Napa Valley Register - Constituents bend Thompsons ear at town hall
By Howard Yune
Rep. Mike Thompson hosted an afternoon town hall meeting at the Vineyard Valley mobile home park in east St. Helena.
Before an audience of about three dozen residents there, the St. Helena Democrat fielded questions on concerns near and far â€" from the travails of health care reform to the future of background checks on gun purchases to worries of weapon proliferation in Iran and beyond.
“What we are going to talk about is 100 percent up to them,” Thompson said beforehand. Yet as wide-ranging as the 80-minute discussion became, many townspeople turned their thoughts toward the health care overhaul, firearm regulation â€" and their weariness with the political bitterness in Congress that has helped trigger this year's federal debt-ceiling battle and the October governmental shutdown.
“Is there anything we gained from all that?” asked a resident, Skip Lane.
“The shutdown cost us
$28 billion, and you can't put a value on the lost credibility. But it was a manufactured crisis; it wasn't a real crisis,” Thompson said, referring to tea party Republicans' attempts to force a rollback of the Affordable Care Act through the shutdown.
Even among a polite and generally supportive audience, some St. Helenans voiced their worries about the early months of the Affordable Care Act, especially repeated glitches in the websites meant to connect the uninsured to new health coverage exchanges and fears of younger, healthier Americans starving the overhauled system of funds by opting out of mandatory policies.
Thompson freely called the program's launch “a mess” but stood firm on the importance of providing an alternative to cheap, but low-coverage, plans â€" as well as protecting those who previously have been uninsurable at nearly any price.
At a Sonoma appearance last week, he said, “a woman came up and told me, ‘I just signed up with Covered California, and it's the first time in 35 years I've had any health insurance â€" because I'm a cancer survivor and I could never get coverage because it was a pre-existing condition.'”
Thompson, the head of House Democrats' task force on gun violence prevention, also discussed the obstacles of passing a bill to expand background checks for firearm purchases. The bill faces a tough path through the House's Republican majority and opposition by the National Rifle Association to expanding such background checks.
“How do you break the stranglehold the (National Rifle Association) has on Congressional districts, so that (politicians) feel safe enough to vote on sensible gun laws?” asked Vineyard Valley resident Miriam Hess.
“Criminals and the dangerously mentally ill should not have firearms, and that's the reason for having background checks,” Thompson said. “The background check bill has 186 co-sponsors; 82 percent of (National Rifle Association) members support background checks. It's not the local NRA, but the Beltway NRA that's clogging things up.”
Earlier Sunday, Thompson's hometown tour led him to the Robert Mondavi Winery in Oakville for a closed-door round-table meeting with Tom Vilsack, secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and U.S. Trade Ambassador Michael Froman.
Meeting with other wine industry figures, the three discussed the challenges facing U.S. winemakers even with their exports reaching a record $1.39 billion in 2011, Thompson said after the round-table on the winery grounds. Among the topics was winemakers' push to cut tariffs of 15 percent or more in Japan and other countries by negotiating a partnership with 11 Asian governments, Froman said after the meeting.
Vilsack, the second Cabinet-level leader to visit Napa in as many years, added he placed special emphasis during talks with Thompson on the importance of passing a new five-year farm bill.
The bill Congress passed in 2008 included federal support for wine promotion and research, which Vilsack said is endangered as negotiations have slowed over a new bill. Negotiations have bogged down over several disputes unrelated to the wine industry, including one over possibly cutting billions of dollars from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.