Sen.-elect Adam B. Schiff doesn’t like to talk much about President-elect Donald Trump. He wants to talk about the economy.
“The question in the last election, which we didn’t have a satisfactory answer to, and which we need to answer as a country going forward, is: Can you work hard in America and still make a good living? ” Schiff said in a recent interview. “For too many people, that’s not the case.”
Yes, California’s incoming senator is “sadly confident” that President Trump “is going to abuse his power” in his second term, and has vowed to denounce any such abuse. He believes some of President Trump’s cabinet nominees are unqualified and their nominations should be rejected.
But Schiff, who heads to the Senate after nearly a quarter of a century in the House, is expected to tackle the economic woes that many analysts believe underpinned Trump’s victory, particularly soaring housing costs and the persistent problem of homelessness. He said he is interested in. It was a “top concern” for many Californians I met during my campaign.
He said he also looked at the problems faced by farmers in unaffordable childcare and access to water, as well as weak local health systems.
“We can’t wait four years to address the housing crisis. We can’t wait four years to address the challenges of child care and the fact that the economy isn’t working for so many people,” Schiff said. spoke. “We need to solve these problems.”
Schiff’s emphasis on economic issues is not new. While much of his campaign and significant fundraising efforts revolved around his disdain for Trump and his support for his opponent, Steve Garvey, Schiff also frequently weighed in on economic issues. Mentioned. He promised to advance policy on housing and other issues and work for the many Californians struggling to make ends meet.
But now, in the wake of a painful election in which Trump and the Republican Party took control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, Mr. Schiff is leaning even further into his economic message, which has earned him both derision and respect. There is.
“After nearly 25 years in the House, I would love to take him at his word that these are the issues we are going to address,” California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said, but “history tells us otherwise.” “I’m talking about it,” he said. story. She said Mr. Schiff had issued statements in recent weeks criticizing several of Mr. Trump’s cabinet appointments and the decision to end the criminal case against him.
“He’s still obsessed with Trump,” Patterson said. “He’s not the one who’s found solutions for Californians. He’s not the one who’s focused on the problems Californians face. He’s been focused solely on the president for the past eight years. He is a person.”
Kevin Spillane, a veteran Republican strategist in the state, said Schiff’s renewed focus on economic issues seemed genuine and was a smart political move given the election results.
“His change in tone is simply an acknowledgment of political reality,” Spillane said. “He’s a smart and pragmatic politician.”
Mr. Spillane said Mr. Schiff may choose to focus on getting things done, such as looking back on a less partisan past, rather than harping on about all of President Trump’s failings.
“Before his role and image as a resistance fighter against Trump, Schiff was actually known as a more pragmatic liberal. [California] Legislature and Congress,” Spillane said. “Maybe that would be more true to his character.”
Mr. Schiff is also starting a new job, which requires constant readjustment. He knows many Californians want him to continue fighting Trump, but he also believes many voters want him to solve problems for them. There is.
“When people see their quality of life starting to fall below that of their parents, they accept agitators who promise they can fix it on their own,” he says. “So we need to figure out how to make the economy work for people.”
Most of that is residential, Schiff said.
Too many Americans can barely pay rent, he says, and too few can afford to buy a home. Many more are also frustrated with the fight against “endemic homelessness” in their communities, he said.
In Schiff’s view, “both of these problems stem from a lack of supply.” To that end, he will look for ways to “remove barriers” to new housing, including pushing for a bipartisan expansion of the low-income housing tax credit, which he said is “small and “It’s oversubscribed and generally unavailable to most people.” Who wants to use it? ”
The program provides about $10 billion in annual tax credits to states and local governments that build or renovate low-income rental housing, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Schiff also plans to explore new ways for the federal government to approve affordable housing projects to local governments more quickly and give them an “urgency” to build.
Housing affordability and homelessness won’t be solved “unless we start building more housing,” said Shane Phillips, housing initiatives project manager at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Research.
Phillips said expanding tax credits and “housing vouchers and other demand-side and supply-side subsidies” would help, but “if we don’t address the housing shortage problem,” fewer people will receive services. , said it would be costly.
He proposed several other measures that could and could receive bipartisan support in Congress. These include changes to tax laws and loan products to incentivize the production of more affordable or mixed-income multifamily housing projects, and “amendments to mortgage lending standards to allow for more mortgages to qualify.” You need people with good (but not great) credit scores to get .
Another issue Schiff wants to address is rural health care, which he said is “completely in decline.”
Schiff raised concerns about such care before the election, including during last month’s campaign shutdown at Madera Community Hospital. The hospital was declared bankrupt and closed early last year, but is now scheduled to reopen with emergency funding from the state.
Schiff said that in many parts of the state and across the country, federal subsidies for patient care for low-income and elderly patients are “too low,” in part because it has become extremely difficult to attract and retain staff. He said that local hospitals in the area are “basically overwhelmed.”
“I hope that finding a solution becomes a bipartisan priority because red states are in much the same position as the Central Valley and the Imperial Valley,” he said.
Madera Community Hospital CEO Steve Stark said he was “very encouraged” by Schiff’s visit and the interest in addressing these issues in Washington.
Stark said about 70% of the hospital’s patient base relies on Medi-Cal, the state Medicaid program for low-income people, and another 22% on Medicare, the federal program for the elderly and disabled. He said that This significantly limits hospitals’ ability to generate revenue from the remaining 8% of patients, he said.
In addition, due to population growth in the area, the hospital lost its federal rural medical designation serving communities of less than 50,000 people, and with it many additional reimbursements that had greatly helped its bottom line. I can no longer accept it. Without these additional capabilities, it would be much more difficult to attract and retain staff and provide certain types of care, such as obstetrics, Stark said.
Stark said a great start to solving the problems facing rural hospitals is to increase population limits for towns to maintain eligibility for rural reimbursement, especially with populations like California’s. Even rural towns in many states are “still quite large,” he said.
Another big help would be to increase the variety of medical care, including obstetrics, to offer cost-based services under Medi-Cal and Medicare, meaning their full cost would be covered by the program. That’s true, Stark said. Otherwise, hospitals like Madera would lose about $7,000 per birth, he said.
Without that support, Stark said hospitals like his will continue to balance on a “very thin rope.”
The third priority listed by Schiff is child care, and because child care has become so expensive and hard to obtain in California, many people, especially women and women of color, want “more child care.” “They’re locked out of the workforce because they have to pay money that they can make at work,” he said.
That’s just “bad economics,” he says.
Schiff said he hopes his influence as a lawmaker from the most populous state will help advance progress on all of the issues listed above, as well as other difficult issues such as immigration. “When you represent over 40 million people, it gives that representation a certain weight,” he says.
He also said he looks forward to leveraging new relationships with Republican colleagues with whom he believes he has common ground. He said he has done similar things in the past, citing former Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas)’s work in the House as an example.
Schiff and Culberson, who were in the same freshman class, both had a strong interest in NASA. Culberson is from Houston, and Schiff had a Jet Propulsion Laboratory within the district. After meeting during a bipartisan training camp early in his term, they and their families ended up working together on space efforts for years, despite disagreements on many other issues. We decided to work together.
Culberson said in an interview that he found “shared passion” to be an example of the bipartisanship possible in Congress, acknowledged Schiff could continue, and agreed to work together.
“We worked closely with other Democrats and Republicans to maintain America’s leadership in space exploration and scientific discovery,” he said. “Adam has always been a strong supporter of both sides and has been able to work with members on both sides and across the country.”
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