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Don Gronning
SPOKANE – U.S. Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Spokane, started his town hall in Spokane Monday night at Cowles Auditorium on the campus of Whitworth University by saying he likes holding town halls.
“This is my seventh town hall in my first 75 days,” he said. “It’s my hope that we can do at least one town hall in every county.”
While he was generally optimistic about the country he said in opening remarks, he was also worried.
“I do really worry about the partisan divide in our country and the hyper-partisanship and anger,” he said.
Baumgartner said he thought that Congress should be the strongest entity in Washington D.C.
“I don’t think the founders ever imagined that Congress would give away so much authority to the executive branch,” he said. That was met with applause, but also jeers.
“Then vote like that,” one person said from the crowd, one of the first of a night-long chorus of dissent and anger at both Baumgartner but also Republican President Donald Trump and his administration’s policies.
Baumgartner said the country’s budget situation was unsustainable. “Then tax the rich,” someone yelled from the audience.
Baumgartner said he refused to leave his children with $37 trillion in national debt. He said the government shut down in response to the COVID crisis, then flooded the economy and individuals with payments because the economy was shut down.
“A lot of that money was inefficiently spent,” he said. “We’re trying to rebalance what should be the right size of the federal government and rebalance what should be a sustainable debt trajectory.”
He was interrupted by cries of “tax the rich.”
“If you give him a chance to say his piece we might get to where we can say something back,” someone else said from the audience. The audience applauded.
Baumgartner continued on.
“Big picture, trying to fix the Constitutional issue, worrying about global threats, unsustainable budgets and issues that really matter to Eastern Washington,” he said, such as rural health and Fairchild Air Force base.
Then the questions started.
The first question was prefaced with a statement that Trump was defying court orders, abusing wartime powers and deporting people without due process.
“We are not at war and Donald Trump is not a king. He is not above the law,” the questioner said. “What will you do to make sure he doesn’t defy court orders and make a stand for the Constitution and democracy?”
Baumgartner said tension between Article I and Article II of the U.S. Constitution was playing out. Article I of the Constitution said the Congress is the people’s house and Article II says that executive authority is entrusted to the president, he said.
“Within the powers of the president, the top line authority he has is national security as the commander in chief,” Baumgartner said.
He said it was not healthy for the country to have court orders that were not being obeyed. That was met with applause from the audience. “It’s also not healthy for the country when you have district judges who probably do not have the authority issuing nationalized injunctions,” Baumgartner said.
He then pointed to former Democratic president Joe Biden’s unilaterally relieving student debt. The audience was not having that.
Is relieving student debt the same as jailing people in El Salvador, one person shouted?
Doesn’t support increasing Social Security Tax
The next question was about Social Security. The questioner said that people had paid Social Security taxes with the promise that it would be there to support them.
“This administration is firing staff, closing offices and are on path to privatizing Social Security, absolutely following the Project 2025 blueprint,” the person said. The Social Security program was one of the most effective programs in the U.S., with the least fraud of any agency, the person said. If millionaires and billionaires actually paid their share, the trust fund would be solvent.
“Will you commit to supporting legislation that raises the unfair cap on Social Security taxes?” the person said. Currently Social Security payroll taxes are capped at $176,100 in wages, meaning an individual who makes more only pays payroll taxes in the first $176,100 in wages.
“No, I don’t support increasing that tax,” Baumgartner said.
He was asked a written question about the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE had overstated the savings it had found and made many mistakes in its reporting of any savings. “Do you believe the figures reported by Elon Musk and his department to be accurate?”
Baumgartner didn’t answer directly, instead saying that every president, just as Bill Clinton had done, had an obligation to cut waste, fraud and abuse in government spending. That was met with cries of “answer the question.”
“Some of the things government is doing are good things but we just can’t afford them as much anymore,” Baumgartner said. He said money DOGE identifies doesn’t go away just because DOGE identifies it.
“It has to come back to Congress, which has the power of the purse,” he said. He said DOGE has made some mistakes.
“That’s why I was one of the legislators, in a bipartisan fashion, that supported a bill that said if someone was mistakenly fired by the executive branch during their probationary period, and then were rehired, that they wouldn’t lose their probationary status.”
Baumgartner said the president was head of the executive branch, so he gets to run the executive branch.
“I certainly want to live in a republic where if Congress says the executive branch should spend money, we need to spend that money,” he said. Money that isn’t spent has to go back to Congress and that’s how the process should work.
In response to a question about money being pulled from colleges where there were student protests over Gaza, Baumgartner said that Jewish students, particularly at Columbia University, felt threatened by the protests. He said there were egregiously dangerous threats at Columbia, to which the audience started chanting “Jan. 6, Jan 6.”
He was asked about his Christian values and refugees. He responded that he believes the country should support refugees, but that you can’t support refugees without talking about an insecure southern border.
In response to a question about Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests, he said Washington would be safer for everybody if it wasn’t a sanctuary state. He said he would work to have Washington better deal with the federal government.
Buying Greenland?
In response to a question about climate change, he said he supported more investments in nuclear and hydro power.
In response to a question about an “insane” president annexing Canada and buying Greenland, Baumgartner said the country was in an artificial intelligence arms race with China.
AI requires an immense amount of power. He theorized that Trump was interested in Canada and Greenland because of power. He wasn’t in favor of annexing Canada but if the U.S. could peacefully get Greenland, he was in favor of it, he said.
He was asked about healthcare and serving the vulnerable.
“Medicare and Social Security are not being touched,” he said to the general expressed disbelief of his audience. Medicaid was different.
“Medicaid right now is a broken system that truly needs to be improved to protect the most vulnerable,” Baumgartner said. He said there wasn’t going to be a reduction in overall dollars for Medicaid.
“But there may not be the rapid increase” that some would like, he said.
In other answers, Baumgartner said: * He did not support the Boycott, Divest and Sanction Movement against Israel for waging war on Gaza. He said much student protests at Columbia University were largely antisemitic.
* That former president George Bush should get a Nobel Prize for his work establishing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
* That the U.S. Agency for International Development cannot be seen as charity, that it was developed to fight communism and that it should be brought under the State Department.
* Programs created by Congress can only be eliminated by Congress.
* While he has disagreements with President Trump on things like tariffs, the American people want to see Trump deliver on his promises.
