Himes says Congress is more 'polarized' than any time in his service

Jim Himes Joe Biden Barack Obama

Michael Goldstein Jayme Stevenson John Della Volpe

By Scott Benjamin

WESTPORT -- U.S. Rep. Jim Himes said the recent testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, was "pretty shocking to me" since it indicated that the January 6, 2021 siege at the Capitol was "a very deliberate plan" with "legal maneuvering."

The Wall Street Journal reported that Hutchinson told the congressional January 6 Commission that "then-President Donald Trump had been told that some of his supporters were heavily armed when he urged them to march to the U.S. Capitol and sought to join them in trying to stop President Biden’s election win."

Himes (D-4) of the Cos Cob section of Greenwich said he was one of the last members "out of the chamber" that day.

"I thought this was a demonstration that had gotten out of hand," he said in an interview with Patch.com.

Himes exclaimed that - based on Hutchinson's testimony -"This was an attempted coup."

"What is troubling is not just the past, but going forward," he said. "There are still 30 to 40 percent of Americans that are kind of okay with that. That's a real problem with our democracy."

Himes added, "A majority of my Republican colleagues have not been able to say that what happened on January 6 must never happen again. It is really painful. It really broke the Congress."

"We're more polarized than at any time in my service," exclaimed Himes, who was elected in 2008. "It was bad before January 6. But January 6 really broke the Congress."

"Through my whole career, I've tried to be as bipartisan as possible," said the congressman. "I recognize you don't get anything done unless you have some Republican support."

Himes said there has been some recent improvement since the recent talks to address the crisis in Ukraine has "got us seated side by side working together on something."

"There is a pretty good chance that we will have divided government after November," he said. "That the Republicans will pick up one chamber." The Democrats currently are in the majority in the U.S. House and Senate.

Himes declared, "If we don't get things done, people will reject both parties."

He is running for an eighth term this fall in the Fourth District, which has 17 municipalities that extend from Greenwich to Oxford with constituents who live in 12-bedroom mansions as well as rural farms.

In May the national inflation rate was 8.6 percent, the highest in 41 years. A July 3 Wall Street Journal sub-headline stated, "Consumers are cutting back on spending as they contend with historically high inflation."

Himes commented, "Let's be clear, there is inflation all over the industrialized world. With an election coming up, the Republicans need to say that inflation and gas prices are all Joe Biden's fault. That's nonsense, of course."

He said in some industrialized countries the inflation rate is "much higher than in the U.S. Gas prices are in a global market."

"The primary sources of inflation, of course, is the devastation that COVID reeked on the world supply chains," he declared. "As we speak, there are huge ships stocked up outside New York Harbor and outside Los Angeles Harbor. There's not enough people to unload them."

"It is also true that the federal government may have overshot," Himes remarked "Over the last two years we spent about $6 trillion [pandemic relief]. And as a result, unemployment is at 3.6 percent. Our economic indicators other than inflation are very good."

"The Republicans are being dishonest," Himes declared. "They want the American people to believe that it is all about the $1.9 trillion [that was approved in 2021 through reconciliation] and that it is not about the bipartisan $2.2 trillion carry back [from March 2020], even though people still have money in their bank accounts from that initial payout."

"We might have a higher unemployment rate and a lower inflation rate if we had done less," Himes remarked. "The notion that it is all Joe Biden's fault or all the Democrats' fault is nonsense."

Did the Federal Reserve Board react too slowly after the first signs of inflation in 2021?

"I think they were very late out of the blocks," Himes said regarding the Federal Reserve Board's recent decision to increase interest rates to combat inflation. "And as a consequence, you are seeing the 75 basis points [0.75 percent rate] hike," which was the biggest increase
since 1994.

However, it has been 21 years since there was a balanced budget.

Said Himes, "If the economy is healthy, I think we do need to be more prudent. I've been in politics long enough to know that the Republicans are going to say that it's the Democrats fault because they like to spend money."

"Probably the biggest act of fiscal irresponsibility in the last five years has been the passage of the Trump tax cut," Himes insisted. "It just exploded the deficit. They dropped the corporate tax
rate from 35 percent to 21 percent."

Retired Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson wrote in November 2019, "The most favorable thing that can be said of President Trump’s 2017 tax cut — whose cost is reckoned at roughly $1.5 trillion over a decade — is that it disappointed. A harsher but perhaps more accurate judgment is that it flopped. It didn’t perform as advertised. This is not just a verdict on the past; it’s also a warning for the future."

Michael Goldstein of Greenwich, the challenger in the August 9 Republican primary in the Fourth District, disagreed, writing in a message to Patch.com that, "According to an April 19, 2022 editorial published in the Wall Street Journal entitled Corporate Tax Reform Worked the lower tax rate resulted in corporate income tax revenue that exceeded what the Congressional Budget Office predicted. In fact, at the lower tax rate revenue exceeded what would have been expected had the higher corporate tax rate remained in effect."

Goldstein stated, "This is because there were fewer loopholes, less incentive for corporations to shift business overseas to lower-taxed countries and the economic prosperity of the Trump years."

He added, "The real reasons for higher budget deficits include irresponsible government spending."

Jayme Stevenson, the GOP convention-endorsed candidate in the primary, told Patch.com in a phone interview that under the Trump tax cut the average taxpayer in the Fourth District received "just under a $1,300 tax break." She said that currently with "rampant inflation" the average household is "paying $6,000 more a year on food and gas."

"How much more additional pain "there would be now if they hadn't gotten the money from the tax cut, she added.

Stevenson, who served as first selectman of Darien for 10 years, said she "absolutely" supports making the Trump tax cut permanent.

Regarding deficit reduction, she said she would "reduce and prioritize federal spending. This [Biden] administration has lost control of our economy."

Himes said "I've been in Washington long enough to that few people are at all interested in the debt."

He commented that there may be a small number of Republicans who may say they want deficit reduction, but they also are "interested in spending a lot more money on defense and devasting revenue through tax cuts."

He added, "The next couple of years, assuming we're in a relatively high growth, inflationary environment, that would be a good time to start thinking about reining in spending."

In 2010, Himes was one of only 38 members of the U.S. House who voted for a version of the deficit reduction plan that was proposed by the Alan Simpson- Erskine Bowles Commission - formally known as the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

Former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker - who lived in Bridgeport, the largest city in the district, and was a candidate for the 2018 Republican gubernatorial nomination- said during a 2012 forum in Danbury that the commission's recommendations "would have more than gotten the job done" on deficit reduction.

The Sabato Crystal Ball rates the Fourth District as "Safe Democratic" for the November 8 election.

Twenty years ago, that would have been a far-fetched proposition.

Republicans captured every election in the Fourth District from 1968 through 2006 - although Democratic former Westport First Selectman Diane Farrell lost in a photo finish in both 2004 and 2006.

Himes has taken more than 61 percent of the ballots in each of the last two elections.

Among other things, Democratic leaders in the district point to his constituent service.

Sal Liccione, a member of Westport's Representative Town Meeting, said, in a phone interview with Patch.com, "Jim is on the ground when he's not in Washington. He brings in money for all the towns."

Former state representative and former Democratic State Central Committee member Susan Barrett of Fairfield added in a phone interview with Patch.com, "I've been able to send people to his office to get information or get something accomplished, and his staff takes it on and really embraces it, and has a very sincere approach. It's not just, 'Oh, it's a constituent call.' "

On another economic subject, Himes said he has been "agitating" to get the $52 billion in federal subsidies for semi-conductor production out of conference committee and toward final
approval.

Reuters has reported that U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo noted that two decades ago, the United States produced nearly 40% of all chips while today it accounts for only 12% of global production."

In terms of fighting inflation, Himes said, "It will help in the medium and long term. It is not going to help in the immediate near term."

He commented, "We discovered to our chagrin that semi-conductor supply chains were very weak and we need to fix them, since we depend on them for what is in our refrigerator, for our clothing - you name it- semi-conductors are going to be absolutely essential."

Regarding what steps Democrats take to address the recent 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court vote that places greater restrictions on abortion access, Himes said, "We should do everything short of attacking our institutions."

"I don't support court packing," he said regarding proposals to increase the number of members on the U.S. Supreme Court.

"I don't support changing the rules just to achieve your objective," Himes commented.

"I do support court reform," he added. "Let's give these guys 18-year terms and stop the demographic roulette by president by president."

"It took me a long time to get here, but I do support getting rid of the filibuster [in the U.S. Senate]," Himes continued. "I say that to you fully aware that if the Republicans take control of the House, the Senate and the presidency, they will do a national abortion ban. That is very
much a double-edged sword. However, I believe in democracy, and the filibuster is fundamentally an undemocratic tool" since 60 votes are needed to end debate.

On another topic, Harvard pollster John Della Volpe, who was a consultant for Biden's 2020 campaign, wrote in The New York Times that many young Americans are experiencing "hopelessness and depression" about their future.

"Less than one in 10 Americans between 18 and 29 years old describe ours as a “healthy democracy," he stated in the column.

Himes said the younger Millennials and the Generation Z voters are frustrated after growing up through a Great Recession, a pandemic and school shootings.

He remarked, "If you're in your young 20s right now, you probably have a lot of college debt. Education has practically become unaffordable. You probably are not going to be able to buy a house. The economy has been all over the placed in the last 20 years."

"Life has been harder than it has been for any other generation," Himes exclaimed. "You're probably angry at the system. It is a very volatile demographic."

He indicated that he believes that the Democrats can attract many of those voters because of its candidates' positions on climate change, LGBT issues and women's rights.

In a July 2018 interview with Patch.com, Himes offered considerable praise for Democratic former President Barack Obama.

In describing Obama's relations with Congress, he said he was thrilled to get two tickets in 2011 from the president for his box at the Kennedy Center. Himes took his mother and “I was a hero to her.”

“But he didn’t do enough of that,” Himes said in the 2018 interview.

“Obama had a certain cool, even to the point of distance,” he said, noting that some members of Congress were critical of the former president's reserve.

When asked in the most recent interview if Biden is better in that category, Himes said, "No. Not really. Which sort of stumps me, because temperamentally Joe Biden is a very different person than Barack Obama. Joe Biden is a people person. Barack Obama, as much as I respected him, he was an introvert. Joe Biden is an extrovert."

"He [Biden] has all the resources available," Himes said. "But he and his people are not doing enough to build relationships inside the Congress."

Resources:

https://www.reuters.com/world/...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/0...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

David Walker, No Labels forum, Danbury Library, April 14, 2012

https://patch.com/connecticut/...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/c...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/c...

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2...

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/1...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/f...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_public_debt#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Congressional%20Budget,surplus%20during%20fiscal%20year%202001.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://centerforpolitics.org/...

https://www.foxnews.com/politi...

https://www.foxnews.com/politi...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a...