Hi-Noon Kiwanis Club opened a portion of its meeting Thursday to allow the public to meet with U.S. Representative Jerry Moran, who was a guest of the club as part of his Listening Tour of the district.
The club initially allowed the non-members access to accommodate area residents who wanted to question the Congressman about refugee policies. The topic of refugees, however, was not raised until near the end of the open session, held at the Emporia Country Club.
Moran installed Amy Miller of Big Brothers Big Sisters as a new member of Hi-Noon Kiwanis before the doors opened to the public.
Moran gave a synopsis of upcoming issues, saying there are many challenges to face.
Agriculture policy is an overriding issue and health care, with its national significance, is equally important to the future of Kansas communities, he said. Young families with children often will not settle in communities with no doctors, while senior citizens may need to move from a rural community to one that offers easier access to doctors and medical care.
Congress again will be dealing with education, which Moran said he believes is primarily a state and local responsibility. He placed funding of special education at the top of a three-item list of focus.
“It’s a very expensive federal mandate,” he said, referring to the needs that have arisen as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act.
“It’s a piece of legislation I voted against,” Moran said, questioning the wisdom of requiring 100 percent of all children to achieve proficiency on reading and mathematics tests.
“We’re not all the same,” he said; it is unlikely that everyone taking the tests will be able to reach the proficiency goals.
“All of us can improve. That’s a different theory,” said Moran, who introduced his own alternative to NCLB last year.
Moran said that teachers are turning away from their profession because of the time that must be spent in testing, special workshops and other activities focused toward reaching the 100 percent proficiency level.
“The joy of teaching comes from the classroom,” Moran said. He illustrated the solution with an axiom from a rural constituent: “If you want fat cattle, feed them, don’t weigh them.”
He has been gathering support for his own version of an education plan.
“I know if we’re going to have (NCLB), it’s my job to try to make it better,” he said.
With energy prices and oil imports rising, Moran said the country needs a national effort to reduce oil imports.
“Nuclear (energy) may once again be an option,” he said.
The question-and-answer session moved on to specific interests of the audience, and the SCHIP bill was the first topic mentioned.
Moran had voted to re-authorize the SCHIP program, which provides health insurance for children under 18.
The bill, which would have been financed by cigarette taxes, was vetoed by President Bush.
Moran said he did not vote to override the veto.
Kansas’ approach to SCHIP was to allow families to select their own health care insurance from two providers authorized by the state.
The maximum income to qualify for SCHIP in Kansas is $43,000. The earnings cap is supposed to be set at 200 percent of poverty level, he said.
The Bush administration, however, has made exceptions to the formula and has authorized waivers for some states.
Moran said that he does not advocate a national health-care plan that would eliminate choices of doctors and other needs that should be left up to the patients. He is, however, adamant that an SCHIP bill needs to be passed to keep health care costs lower while simultaneously taking care of children’s medical needs.
“I guess at some point in time there’ll be a compromise,” Moran said. “If we don’t figure out ways to have healthier kids, these people end up in our most-expensive method of health care, and that’s emergency rooms of hospitals.”
An audience member turned attention to the problem of illegal immigration across the Mexico-United States border.
“Tell me what you, as a legislator and congressman, intend to do about closing the border,” came a question from the audience.
“It’s easier for me to tell you what my position is than to tell you what Congress might do,” Moran said. “Congress may have done more than what the administration wanted to do.”
Construction of a fence along the border — whether barbed wire or virtual — has been slow.
Moran said that he voted in favor of a bill to close off borders to illegal immigrants.
President Bush and the Democrats seem to prefer granting citizenship rather than stemming the flow of illegal immigrants to the United States, he said.
“This is the number one conversation I have with Kansans,” Moran said. Gas prices and coal-fired energy plants round out the top three topics.
“ ... It just seems to me that the administration is dragging its feet,” he said. “If this is an issue they care about ... then this is an issue we’ve got to get to the forefront.”
With the slow progress of installing fences, Moran said he doubted the country was any safer today than it was when the terrorist attacks took place on Sept. 11, 2001.
The Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of investigation did not communicate information each had, border crossings were easy and the immigration bureau was dysfunctional, he said. Visas the terrorists had applied for were granted after they had died in the 9-11 attacks.
“We have a system that doesn’t work,” Moran said. “INS is worse than the IRS.”
Because young people no longer sign on for custom harvesting, which runs from Texas through the layer of states to the north during summers, the custom harvesters look elsewhere to find workers.
“We grant work visas to hire people from South Africa to do custom harvesting,” he said. “Harvest will be over before the work permits are issued.”
When questions turned to Iraq and troop withdrawals, Moran said those decisions are difficult.
“My frustration is that we have lost so many (lives), but the Iraqi people have not got their act together to make it work,” he said.
The surge appears to be more successful than he had anticipated in slowing attacks, but lives continue to be lost and Iraq itself has not made progress in settling its own ethnic, religious, and geographical differences.
“What I still don’t see is, no Iraqi people and their government functioning in a way that will allow stability in the future,” he said. “What I want to see and keep seeing is that the Iraqi people understand that they’ve been given a great gift by the American people.”
Another audience member asked Moran, “What principles do you hold from which policies flow?”
The congressman named freedom as the overriding principle. Charity to enrich lives and make the country a better place came next, followed by limited government.
Moran termed himself a bit of a libertarian, populist and a free-market advocate.
“I also am more of a Main Street guy, not a Wall Street guy,” he said. “I don’t think you could label me as a free market liberal.”
Sometimes, he said, he becomes frustrated with Congress’ “glacially slow” pace in accomplishing necessary goals.
“If you’re a person who wants to put a check in the box and say you’ve solved a problem, Congress is not a good place to do it,” he said.
When frustration boils up, Moran said he puts on his tennis shoes and heads toward the Washington and Lincoln monuments. On the way, he passes memorials to veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam and gains perspective.
“I worry sometimes that Americans will do what I do, and that’s stop watching the nightly news,” he said. He does not want Americans to shrug their shoulders and give up.
“That’s when the country is in trouble,” he said. “Frustration’s what makes you do more.”
When the topic turned to refugees, Moran said he remembered that in the past churches had helped by sponsoring refugee families.
“It just seems to us that they’re being dumped,” Phil Dillon said of officials’ handling of the refugees.
Moran said that Americans generally are welcoming.
“The difficulty we have is when they overwhelm us,” he said, explaining how numbers of refugees are set. “The president has a law, a quota, in which he can bring refugees to the country.”
Moran invited constituents to send other concerns to him at one of the Kansas offices, rather than the Washington, D.C., office, where precautions against anthrax continue to slow mail delivery.
Steve Ihde asked Moran to consider having Congress consider ways to outsource work to Mexico instead of India, Pakistan and China, if outsourcing must be done.
“To me, it makes more sense to strengthen North America than it does to strengthen Southeast Asia,” Ihde said.
Moran chuckled when he mentioned the challenge of asking Congress to pay for building infrastructure in Mexico.
“It’s one of those I’ll have to think about, going down the highway,” Moran said.