West Lebanon
“To me, it’s more about obstruction than gridlock, so that’s why this election is so important,” Kuster said while meeting with reporters and editors at the Valley News.
Kuster blamed the current Congress’s inability to address such issues as gun control on a small contingent of Republicans who refuse to work across the aisle — namely, the Tea Party caucus. Her challenger, former state Rep. Jim Lawrence, R-Hudson, would fall into that group, she asserted.
“My opponent is a very far right-wing Tea Party person, and that’s his prerogative, but that’s the last thing we need in Congress,” she said.
Kuster listed various accomplishments of her own that she promised to expand on during what would be an unprecedented third consecutive term for a Democrat in the district.
Those included the establishment of a bipartisan national task force on heroin abuse, which is also a pressing issue at home; legislation to curb sexual assault on college campuses; and efforts to make postsecondary education more affordable for the next generation of American workers.
Her work on the latter issue, higher education, should be familiar to Upper Valley residents, she said, given that she helped bring River Valley Community College to the former Lebanon College campus in downtown Lebanon.
“I want to kind of lift everybody up,” she said.
During Wednesday’s editorial board meeting, Kuster declined to address a question about Lawrence’s business and finances, which recently have been the subject of scrutiny. News reports this past week have said that Lawrence is three years and $15,000 behind on his property taxes, and were unable to find record of contracts that he said his former company had won with the federal government.
“I’m running on my record and on the issues,” she said, “and there’s a big difference between us on the issues.”
Kuster pointed to Lawrence’s record in the New Hampshire House, which involved opposition to gun control and abortion rights. Kuster said on Wednesday that she supports a woman’s right to an abortion and, on guns, backs expanded background checks and a ban on gun ownership for people who appear on the FBI’s “no-fly” list.
She also mentioned that she had participated in a recent Democratic “sit-in” on the U.S. House floor, which was a response by the minority party to Republican leaders’ refusal to bring a gun bill up for debate.
Later on Wednesday, Lawrence denied a connection to the Tea Party, and said he hoped to get things done in Congress — not obstruct others’ efforts.
“I’ve been very consistent throughout this entire election cycle,” he said in a telephone interview. “I’ve been campaigning on the platform that I want to be an effective congressman. I want to go down to Washington to get things done.”
Lawrence called the reports about his business “inaccurate,” and said he would soon produce evidence of millions in contracts secured by his former company, Lawrence Battelle Inc., the security consulting firm he founded in 2003.
As for his property taxes, Lawrence said he and his campaign staffers needed to do more research before responding to reports that he owed money.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said: “My team has not researched this properly to give you exact figures on that.”
He noted, however, that Kuster in 2013 had been behind on her own taxes in both Hopkinton and Jackson, and called the media’s focus on candidates’ personal finances a “distraction” from policy issues. Soon after those 2013 reports, Kuster made good on her bill.
As the Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton, has done on the national stage, Kuster on Wednesday defended the policy reforms of the Obama administration and said this election cycle presented a clear choice for voters: expand on those achievements, or elect someone who will scrap them without a backup plan.
The Affordable Care Act, for instance, is an Obama-era institution that Kuster supports — and hopes to improve.
“Some of our supporters don’t want to move a comma or cross a word out,” she said, but this was not the case for her.
Among other reforms to the ACA, Kuster has espoused a fix to the so-called “family glitch,” a method of calculating tax credits that sometimes excluded people paying high premiums for family plans.
She also said she had supported amendments to the law that would make it more affordable for small businesses to pay for their employees’ insurance.
Kuster acknowledged that health insurance premiums had risen since the advent of Obamacare, but asked, “In comparison to what?”
Before, she said, the insured used to pay for the emergency care of the uninsured, which was a cost driver. She also predicted that the care provided to those with chronic illnesses under the law would lower medical costs over the long term.
Kuster has also been an advocate for women’s rights, speaking out against rape in higher education and beyond, and on Tuesday she referenced legislation she had sponsored to establish the rights of sexual assault survivors.
The incumbent congresswoman, who has publicly discussed her own sexual assaults — one of them at Dartmouth College, where she was a member of one of the school’s first coeducational classes — recently made headlines for naming a man she said assaulted her during a meeting on Capitol Hill when she was a young Congressional staffer.
The man she accused was Christiaan Barnard, a world-famous surgeon from South Africa who died in 2001.
The public response to her disclosure, she said, had been “enormously positive,” with many women reaching out to tell her their own experiences.
Having shared her own story, she said, “I feel better, ironically — safer — because I think we can change our society on this topic. And if I can be a part of that, and be supportive and advocate for survivors, then this whole job will be well worth it.”
Bringing things back to the presidential election, Kuster said that Republican nominee Donald Trump had inadvertently started a national conversation about sexual assault, thanks to the leak this month of a 2005 recording in which he bragged about groping women without their consent.
If Trump were to win the election, her mission as a congresswoman, she said, will be “to educate him.”
“And that’ll be an uphill task,” she said. “But I don’t think it’ll happen. I think that women across America and the men who love them and support them are going to turn out on Nov. 8 and give a resounding response.”
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.