Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky Holds Town Hall In Skokie

SKOKIE, IL — Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D, IL-9) held a town hall meeting at Niles West High School Monday evening, urging citizens to stay involved in both local and national politics.

She began the event recalling a hostile crowd in the same venue at a similar public event during the debate over the Affordable Care Act and predicting this time, eight years later, things would be different.

The questions were indeed almost universally supportive, although Schakowsky did not escape getting shouted at by at least one attendee. The moment came early on, as one woman began yelling that Schakowsky was a "liar" when she mentioned Planned Parenthood during her opening remarks. The congresswoman later invited the woman to speak first once questions began, although she had already left.

Several hundred people assembled in the Niles West auditorium, with some bringing well-defined specific agendas. One man explained he was running for local office and wondered if Schakowsky believed the primaries had been rigged against Bernie Sanders (She did not.) One woman brought a letter supporting Morton Grove adopting a welcoming city ordinance and asked Schakowsky to agree to sign it (She did.)

Some others were looking for an agenda or, at least, a more focused one. Several mentioned feeling overwhelmed at the scope and breadth of the Trump administration policies they sought to oppose. Perhaps in an effort to direct some of that restless energy and perhaps to offer a bit of tag team relief from the more than a dozen questions during two and a half hour event, the Evanston Democrat deployed several guest representatives of friendly organizations with local subject matter expertise, including the ACLU, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Indivisible and Sierra Club.

Two young proponents of stronger immigration enforcement, one wearing a "Make America Great Again" shirt, each had the opportunity to ask two questions (In response to one, Schakowsky affirmed her opposition to an independent redistricting map in Illinois, such as the one blocked from the 2016 ballot by the Illinois Supreme Court, unless it was done on a nationwide basis.)

Schakowsky was mostly optimistic about the prospects of defeating the Republican health care reform proposal, the American Health Care Act, while attempting to allay fears from questioners about potential warmongering from the White House by pointing out Secretary of Defense James Mattis should be able to dissuade the president from needless wars. Americans, she said, had no appetite for additional, unnecessary wars.

Several questioners expressed a deep angst at self-imposed "bubbles" of media consumption that have seemingly so inured many citizens to the lived realities of many of their fellow Americans.

A 70-year-old Evanston man called Paul exemplified this concern. Recalling back as far as the 1960 election, he has never before seen anything approaching today's level of national division, he said. He described parallel universes, mutually exclusive realities experienced by political opponents.

"If you believe what they believe, you might support [Trump] too," Paul said. "So how do we engage them?"

Responding with a message of "progressive economic populism," which she said was having a "heyday," she said it was important not to write off supporters of Trump as "Fox News-watchers and bigots."

"It's bigger than that, more significant than that. We need to pay more attention," she said. "Wages have been stagnant in this country for ordinary Americans for about 30 years." Many people voted for Trump out of desperation despite not even being fully confident in his abilities, she said, because the system was not working for them. She blamed a "wholesale attack on unions and good jobs" for the decades of wage stagnation, pointing out previous generations of industrial and manufacturing jobs were no more skilled than today's but simply better represented and organized by trade unions.

"We have to raise wages of ordinary workers, and then Democrats will get them back," Schakowsky said to applause. "Trump isn't going to deliver for them, and we have to be there to insist on higher wages in this country and good jobs in this country."

Complete video of Rep. Jan Schakowsky's Monday town hall from Niles West High School.