Inside Douglas County with U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz

This is Inside Douglas County on News Radio 93 9 FM and 1240 KQEM. It's our daily in depth look at people and issues that are shaping the local area. Inside Douglas County is presented by concrete builder supply. Now inside Douglas County on News Radio 93 9 FM and 1240 KQEM. Afternoon, thanks for being here. Just to cover things around the implied valley and beyond. And joining us not from Washington DC. I was wrong earlier joining us from Ontario, which looks much different than Washington DC. Second District Republican Congressman Cliff Pence. Congressman, thanks for being on this afternoon. Kyle, thanks for having me. Very much appreciated in your right. The Ontario area looks far better than DC. Well, I've only been in Ontario a few times since I used to live in Baker at one point as a kid. But you're in the district. And that's one of the reasons we're doing this is because we still have this federal government shutdown continuing. Now are all the Republican lawmakers did everybody go home or are some still left other than the speaker in DC? Well, it's entirely up to each individual if they want to go back and stay in DC during the shutdown. The on the Republican side in the house, we did our job. We passed a continuing resolution out a clean with continuing resolution with no pickups or surprises. Or they call it anomalies. No anomalies in it. We passed it out of the house and it went to the Senate. So that's the our keeps everybody paid keeps the government open keeps people talking and would would end on November 21st. I said it keeps government working, but it didn't pass the Senate. It just went over and stopped and it stopped because of course that particular type of legislation takes 60, 60 votes. We Republicans have 50 three votes. And I think 52 Republicans voted for that bill. One did not. But that means you need eight Democrats to join you three did join us. We Republicans, but it takes another five and so until those five choose to keep the government open, it will stay closed. And that's sad for everybody, but particularly those who aren't getting paid. And by the way, before you ask, I think most of us, I can't say every one of us, but most of we Congress people told the clerk to hold our pay also until this shutdown ends. So we're not getting paid either, but the small potato that doesn't mean much to people out there that are busy working away still and not getting paid. So what's your perspective on what led to all this? I mean, you kind of put out the basic framework. We have had federal government shutdowns over the years and number of times this one seems to be one of the longer ones. It's certainly getting that way. The longer someone was something like 35 days back in 19, I think. And it was over the border wall. And eventually the president president Trump then decided that he would go make a deal with Chuck Schumer and speaker Pelosi. And then without getting much money at all for the border wall, then he took money from other programs to continue with effort to build out wall. By the way, we did fund the border wall in the big bill that we passed back into July. But as far as the link that these things goes, this is too long. I do not support government shutdowns mainly because they end up costing so much money and because normally your military doesn't get paid. And the president is doing his best to find the money from other sources to pay the military this time. And I'm glad he's doing it because our military deserves to get paid for sure. And at least this will keep that particular part of the government paid at least at this particular time. But they're bad. The shutdowns are bad. And the reason they're bad in addition to the people not getting paid is that they cost the economy money. I have my staff in that conversation just called with you today. Kyle looked at up and it appears about $15 billion reduction GDP starting about the three or four days ago. It takes a while for this to kick in. Per day, 15 billion per day taken off of our GDP because of the shut down. And a lot of impacts in other sectors. I'm told the travel industry taking a huge hit right now. A lot of folks opting not to travel because they're concerned just to whether they can actually get where they want to go without a lot of hassle. So there's that impact. What about for veterans seeking VA services? What do you know about VA staffing levels at this point? I'll have far more detail sometime by hope early next week because I've asked my team to determine exactly what the impact of the shutdown is across the district concluding the VA. So I don't have anything exact right now but sometime early in the week we will and we will put that online in one way or the other so people can see who's actually getting hurt. There's quite a bit of variation between who's essential. If you're essential, you keep on working even though you're not getting paid. If you're not essential, you get furloughed or you go home. Regardless, you're going to get paid when it's over. A lot was passed to take care of that. I think four or five years ago, but the bottom line is I can't answer your question because I don't know but I will earlier in the week early and next week and we will get it out to everyone. Now, it's interesting when this began was while I was on my trip and talking to our tour guide over in Italy, she was not, you know, obviously being Italian was not as familiar with US politics. And when I said the federal government was shutting down, she just looked at me like I was, you know, talking gibberish and said, why would that happen? And it seems like a lot of people can their ring their hands at this whole situation regardless of what's out of the aisle they're on. Well, they certainly do because as I said, shutdowns are not good for anybody. And if you listen to people who studied the situation, they will point out that a shutdown is a device used by a minority to try to control the majority. That's what that's what it is. And that's what we have here. We have basically six people to five people in the Senate refusing to sign on to the clean CR. And I say clean again because there's no excuse for the Democrats not voting for the CR. It keeps the government open and it keeps it open until the 21st and they can talk about anything they want to talk about or we want to talk about during that period of time. Why make people suffer by closing down the government? But those six or seven or five people are doing exactly that. And I should point out that only one Democrat in the House voted to keep the government open. One Democrat joined almost all of we Republicans. I think there were two that voted against it. And I'm in the Republicans in the House. And that is the minority pushing trying to push the majority around. What you're supposed to be doing is talking these things through and trying to figure them out. You might ask, well gee, why aren't you talking now? And they are talking in the Senate because in the House, we passed the bill to keep the government open. That's called the continued resolution. And now it's up to the Senate to act and they are doing some talking. But what's happened is the Democrats have asked for 1.5 trillion basically to reopen the government. They basically have said if you want the government to reopen then you have to reverse all of the healthcare provisions contained in the big bill. And that adds up to about a 1.5 trillion dollar additional expense. And I say about because about 400 billion of that would be the 10-year extension of the double tax credit that is attached to the Affordable Care Act lower tier of coverage. And so it gets kind of involved. But the bottom line is the Democrats have said if you want the government to reopen, pay 1.5 trillion. So what will it take to end this stalemate? Well, if I knew I certainly would be sharing that with everybody, the challenge we face right now is both sides think they're right. And the reason they think they're right is because they're checking the polling and they're seeing that the polling is essentially tied depending upon what polling you look at. And by tied I mean they're saying do you support the shutdown or do you not support the shutdown. And so if the public opinion swings strongly against one side or the other, I think you will see the government reopen. The pressure I thought that would bring this thing to an end would be pressure on a broader scope of the population. And because until now there really hasn't been any suffering by any significant large group of people and thus the pressure by the public to end it has not been brought to bear yet. One of the things that I thought would happen soonest would be air traffic controllers just not showing up for work. And that will result in airlines, air flights being delayed. And that is going to have a terrific, critically negative impact on on our economy. And then the same is going to be true for other aspects of it, but that's going to be a very direct one. Is this just another kind of example of the increasing polarization in the nation? It seems like there's almost this even split and increasingly one side doesn't really want to talk with the other. Well, I think sadly that is true. What we have is a social media environment where whatever you do, everybody instantly knows about it. And in addition, nobody seems to get any political mileage out of getting along. It's much more popular for you to go online and say that you were aggressively anti the other party. And that's what you see happening with our New Yorkers, one of whom is Chuck Schumer. And he realized all of a sudden when he when he joined, we Republicans back in March to to sign the sea or continue to vote for the continuing resolution that ends up here in bed, excuse me, at the end of fiscal year. He earlier in the beginning of this month, he basically realized that that was a very unpopular thing to do to get along. And so this time around, he's not getting along. He's basically saying no. Unless you reverse a big chunk of the big bill, including by the way, the 50 billion that's going to our small hospitals to try to help them better deal with the real challenges that are in the medical space, he's willing even to vote against that. And that shows you how difficult it is now to get along. What about the lagging impact I would imagine of the house being out of session while the Senate is still meeting. I mean, some things can be advanced, but they can't go to the other chamber because it's not meeting. Well, you can see the government is closed down so advancing things is extremely difficult until we get it reopened. You can still do it. But a good example, one of the key organizations that we rely on a lot is the Congressional Research Service, the CRS. And it helps you analyze these complex bills. And it's basically closed down. It was viewed as non-essential and everybody went home. So this morning, for example, I need some analysis on a couple of really complicated things we're working on and guess what? CRS isn't there. They're out until we reopen the government. And so this is true for many other things. So, for example, part of my staff has been furloughed and part of my staff has stayed on. And they have to because we have questions coming in all the time and more and more each day as more and more people are affected. But if the Democrats come to the table, we are on 48 hours notice. Right now, when we have been since the day we left, that we need to be back in DC on 48 hours notice. And we will be back. I don't know how many airplanes reservations we've canceled over the last two weeks, but a lot. And I want to re-emphasize. I'm as beautiful as you hear in the fall on our farm about 10 miles out of Ontario or again. I much rather be in DC getting the work done that we absolutely need to get done before the end of the year. And there's a lot of it. So, this is one of those things where none of us want to shut down. At least none of we Republicans I'll tell you. Let's say a few other topics in the several minutes that we have left and maybe we'll come back to the shutdown at the end. What about your concerns regarding, and you've talked about this before, about the supply of electricity in the future. I know there have been some moves on the federal and state level and have seen some things recently from some utilities concerned about the potential supply moving forward here in the northwest. Right. Well, it's a huge concern and everybody should know that the vulnerable power administration has had a very difficult time building transmission. And the type of facilities that are necessary to allow transmission, the type of equipment that allows you to move the volume, if you will, of electricity up and down as it comes off and goes on these power lines. But if EPA can't do that, then that means that our ability to move electricity around once we finally do have more generation is in dramatically constrained. And so what I've been working on with other folks has been, I've been reaching out to the White House on certain of the projects that they have suggested need to be terminated. There's one in particular that I think should not be terminated. And I've written to the Secretary of Energy saying, hey, this new power line that should run from central Oregon over the, over the cascades and into the Lamar Valley needs to be completed. And there was a significantly sized grant that is on a list to be terminated. And I'm hoping that it's not. And once again, the shutdown is going to interfere with the type of analysis I think will need to be done on that type of a problem. But to your point, we need more transmission. We need more generation. I was happy to see that the Army has entered into some contracts. I think one of them, one of the possible beneficiaries will be the new scale, a nuclear company that is a situate or was situated in Corvallis. And the idea there is to have small nuclear margin or nuclear reactors constructed as soon as two years from now. So if we can get that done, that would be huge when it comes to adding to our electrical generation ability capability. But with the shutdown, you know, to the side for a moment, what about the federal funds needed for an Oregon veterans home in Roseburg? Any movement on that from the federal side? So I met with the head of the of the veterans administration, the week or so before we came home at the beginning of this month. And went over that situation with her. And sadly, there are many people ahead of us in that line. I want to I think the number that she gave me was something like 80. And we are like down to the bottom of that group of people who have had money allocated by the their state toward the love facility. And that's been the case in Salem. They had allocated some 30, 35 million dollars to the facility there in Roseburg, which was roughly a third of the cost of the facility. The difficulty is the amount. If you add up how much money the people ahead of us are asking for, it's over 1.5 billion. And the amount of money normally put into that program is around 200 million. And so to somehow move us up that ladder is a real challenge because everybody else is as jealous regarding their position as we would be as we are because we are the first year. There are three I think tears below us. And so we're we're up there, but the amount of money that we're putting into that space is dramatically less than the amount of people and those the amount that people are asking for. So probably your request and your conversation with there is one that she's had with dozens of other jurisdictions as well dozens of other members of Congress as well, plating for for their district. Yes, the solution obviously because every veteran has got the same leverage as any other veterans. So the question is, how do we get more money into that particular space? And that's what we've been looking at, but it's still a great big number in today's environment of trying to reduce spending even as justifiable as this expense is, you still have to go find the money. And that's and that's where we are by the way with the secure rural schools money because we've been we thought we had it in the total amount is around 400 million. And so we've been trying to get that money literally for the past year and a half and we thought we've had it two times before and both times the money was magically disappeared to somebody else. And so this is this is quite the challenge when when it comes to when you're trying not to spend money and and you still want to spend some it becomes far more difficult on actually getting that money for for our constituents. But we are working at it and I've got some great company will be meeting with on the SRS matter with the speaker when we do get back one of the current things as well was that. A shift as more federal forestry is supposed to be opened up under the president's directive that the money though the percentage share would not be going to counties. County commissioners have definitely been very concerned about that. So you're absolutely right we want the money a portion of the money when logs are taken off our forest to go to the counties what happened in the great big bill is that we couldn't get a provision in the bill which allocated part of the profit if you will. From the sale of the timber given to the counties without disqualifying the entire provision from being included in the reconciliation bill. And so that was the we were faced with a difficult choice we could leave the provision in the bill which would get more logging jobs and more timber out of the woods and not have a portion of that money go to the county. Or we could put the county in and have it have to send a parliamentarian take that part of the bill out entirely so this was a half a low for sure. By the way thank goodness it only applies to a portion a relatively small portion of the additional logging that should occur under the big bill as we wrap up what what's your prognosis for the next few days on Capitol Hill. So it's been everybody's thought that we wouldn't see the Democrats make a move in before the no king's protest plan for us tomorrow. And so it's anticipated that if something is going to shake loose it wouldn't happen until after that that protest. And so I just don't think that the Democrats want to be getting along with the Republicans just before that type of a protest because at its heart the delay occasion by the Democrats is an anti-Trump move. And so hopefully we'll see something break loose next week. Congressman Cliff Pence from the second district from Ontario. Congressman thanks for being on this afternoon. Kyle thank you. I really appreciate it. 1258 news radio 93 9 FM in 1240 KQ E.M. You've been listening to Inside Douglas County on News Radio 93 9 FM and 1240 KQ E.M. A daily look at the people and issues that are shaping Douglas County. It's presented by concrete builder supply. The show will be available as a podcast in just a few minutes at 541radio.com. So share it around and let others who weren't listening live know about today's show. Inside Douglas County is a public affairs presentation of Brook Communications. Stay connected with local news and information news radio 93 9 FM and 1240 KQ E.M.