One-on-one with Rep. Janelle Bynum | KOIN Conversations [0:00-5:01]

Welcome to coin conversation. This is Ken Body and, you know, it's a very special interview we've got right now. It's been almost a year since Democrats, you know, Bynum was elected to Congress in Oregon's fifth congressional district. What a year has been from the big beautiful bill to health care, to concerns about losses in federal funding. Congress has been very active. Now Congresswoman Bynum is running for another term, so she's beginning another campaign as she reflects on her first year in office, Congresswoman Bynum. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Well, big issue in Congress right now, the expiration of the Obamacare tax subsidy, starting in 2026. How could this affect your district, which does include Clackamas County and Bend and Central Oregon, and do you think Congress will eventually pass the extension? Well, I'm hoping my Republican colleagues, while they're on break, get an earful from their constituents because I've gotten a near full from mine. We know that these subsidies are critical to small business owners, to people who run churches or nonprofit institutions. We know that it's not just hitting one group of the population, it's hitting everybody. So this is important. Do you think Congress will eventually pass that extension? I think we'll pass something because this is not a red or blue issue. This is an American issue. So the challenge right now is we need enough healthy people in the population. We need to make sure young people decide not to opt out. We need to make sure that local hospitals and doctors offices have enough of a patient population to make it worthwhile so that we keep them open. And we need to make sure that we have a healthy population of people. Kids can go to school without worrying about another kid being sick. I mean, this is a big deal. This is not small peanuts. What about people who say those extensions were only supposed to be temporary? Everything can be temporary, but is that a good thing for the country, right? So the long term goal is to make sure we have an affordable and accessible health care system. People want to bring up different ideas on how to fix it. We should have those conversations, but at the end of the day, if you have an economic system that allows people to opt out because they're making a financial decision and they're saying this is too expensive, then you're not providing health care for the country. You know, affordability seems to be the word of the day in Washington, DC, and communities across the nation. What does that mean for you from a legislative standpoint? Well, people have asked me, you know, rep find them, what should I believe? Where should I listen to the news? And I tell them, look in your own house. And so I'm looking at my own house and I've got a daughter who's in college still and she comes home every weekend and shops our pantry. And then sends me a video of her haul, right? So she's seeing grocery prices go up. People are seeing them as they're going to the store and shopping this holiday season. We're seeing the impact of tariffs. We're seeing even in a Clackamas County here in Happy Valley where I live, we saw that a bond was not passed because people found that the bond wasn't affordable to them. So, you know, bad timing, people are making economic decisions. You come from a business and science background, although you did serve in the Oregon legislature. What's been the biggest adjustment for you moving from state politics to Washington, DC? Things are a lot less orderly. If you look at the proceedings of the Oregon House versus if you take a few minutes to look on C-SPAN, they're wildly different. You know, 60 members in the Oregon House, 435 members in the US House. It looks like a bunch of like mice milling around. There is actual legislative activity happening, but it's much less orderly. And you'll start to see now, I think, Republicans are on the run and they're starting to be a little more interested in bipartisanship. So you'll see them start to come over to the Democrat side a lot more than they did in the beginning. That's been a surprise to me. Let's get into that. We have seen some cracks in the MAGA base, including the exit of Marjorie Taylor Greene. We saw the pushback, even from conservative Republicans after the president's comments about Rob Reiner and his wife after they were murdered. What do you think you're seeing?