means that you’re not coaching Little League. It means that you’re not making it to PTA meetings. It means that you’re not going to see your kids as much at night. And it’s a real atrophy of community. And so when you, you know, that’s one of the real things about the shift to the knowledge economy or the service economy, you know, if you need, if you’re trying to make a living cutting hair, a lot of times that means you’re going to move to a city and you’re not going to be able to own land, right? You’re not going to be able to own a home as easily. When you have a mill, you’ve got the full integration of people, apprentices, all the way up to management and owners in the same school. There’s a real asset to being to making things and to having a real economy of manufacturing. And so it’s a fighting for SRS reauthorization with all that I’ve got and also saying we need the kind of policy that has sustainable timber harvests. I was able to pass the Good Neighbor Authority expansion, which is a kind of harvesting where it’s thinning, and that those dollars come back. The county is able to kind of help manage some of those sales. A lot of people will not bid on a job if it’s being bid through the Forest Service as easily as they might if it’s something they know at the county or the state. So every action we have to ensure that our natural resources, that the value of that is accruing to the public good, to real family wage jobs, to good public schools, to good infrastructure. You know, we’ve got to think about this three-dimensionally here. And so that’s where we’re at. Thank you, Lisa. I appreciate your work so much. And I deeply understand nobody runs a budget. Nobody would choose to run a budget like this with a year-to-year lack of confidence.

Okay, Marjorie from Stevenson asks, what are you doing and what will you do to protect the immigrant community from being terrorized indiscriminately by ICE agents in southwest Washington?

Well, so I think it’s important that you’re not demagoguing law enforcement, that the accountability lies where it ought to with how it’s being directed and where and to what degree. And I’ve made sure that my staff knows it’s a priority for me if a citizen is somehow involved in one of these in detention that we are proactively reaching out to families as much as possible to make sure they know about our casework opportunities and really pursuing that. We have not gotten any engagement on that. The numbers are relatively low in southwest Washington on ICE engagement. You know, I think it’s also, I mean, it’s Congress’s failure to act on immigration reform. I mean, I think it’s a good thing. We don’t want to see cartels being able to make a buck trafficking humans, and we don’t want to see them trafficking fentanyl. I think it is the obligation of a country to know who and what is coming through. And Congress’s failure to have comprehensive immigration reform is pushing us into more chaos and giving more agency to an executive branch that is not always, it is not. We have as much agency as the executive branch and we need to be exerting it in defense of a sane policy. My dad immigrated here from Mexico in the 70s and looking at the ways that families experience of the immigration system is so different depending on whether or not you have access to a lawyer. And that is not America. That is not the way it ought to be. It should not be dependent on your bank account or your last name. We need to have an immigration system that is clear and fair and prioritizing, that is efficient and quick, and not a guaranteed employment for lawyers, but is really meeting our country’s needs where they’re at and affirming our identity as a nation that welcomes refugees and that is honoring the dignity of humanity. So we’re going to keep our ears open and eyes open and being as available as we can be. And yeah.

Next question is from John from Underwood. Can you support federal, state, county, and local law enforcement working together to get violent criminals out of our community?

Nobody wants violent criminals in our community, and I think it’s really critical that one of the things that I’ve been pursuing, you know, cartels or trafficking cartels, they do not recognize or they do not care about which jurisdiction they’re in. And so having funding for multi-jurisdictional task forces, particularly on drug and addiction, really matters. That our law enforcement is able to communicate with each other and across departments. That there’s officer resources. I mean, we’re on the I-5 corridor. And that means that we need to have the resources to communicate across state boundaries, across county boundaries, between different agencies. And we also need to have resources to respond to local issues. It can’t just be pursuing, chasing people on I-5. We need to be able to have responses when, God forbid, your house gets broken into, that the sheriff has capacity to get there. And I will say the same thing goes. This is a little bit outside of what John was talking about. But talking to the sheriff about, I think it’s something like a 700 percent increase in the demand for search and rescue operations. So you’ve got a lot of kids on TikTok who do not understand what they’re getting into. And they get out in a Gifford and they get lost. And that means that we have our local law enforcement tied up in the woods, often without communication access. You know, they can maybe send a text, but they can’t communicate about the condition. And that’s a whole other kettle of fish. One of my early CPFs, earmark requests, was for radio communications to have more communication because we all know how unreliable it’s the gorge, right? It’s a difficult place to get cell phone reception in. So ensuring that our law enforcement has the ability to communicate with each other, that they have the agency and authority to communicate with other law enforcement. And this is becoming a particularly tough issue because you’re seeing so much shift to digital communications and law enforcement with a whole different set of communications infrastructure. So trying to catch up and be able to communicate between counties when one county might be on a radio system and the other county has transitioned to digital communication. So there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. And, you know, to his question about, you know, violent criminals, I have concerns about some of the data. I think sometimes the crime are just going underreported. You know, if you know that they’re not going to make it out there, you’re not maybe going to call about illegal dumping on your property, or you’re maybe not going to call about the kids doing burnouts. It doesn’t mean it’s not happening. It doesn’t mean that we’re feeling safe and secure. And so ensuring that we have that access and we have the resources to respond and people are able to call in and get the support they need, that’s a real facet. And yeah.

Next question. DeJana asks, I hear you talk a lot about trades and trade training, but I don’t hear a lot about unions. What is your opinion on unions? What are your thoughts on what is happening with federal employees? Yeah, I think unions have been a really important part of upholding the dignity of work and the ability to get paid a living wage for real work. I think that is a cornerstone of our economy, that you ought to get paid for the work that you do. And I think it’s also a part of upholding work that is worth paying for. You know, I get pretty frustrated about how often my husband walks through his work boots and just, you can’t find work boots that last longer than a year anymore. And the idea that I don’t want to see a kid somewhere else exploited for a cheap pair of work boots. I want to be able to buy things that were made here with skill and pride that uphold the nobility of craft and commitment to that. And unions have been a really critical part of that. One of my brothers is a federal employee at the VA. And I was pretty frustrated to see the way that federal employees were scapegoated. We want systemic reform. We want to have an efficient government, but randomly scapegoating a federal employee does not build a better machine. It’s just pulling butts and nuts off randomly. We want to see a more efficient machine, and a lot of times those employees that were scapegoated are exactly the ones who could tell you where the inefficiency lies. Like I remember talking to some of my oyster growers, and they were like, well, they fired the person that does the water quality testing, but apparently they still have a comms director because they’re still tweeting. And so what’s your priority here? And it’s not about a upper management class being able to kind of protect themselves and their own job security at the expense of people who are working. It’s a balance of the work boots to the clipboards and saying that we want to see our federal dollars being used to do the thing itself. And I’d say that goes also, I was talking to the Port of Chinook. They were telling me that 40 percent of the cost of dredging was permitted. They’re like, what are we doing? What are we doing here? When that dredging not happens, means that we have more semis on the road. When that dredging not happens, it means that we’re cut off from emergency response and any kind of high water event. And a lot of those federal employees are exactly the people who could point to you where the inefficiency is and how to build a better machine. These are civil servants that want to do a good job and have gotten wrapped around the bureaucratic axle, not by their own choosing, but because often, like Mark Twain said, I would have wrote a shorter letter, but I didn’t have enough time. They would have wrote a better bill, but they didn’t listen to people. And so having a legislative process where people who’ve done the job are at the table and have a local lens into how this is going to be implemented. I was at the Clark County Jail, talking to their corrections officers. They told me, you know, the average life expectancy of your corrections officer is 58 years old. They have a suicide rate seven times higher than the general population. And it’s underreported because they don’t get the insurance payment. And I was talking to them about what they need. Like, how can I support you? And they kept telling me what their detainees need. They’re like, well, look, if I can give that detainee a roll of toilet paper, my whole relationship is going to change with them. If I can’t give them the roll of toilet paper, I might get ejaculated on later. I wish I was joking, but that’s the reality. And they point directly to, this was a little bit of field, but they said you could draw a direct line to when they shut down beds at Western State Hospital to when they started having schizophrenics in the general population and a real shift in what they were experiencing in law enforcement. And so making sure that our civil servants have the ear of lawmakers and that we are actually pursuing the regulatory and procedural reform that empowers the people to do the job they signed up to do. We’re asking them to do the wrong job. We’re asking them to fill out paperwork or to, you know, send a nice report to someone, and that’s not what they wanted to do in the first place. They want to be able to give somebody a roll of toilet paper when they ask for it. And so affirming that agency and their virtue of being able to do that work is a really core part of getting, you know, having pride and agency in these jobs and getting the most value out of our tax dollars. So those are the kinds of things that I’m looking at when I’m thinking about how we support federal employees. I was first in line to very clearly explain to the administration that Bonneville is a self-funding agency. Randomly firing people at Bonneville, firing machinists at Bonneville is not a good long-term solution to having reliable power and getting those, you know, working to get those reversed and that we’re not going to have timber sales if we don’t have people to execute those sales at the Forest Service. We can’t just rely on tech bros to tell us who to randomly fire. It’s looking under the hood and thinking critically about the kinds of jobs where we’ve developed an efficiency in the system itself. Okay, next question comes from Mel from Schemania. With the cost of today’s housing, my own kids can’t afford a house. U.S. property owners that are in the SMA special management area of the gorge can’t even build an ADU on our own property. Can you talk with the feds and Gorge Commission about us being able to build on our own land? Thinking? Yeah, I mean, there are so many crazy stories. I mean, I all personally know many, many stories about, you know, somebody not being able to place the windows because a hiker might see a glare or having to paint the backs of signs or all these things that they make sense on paper, but in practice they don’t. And I have been concerned that I don’t have a problem with nice houses being built, multi-million dollar houses being built per se, but it is very concerning to me to hear that the regulatory moat that that builder might be able to surmount is something that people who are trying to do a starter home can’t. We need starter homes. We need housing. This is one of the primary ways that people move wealth generationally and affirming our ability to build homes for ourselves to have security. Because I will tell you, the alternative is somebody living in an RV and they get group. That’s what’s happening. And then they torch it. And it’s a $7,000 bill to get it out of there. If you can, find a tote, a record to come get it. So there are real environmental and economic and just social and cultural costs to a system that is not correctly sized. So some of the things that I’ve been thinking about is like, you know, not just within the special management area, but broadly. So, yeah, I told you, Dean and I, it was $120,000, we spent $120,000 to build our house that’s at $8,800 square feet. It’s a nice house, not too great, but we did a good job. And I’ve heard reports about the average cost of a federally involved affordable housing unit being three or four times that at times. And I guess three times, two or three times. And so I think that my conception of what’s kind of going on is that, you know, knowingly or unknowingly, people sort of stumble into a very restrictive zoning and permitting process. And that scarcity does help their asset appreciate it. Means that your house is more valuable if there are less houses around. And then they come to the feds and they say, hey, we don’t have any affordable housing. Can you help us out? And then the feds come in and they help build housing and it’s a very slow, arduous process. What I’ve been working on, some legislation that I’ve been working on, is saying, you know, you’ve got to clean out your own act. You’ve got to make it easier for people to build. And I’m not going to tell you how to do that. I’m not going to tell you that it’s about, you know, parking requirements or whatever it is. You figure out how to get there, city or county. You figure out how to get there. And when you elevate, when you build more housing, you move up in the line for those federal dollars. So let the private market, let families like ours build more housing. One thing that we have going for us in Washington State that’s pretty cool, I learned this is very unusual, is our prescriptive engineering standards for owner-builder. So Nina and I didn’t have to go to an engineer to get our plan stamped. You could just look up the book and say what the size of the header needs to be. And that probably saved, I mean, that saved us $10,000, a significant amount. And so trying to apply that and say, are there more ways that we can have prescriptive engineering standards, more agency, more shop class in junior high, more ability to make our own housing? I don’t think that everyone’s going to go out and build their own house, but I know that every housing unit brings down the cost of everybody else’s housing. It takes pressure off the rental market. It gives us more housing stock. And that’s a really important part of our identity as Americans, that agency to do the thing itself and not have to wait for help to do it, but to say, where is the system breaking down? Get that in order, make it easier for people to build a house and build generational wealth that way. A family’s budget is cash is fungible, right? Like we can go in and we can subsidize child care all day long. And there’s strong arguments that there’s good things there. But it’s also true that if you allow a family to move from paying rent to paying a mortgage and owning the thing itself, that extra $200 a month means that they have more money to buy real food, they have more money to pay for childcare, all the other things. And so helping people build their own wealth, because their household budgets are fungible. So how do we get more value out of what we’re doing and making sure that people have self-determination in this country and the ability to get what they want if they work hard, you pay attention and shop class, you’ve got an opportunity here to build something worth having. So those are some of the things I think about around housing and how we get a seat at the table. I guess the last thing I’ll say, sorry, but within that, there’s been a lot of emphasis in building code around really expensive forms of lowering the carbon footprint. Like you’ve got a triple glazed argon-filled window. That’s a pretty expensive window. But the traditional ways of building that we know about, you put an appropriate eave on the house. That roof is going to last. That house is going to last a lot longer. You know, you put the long side facing south, you’re going to need less money for heating. And so trying to get more space to the table to affirm the things that we already know in the trades about how you build a house that lasts 80 years, that is something that you can heat, that you can cool. It shouldn’t just be only about the research. It shouldn’t just be about tax credits for a $40,000 heat pump. It ought to also be about, you know what else saves a lot of energy is putting a skirt on a mobile home. It doesn’t cost $40,000, costs like $2,000. And that person, that family is a lot more likely to be on a fixed income than somebody that’s able to go in and drop $40K on a heat pump. So thinking about these kinds of permitting and building codes and ways that we can build more value in, and I think that comes from having people out of the trades at the table when these rules are being set. David from Tampas asks, are you hopeful in the prospects for cooperation across the island of Congress as the Trump administration goes into its final years? I mean, I think there really is a pretty profound realignment of politics in this country. And, you know, this is an event that’s put on with, this is an official event. We’re using tax dollars to be here. And so I can’t talk a whole lot about campaigns or anything like that. But I will say that you will hear similar things out of both camps in certain avenues. Environmentalism is the same way. A lot of the things that you want out of salmon habitat restoration, that’s also just having a good sewer system. It’s public works also. There are some shared interests there that can mobilize and animate a different kind of agenda. I think it’s important that we are thinking with real humility and curiosity to each other, like what is the thing here that people are, that we really want. Like I was getting a ton of letters about Hunter Biden’s laptop for a long time. But I will say you lit the hood open on that one. And I think what people are really talking about is that your last name shouldn’t determine your experience of the justice system. That the right lawyers shouldn’t. So they’re talking about judicial reform. And that’s something we all want. We all want a fairer system. And so if you lift the hood open and you figure out what is the shared value here, and don’t get sidetracked by the proper nouns or the celebrity or the culture politic, the culture wars here. But is there a shared journey that we agree about here? And trying to animate that. There’s a lot of conversation around campaign reform, campaign finance reform, all of that. A lot of times I think that those ads wouldn’t be so effective if people had time to think, if they weren’t all working three jobs, if they knew their neighbors, if we had more community, those ads are a lot less persuasive. And so we’re often trying to just litigate the thing that we don’t like and figuring out why did we get that thing in the first place and how do we get more of what we want. Knowing our neighbors, knowing what the local issues are, knowing the history on an issue, like having deeper relationships, like that civilian curiosity could animate a very different kind of politics. But I will tell you, the consultant industrial complex does not benefit from that. It is going to take all of us listening to our neighbors more. It takes thinking about the values that people are, what’s really going on, what we really want, and not what is just a gut reaction. So, you know, I was pretty, you know, I mean, it’s a pretty tough thing to see those Medicaid cuts passed by one vote. Like, I’m not going to lie, I was pretty, think about, you know, you feel like breaking furniture in a cloakroom. Because people who said they would never vote for it voted for it. You know, and it’s, it, but, you know, you got to keep giving people the opportunity to be who they really are. And you believe them when they tell you that. You give them the opportunity to be a different, to be a better version. You know, it’s about really, it’s so easy for people to put on their politician skin and never show you who they are and to attack them on that line. But I think trying to build a, you know, when a college wife dies, you send them groceries. It doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on. Like, that is a human thing to do. And so trying to animate that spirit, not holding on to your grudge, I think that’s a really necessary thing in DC right now. Anna from Stevenson asks, there was just an article in the New York Times about the dangers of smoke for Forest Service firefighters. The Forest Service won’t support masks because it makes the firefighters slower. Can you do anything to protect our firefighters? Yeah, so I’m co-leading on Tim’s Law, and that’s a guaranteed $20 per hour for wild men firefighters. These fires are getting a lot more dangerous. They’re hotter. And, you know, these are, there’s one of the things that I’ve heard about from firefighters that talked with us. Like, we know that these forever chemicals, these PFAPs, the flame retardants are not good things. How many more billions of dollars do we need to spend on researching how bad they are? Can we just get a wool-based base layer? Can we just get the thing that we know is better in the now, in the right now? What are the concrete steps we could take? There are things like, I know that Portland Fire Department, they are using steam rooms after really gross fires. They’ve found that you can lower the contaminant levels in your bloods by getting out and just like steaming in a steam room. There are lower scale interventions that people used to know and used to use more commonly, reanimating that, more latitude to spend that budget in a way that makes sense for the department. Some of the other things I’ve heard that I’ve been really concerned about, out of the LA fires, they saw a real shortage of fire apparatus. I heard this from Rob Gordon, the former mayor of Bakota. He was a volunteer firefighter from when he was 15 years old until he died last year, stomach cancer, very suddenly, leaving two little kids behind. He and I had been working together on a fire grant. They had been waiting in line for a fire truck for years. Two companies, I think it’s two companies, now own 70 percent of fire equipment manufacturing in this country. You’re going to be waiting in line a long time for that truck to arrive. So having more diversity in the manufacturing, more latitude in the refurbishment of that equipment, unwinding the barriers to entry of making this stuff, we need more players. We need more people with the ability to enter the market. And, you know, it’s just, I mean, it’s also just true. Looking at the new WUI standards for home building, it’s like there’s a lot of plastic in houses you’re recommending now. Like, that’s not a good thing. Getting back to real wood, traditional building standards, that is another thing that is going to bring a lot. We can get out ahead of the curve on some of the toxic exposure that our firefighters are seeing in ways that make sense for us here locally. Mary from Stevenson asks, if we have billions of dollars for tax breaks for billionaires and corporations, why don’t we have money for veterans benefits and a living wage for active duty military? Amen. Amen. I think that was a pretty just, I mean, that’s the thing about the last budget bill that was passed, is that it was pretty firmly orange around taking stuff from the bottom 10 percent. And I will say, I also want to see, I’m not here for fraud, waste, and abuse. I want those dollars to go where they really ought to go. But the budget bill is just worried around not reforming those systems, but just taking away stuff from the bottom 10 percent and moving it to the top 0.1 percent. And ignoring 89.9 percent of the economy is a really dumb way to run that economy. It added… That budget added, also, yeah, as Mary pointed out, it added $4 trillion to the deficit. That is $13,000 per family. And they’re already saying that, you know, the ultra-wealthy aren’t going to be the ones that are paying it. So who’s going to pay it? It’s going to be us. And, like, I don’t know. I worked for a living. It wasn’t shareholder dividends. It wasn’t the stock market. And to say that we’re going to be the ones footing this bill is pretty enraging. There were some good things in the bill. I think extending the middle-class tax cuts was a good thing. But we didn’t have to add $4 trillion to the debt to do that. We didn’t have to walk away from seniors in Medicare and Medicaid and advanced Social Security insolvency to do that. And I worked pretty hard to try and get in there and say, let’s get a deal that’s bipartisan. And I was rejected all four times. I sent four letters to the speaker. I didn’t get a letter back. But I’m going to continue to put my hand out there and say that our national security matters, that it matters that we are having lower levels of recruitment for the military. That you ought to be able to support a family. You ought to be able to have, you shouldn’t be on hold with the VA for 12 hours when we’re putting this kind of money into it and you put your life into service. So looking for that kind of systemic reform, looking for ways that we can affirm the dignity and necessity. And our service members deserve to be fairly paid while they’re in the service, and they deserve to have the resources that they earned when they get out of the military. I had a roundtable the other day with a group of veterans and man, it’s tough. It’s tough. I think that if what you want to do is go after the college track after you leave the service, that’s great. You should be able to do that also. We need to talk about how we have the ability to go into the trades, to start your own business, to build a house with your VA benefits. You know, the loneliness epidemic is rampant across our country and it is a crisis. People getting out of the military who are used to tight communities who get out and they’re just on their own suddenly. Loneliness is not a psychological disorder, but it can lead to one pretty quickly. And so it can’t just be on and around a system that addresses things when they’ve reached a crisis point. It’s got to be about how do you build community, how do you unwind that loneliness epidemic before it reaches a crisis point. So, you know, continuing to chip away and find every avenue we can. I will also say I was really, I really got pretty upset about hearing what happened here in Scamania County where we lost our transportation for veterans with 13 days of notice. Veterans have been waiting in line for eight months for an appointment at the VA with a specialist, and then with 13 days’ notice, you’re going to lose that transportation. There’s not a bus coming out of here, friends. And if you were like five minutes late for some of those appointments, it’s gone after you’ve been waiting eight months. Veterans were unable to get in. So I was fighting for reauthorization and expansion. One of the problems here in Somania County, I will say, that precipitated that is during COVID we had so many more people move out here. And so we went from being considered highly rural to just rural. And it was like by a fraction of a person that that happened, that that shift happened. And we lost access to medical transportation for our veterans with almost no warning. Very glad to see the VSO finally get a VSO in Scavenging County Veterans Service Officer in Scavenia County to have more connection with those relationships. But we’ve got to do better. It is not the same thing. Having a mobile clinic show up once in a blue moon in East Lewis County is not the same thing as having a clinic. So having the precursors of health, like community and housing and real food, and also having access to health care and being able to use those benefits you’ve used, it was pretty disturbing to see that disregarded in the last budget bill. And for our final question of the evening, Michael from Vancouver asks, how does our nation have a conversation on the need for character in our politics? That is a really good question. I think a very necessary one. And I think, you know, when the house was, I mean, I represent 760,000 people. Most districts around 800,000 people. And it is harder to know your representative and to judge their character. This is my 18th in-person town hall since being elected two and a half years ago. I think really being present and available and going to your district and being unafraid of being seen for who you are, that’s a really important thing. And not asking for, it’s not about a focus group or a think tank figuring out how you should describe yourself. It’s about being in community with each other and reinvigorating a deliberative democracy where we know each other and talk about the things that matter to us. You know, I, you know, I’ve gotten some flack. I’m the only Democrat and was the only woman for a long time going to one of the Bible studies in the House. And, you know, I was like, I don’t think that, I firmly believe in the separation of church and state. I also think that it’s a really difficult place to be and it’s really important to be in community with each other, with members of Congress who are trying to not get divorced and who want to be good parents and who are committed to an external value system. And I’m there because I need more Jesus, not because I need more politics, but these Bible studies often devolve into a political debate will come up during the farm bill negotiations. Somebody was quoting 1 Corinthians, he who doesn’t work won’t eat. And I was like, yeah, well, Leviticus also says that you leave the corners of your fields for the widows and the orphans and the bastards. There was a system in place for people to have access to food. You can’t just use one part and not the other. And having that willingness to like hold the thing. I should clarify that bastard is actually the term used in the New King James Version. But, you know, I think it’s, you know, there’s always this fear that if you say that you’re trying to follow a higher truth or be a good person, that you’re going to get the finger pointed at you every time you fail. And so just never say that about yourself in the first place. But being unafraid to be who you are, to be seen, and to know each other, I think that’s an urgent necessity. You know, humility is, at its core, humility is being unafraid to be seen as who you are. And it’s the only place that you can actually have connection with each other is when you’re not afraid of who you are and you’re not hiding from your neighbors. And I will say one of the things I really love about Samani County, you know, where I live, we don’t have trash service. And the transfer site is really, like, it’s the community center and the best inn. And it’s like when you’re throwing out your trash and you’re recycling, your neighbors all know how much you’re drinking. Like, you can’t hide from each other. And like, that is a much more honest place to start a conversation. You know each other and you’re not, it’s all out there. And like, that’s powerful and that’s community. And I think the algorithm of social media has just given us a very false idea of how each other are living and what kind of life is worth living. And just getting offline and knowing each other, you know, and that’s predicated on being able to have time with your family, being able to get home at night, you know, being able to volunteer, being able to, you know, have enough time at the mailbox to ask how your neighbor’s kids 4-H project is going. And just a willingness to connect on a human level first, because there can be no other conversation. Somebody who thinks that you don’t like them very much or who’s judging, you know, if you’re judging each other on your bumper sticker, you’re not going to have an honest discussion about what you want out of life. Nothing’s going to happen after that if we’re just dismissing each other so quickly. And so I think a lot of it comes down to trying to get the kind of economy, trying to have its, I think a lot of it comes down to antitrust law, and a lot of it comes down to comes down to capital access. My cousins work on farmland they will never own. If you can get people to own farmland again and to live where they work, to not be exploited by their job, but to have pride in what they’re making and doing and being able to run their own businesses and be proud of it. You have a lot more breathing room for the kinds of discussions about character and government. You have time to think and to know each other and to see detail. And then you’re not going to get to a point of truth or certainly not good federal policy if you’re not able to see detail. And that comes from community building. And that comes from strong local economies. It comes from strong families. It comes from the kind of antitrust work that I really care about is right to repair, the ability to run our repair shop and not just have to buy a new car every five years. Where we get to spend our money and who we’re paying it to. That stuff really matters in generating a stronger country and generating and advancing and kind of reanimating a country that values character, where you can be known, your character can be known by your work, by the way you treat each other. So it’s a real privilege to be with you guys. And I just want to say what we have here is special. This is worth fighting for. And we do not need to be fighting each other. We need to be fighting for the thing that is worth having, like our schools, our water, our neighbors. And we are not each other’s enemy, that is a mistake. We’ve got to be persistent in our independence and in our loyalty to each other. And I’m going to keep fighting every way I know how, bringing every tool I can to that process. And I learn so much every time that I talk to you guys and talk to my neighbors. And I just want to, like, I read your letters. I make it a priority, you know, and I really appreciate you making time on a Friday night to come out here and spend time with each other and being part of animating a powerful, a true democracy, a true deliberative democracy. So thanks for coming out. Thank you, Brian.