DC2DQ is coming soon to a town near you
By Congressman Will Hurd
My title is Representative, and I have the honor of representing the 23rd Congressional District of Texas. During my first term in office in 2015 and 2016, I hosted over 400 public meetings, called over 630,000 households for live telephone town hall meetings, responded to over 50,000 constituent letters, and put over 75,000 miles on my car crisscrossing the district. From our five district offices (in 2017, we added a sixth), Team Hurd hosted regular office hours and helped over 1,000 constituents solve complicated cases with federal agencies.
Each weekend before heading back to Washington to represent you, I try to meet with as many folks as I can. Whether it’s hosting a public meeting, speaking with community leaders, or dropping in to a local business to visit with the owner and his or her customers, I am often in multiple towns over a weekend before flying back to our Capitol at the beginning of the week.
Why is this so important? I’m able to stand tall as your Representative, because I’ve gotten to know what issues are most important to you and our community through these kinds of interactions. This is one of the reasons why every August, I do DC2DQ, where I host a series of town hall meetings at Dairy Queen restaurants and local venues across the district. This year is no different – I’ll be holding 20 town halls in six days between El Paso and San Antonio starting on August 6.
This is our third year hosting DC2DQ – and it’s a great way to meet with constituents face-to-face, answer your questions and hear your concerns. Each meeting is open to the public, so I encourage you to bring your neighbors and friends to join us when we come to your town.
If you have questions, contact my office at 210-921-3130, or visit hurd.house.gov/dc2dq for updated details and to follow along on our interactive DC2DQ map. I look forward to sharing a cool treat with you.
Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX 23rd) addressed many topics and took many questions at his town hall meeting in the Dairy Queen in Fort Stockton yesterday. In one instance, he told a worried schoolteacher he takes seriously the value of public education.
A report issued last week by Share Our Strength highlighted the educational challenges caused by hunger — yes, hunger — in some children from, in this case, the equivalent of a four-person household with two breadwinners each earning $11 per hour.
The following five paragraphs are from https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/08/hung-a08.html:
“In the richest country in the world, with the largest concentration of billionaires, one in six children faces hunger, some 13 million in all.
“The House Republican [majority] budget plan, scheduled for a vote in early September, would slash $2.9 trillion from programs for low-income and moderate-income families over the next ten years.
“Cuts in low-income entitlement and discretionary programs account for half of all the cuts in nonmilitary programs proposed by the House Budget Committee, although these programs make up only one quarter of the federal budget. [My note: Military and intelligence spending is about 60 percent of the discretionary budget but has never been fully quantified nor audited. The Republican budget plan proposes increases there.]
“The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that the Republican budget would cut the proportion of gross domestic product devoted to social spending for low-income and moderate-income families from 2.1 percent to only 1.0 percent in 2027, the lowest percentage figure since 1966, when the Johnson administration launched its so-called “War on Poverty.”
“While the Trump administration and the congressional Republicans propose to deal with the deepening poverty and social misery by deliberately making the conditions worse, the Democratic Party offers no alternative. The Democrats are not demanding hearings over hunger or the impact of the proposed budget cuts.”
In response to another town hall question — what are we doing about the federal debt; what are we going to cut — Hurd bemoaned the state of Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. He didn’t, and perhaps seldom does, mention military and intelligence spending.
It’s important, complicated and longwinded, to point out federal deficit spending and the resulting national debt — total outstanding U.S. Treasury securities — are simply tools. Email me for links to how the federal government creates those investment products and how the Federal Reserve creates the dollars with which it purchases a large portion of them. Influence by the bailed-out too big to fail banks (still gambling, now with cheap money) over those monetary mechanisms underpins our historic level of inequality and the fiscal predicaments of state and local governments.
Finally, at the town hall meeting, I questioned the bipartisan groupthink coming out of congress, the administration and mainstream media, about the “War on Terror,” Russia, sanctions, etc. One result of U.S. foreign engagement/entanglement has been blowback, a term coined by the CIA in its report on the 1953 Iranian coup d’etat that it abetted. I’ve seen no discussion in Washington of the possibility that some of our nation’s offensive actions are increasing the risk of intended or unintended nuclear war.
Hurd seems to have full faith in the “deep state.” He has said of CIA involvement in our proxy wars (paraphrasing): they know how to pick ‘em.
Nevertheless, he characterizes D.C. as “a circus” and acknowledged to the audience that developing foreign policy and military strategy in excessive secrecy poses the grave danger of eroding the citizenry’s trust in government.
That concern about legitimacy could be too little and too late for a growing number of people, especially young ones.