West Lebanon
U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster, D-N.H., says she hopes to expand on some of the reforms she helped to enact during her two terms in office.
Those include bills to reform health care, make higher education more affordable and fight the national opioid crisis.
Her opponent, former state Rep. Jim Lawrence, R-Hudson, has another view.
“The more we can drive some of these things toward broader market-based solutions, the more we’d be better off,” Lawrence said in a telephone interview on Monday.
Kuster supports Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s plan to reduce the debt burden on students and make community college tuition-free — changes that could involve significant government outlays.
In an interview with Valley News reporters and editors last month, she noted that New Hampshire, despite having a 3 percent unemployment rate, lacked the higher-wage jobs that people can find with postsecondary education.
“Community college is right at the sweet spot,” she said.
Lawrence, on the other hand, had questions about the effectiveness of that much government intervention.
“That sounds good on paper, but I’ve got a concern about that,” he said.
An Air Force veteran, Lawrence cited the G.I. Bill, which he said had flooded the higher education market with new consumers with money in their pockets, allowing colleges to hike prices. “The problem is that we need to drive the cost in the other direction,” he said.
Lawrence, who has two children in college, proposes to decrease regulations on student lending, privatize some federal education lending programs and streamline the application process for federal student aid.
Kuster is a strong supporter of the Affordable Care Act, which expanded health care access to millions of previously uninsured Americans, including 50,000 in New Hampshire, but has been blamed for a rise in premiums.
Whereas the congresswoman envisions minor tweaks to the law that would expand subscriber eligibility and ease pressure on small businesses, Lawrence wants to throw it wide open — allow consumers to shop across state lines, for instance.
He does not, however, want to repeal the legislation, as many others in his party do.
“What do you do now?” he said. “You can’t turn back the clock.”
One area where both candidates appear ready to devote government resources is the ongoing opioid epidemic, which has been particularly unkind to the Northeast.
Lawrence favors a three-pronged approach: bolster drug-interdiction efforts, addiction treatment and drug education. He added, however, that the “heavy lifting” in terms of funding has to happen at the state and local levels.
Kuster, for her part, pointed to legislation she has already sponsored, including the creation of a national, bipartisan heroin task force, and lamented how few beds the Granite State had available for heroin addicts.
“I used to say New Hampshire was frugal,” Kuster said. “Now I say we’re cheap.”
News reports in the past month have raised questions about Lawrence’s former defense contracting business and his property taxes. The reports found little evidence of the contracts that Lawrence says he secured with the federal government, and uncovered $15,000 in unpaid property taxes dating back three years on his Hudson, N.H., home.
Asked about his taxes last month, Lawrence told the Valley News his campaign team needed to “do more research” before he responded to questions.
On Monday, he acknowledged having been delinquent, but called the matter a “distraction” from policy questions and noted that the same scrutiny had fallen on Kuster three years ago. She paid her property tax bill after news reports came out.
“Historically, yes, I did fall behind on my taxes,” Lawrence said. “I always have paid my taxes; I will continue to pay my taxes going forward.”
The candidates differ sharply on issues that might be considered more social than economic.
On gun rights, Kuster last month stressed that she was a supporter of the Second Amendment, but said she supported some “common-sense” measures to keep firearms out of the wrong hands.
Those include a ban on gun sales to people on the FBI’s “no-fly” list. Earlier this year, she joined a sit-in on the floor of the U.S. House to protest Republican leaders’ refusal to discuss a bill to that effect.
“If we don’t take over the House,” she said, referring to the Democratic Party, “you’ll probably see more of that.”
But Lawrence, also a gun rights supporter, questioned whether the measure would violate Americans’ rights to due process. Civil libertarians for years have raised this concern regarding the no-fly list.
“There’s an example of where Ann Kuster is willing to take away our constitutional rights,” he said last month, “and I can’t support that.”
Kuster has long supported abortion rights, but Lawrence sidestepped a question on the topic on Monday, saying it was secondary to the economic issues he was running on.
“We talk about this every election cycle as if it’s a big issue,” he said. “Arguing about it has not been effective.”
New Hampshire’s Second Congressional District includes all of the Upper Valley and stretches from Coos County to the state’s capital, Concord, to its second-largest city, Nashua, in the south.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.