Pulse On Policy: Texas 21 Congressional Forum With Video

On Wednesday, May 2, the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce partnered with the Austin Chamber Commerce to host and sponsor a forum for the Texas 21 Congressional runoff candidates…

On Wednesday, May 2, the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce partnered with the Austin Chamber of Commerce to host and sponsor a forum for the Texas 21 Congressional runoff candidates.

The four candidates hope to replace Congressman Lamar Smith. Smith was first elected to Congress in 1986. He announced his retirement from Congress in November 2017.

He currently serves as Chairman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee and continues to serve on both the Judiciary Committee and the Homeland Security Committee. He is the former Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the Ethics committee.

Democratic candidates Mary Wilson and Joseph Krosper, as well as Republican Candidates Matt McCall and Chip Roy, attended the event to discuss issues from the recent Tax Reform bill to immigration and education.

The date for the primary runoff election is May 22; early voting begins Monday, May 14, and ends Friday, May 18.

PATRICK SVITEK: We’ll start with two-minute opening statements from each candidate. Then I’ll be asking the candidates several different questions over the next kind of eighty minutes or so.

Each candidate will get two minutes to answer their question, and a candidate will get one minute for a rebuttal if he or she is criticized or otherwise directly mentioned by an opponent.

So let’s get started then. Just at the end we’ll get one minute closing statements as well.

So Chip we’ll start with you and your opening statement.

CANDIDATE OPENING STATEMENTS

CHIP ROY (R): Sure, thanks. Everybody can hear me okay? Excellent. Well, really appreciate the opportunity to be here. Appreciate y’all hosting this event, and thank you for y’all coming out this morning to join us.

Getting in the homestretch here, and we’ll see what happens on May 22 as we then look at obviously November.

I am delighted with the enthusiasm that I’ve seen out on the campaign trail about the state of the country. Increased consumer confidence, economic growth that we’re seeing take off. And it significantly is a part of what we’re seeing happen as a result of the president being willing to challenge the status quo in Washington.

If you had to summarize in a nutshell why I’m running, I think it is because we need a Congress who will send to the president legislation that will be easy for him to sign.

That will help create economic growth, that will help return to our constitutional core values, our constitutional structure. So that we the people in Texas and people across the country can live according to our values and create wealth for our families.

They’ll be able to pass down that wealth to our children and make sure that we can extend to them a better country than we inherited. That’s the goal that we have in front of us, that’s the outcome, community that we have in front of us. And that’s why I’m running.

I think that we have seen great strides over the last 15 months with 12 court appointees, United States approved court justice appointee, a tax bill getting passed getting us out of the Clean Power Plan, which would have been dreadful for our economy.

Getting us out of the Paris Agreement which would have been dreadful for our economy and our ability to access affordable energy. And I think these are giant steps forward, but they’re still only a little bit of the way we need to go to make sure that we can transform our country and give ourselves the opportunity for our children to go forward in the future.

There’s a lot we need to do. There’s a lot we need to do to reduce spending to give us healthcare freedom back, to secure our border and create an immigration system that will work for the country that will be America first.

And there’s a lot more that we need to do to make sure that we in Texas can govern ourselves without the long arm of the federal government interfering with us and our ability to govern ourselves.

I looked forward to this conversation this morning, and I look forward to continuing the dialogue. Thank you all for having us and look forward to it.

MARY WILSON (D): Hi, my name is Mary Wilson. I am running for U.S. House District 21 as are these gentlemen. We hope to replace Lamar Smith, and one of the reasons I want to do that is because of my background in both education and as a minister.

What the commonality of those things, most people don’t put together, is the importance of listening to people.

What I have heard over the years and for decades obviously in my careers, is that people in need feel left out. So for instance, right now we have one and a half trillion dollars of student debt. That is over $629 billion more than our national credit card debt.

And so when I talk to students who are graduating who cannot find jobs that will help them pay off their student debt, we are not providing a culture where they can become part of our economic society.

We are numb with debt that burdens them in ways that they will never recover. I just spoke with someone last night who started out with a debt of $58,000 which she doesn’t make enough money to pay on that debt so now it’s grown to $72,000.

She’s never gonna be able to pay this. I hear people all the time in hospital settings because I go and visit people in the hospital and what I hear is that they are afraid of what the cost of their healthcare is going to do to their families.

And we cannot continue to saddle people with economic debt for all their healthcare costs. Freedom is not going bankrupt due to healthcare costs, and we are the only economically developed country in which that happens.

So we need a better cure for the system so that everyone has healthcare. Freedom is being free to be able to live your life and not be threatened with cumbersome debt.

I hear people talking about education, having spent twenty years in the classroom I know the importance of the quality of education. And I know the importance of a quality education for all so I am a strong advocate for public schools.

These are not just quote-on-quote government schools that I’ve heard some people talk about. These are neighborhood schools where our children learn to make friends, and they learn to grow up and support their communities.

And when we siphon off money from our public schools and deconstruct them systematically and then claim that they are failures, then it’s not the fault of the schools. It’s the fault of people who are defunding them.

And so what I hear is that we need quality education. Quality education for all.

So those are just a few points that have brought me into this race. As an educator, as a minister, one of the things that I look at is what is good for the people who are most in need.

Not what is gonna make the wealthiest people make the most money. Thank you.

MATT MCCALL (R): Good morning I’m Matt McCall. Thank you so much for coming out and for the Chamber of Commerce to put on the forum. It’s a great pleasure to be with you all.

I am running for U.S. Congress because I think I’d make a difference. I am a small business owner, and I do have an unusual business. I have an FDA certified human tissue bank, and I provide human tissue to the American military in Europe and in Asia for transplant.

And I’m a distributor, and I traveled throughout the world at 45 different countries for business and personal interest. And I’m running today because I believe that it’s meant to be a citizen’s legislature. And that means citizens need to run.

If you take your passions and your skill sets that you get in the private sector and that you build up over through a year or over a lifetime, and you take them to Washington and you’re there for the fight, and you’re not just there for the perks, power and prestige.

If you’re going, if you go to Washington and say, “I have to be there for 20 years ’cause that’s what it’s gonna take to get something done.” Well then it will take you 20 years to get something done.

And so I want to go for six years and fight for our values, fight for the interests of TX-21. It’s a very rapidly growing area here in, along I-35 and I live in Kendall County. And we can get some things done. We need to quit being a donor state for our gas tax.

We need to bring that money back in, fix our roads. But I completely agree with my opponent Chip that things have gotten a lot better in the last year or so with Mr. Trump because he’s cut a lot of regulations. Our bureaucracies have been out of control, and we need to get them under control.

And I agree with my Democrat opponent Mary that we need to make our neighborhood schools, neighborhood schools. And we need to get rid of the Department of Education because the teachers want to.

It’s time. Jimmy Carter gave it to us, and it’s failed. And we can do that, and so I think that if you come as a private citizen, and you are getting paid to go and fight and take your skill set and your values and dedicate it going home, you can get something done. Because you know you’re gonna have to go and live under those laws that you pass.

So I’m running because we have, even though in the midst of good times and the economy’s getting better, we have $21 trillion worth of cash debt, $200 trillion worth of unfunded mandate on a $17 trillion economy.

And I simply don’t want to leave this burden to my real children. And to theirs. So we have to make some changes, and we’ve gotta grow the economy and cut the size of government in order to get America back on track for the next generation.

And in the midst of this crisis that we have, a crisis of leadership where we’re not getting anything done largely in the Senate, it’s because we don’t have a Speaker of the House that is guiding the Senate.

We passed a budget last year, the Senate didn’t do anything with it, and the House didn’t just cave in for continuing a resolution that funded everything that you and I hate basically if you’re a Republican.

And so we need a Speaker of the House that can fight and say, “No, the House spends the money according to the Constitution. We pass the budget, you guys gotta do your end and pass it.”

And so we are at a place in history where we can make the difference if we go and fight and that’s why I’m running.

Thank you so much again for coming out, and I look forward to hopefully answering all these wonderful question that we go on.

JOSEPH KOPSER (D): My name is Joseph Kopser, and I want to represent you and your interest in Congress. I say that and I don’t say it lightly. It goes all the way back to when I was just 12 years old in the sixth grade.

My teacher Mrs. Grevious who was a civil rights icon, would stand before us in class every day and it was more than just reading, writing and arithmetic. It was really about life and she said, “When you see a problem, you go and fix it.”

And that is what I have done my entire life after graduating from West Point, spending 20 years in the United States Army. Four different assignments in and out of Texas, and to stay here as much as I can. Two trips to Iraq, and in all of that time when I saw problems, I fixed them.

When I got into business here in Texas, the problem I was trying to fix was traffic congestion. The comforting that we’ve built was focused on making the daily commute less of a burden in the lives of people.

And when you marry the experience of the military in business, and then you lay it on top of this district, with the unbelievable opportunity for innovation and growth for business, to provide people the meaningful work. The return of the days work and the investment in their community.

To be able to unleash the potential in jobs, education and most importantly in our kids future, my story is the story of this region. And the opportunity that it has to be not only a leader in Texas, but to be a leader nationwide because of where the future is going. This region, the innovative corridor that we sit in here this morning, is something that needs to be unleashed and I want to be a part of that as part of representing you in Government. Thank you.