NEWS
BY CORINNE BOYER
SEN. RON WYDEN HOSTS
JUNCTION CITY TOWN HALL
Residents voice concern over taxes, voting and sexual misconduct
SEN. RON WYDEN
TAKES QUESTIONS
AT A JUNCTION CITY
TOWN HALL
PHOTO: CORINNE BOYER
O
n Nov. 10, several veterans, high school students
and advocacy groups showed up at Junction City
High School for a town hall hosted by Oregon’s
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden. It was the senator’s 78th
town hall of the year, and he began by recogniz-
ing veterans who had served from the Korean War to post-
Sept. 11 veterans.
Topics included whistle-blower protection, moving
the presidential election away from the Electoral College
and single-payer health care. Members from Health Care
for All Oregon wore red T-shirts, and some wore hospital
tional reports of widespread sexual misconduct.
“Obviously there are powerful people — lawyers and
publicists and managers — who clearly knew about a fair
amount of this, and they’re coming forward, and they’re
saying ‘I should have spoken out; I should have taken ac-
tion,’” Wyden said. “So my view is this shouldn’t have
happened, A. It should have come to light, B. And out of
this we’ve gotta say that there is zero tolerance for this kind
of abuse of power.”
Wyden told Eugene Weekly the Republican tax plan is a
“Trojan Horse for getting an enormous set of tax goodies to
Oscar Martinez said he attended the town hall because
Wyden is Oregon’s senator and because his daughter told
him about the event.
“This is for her an example to hear what’s happen-
ing beyond Junction City,” Martinez said. “Quite often
our kids nowadays are connected via Twitter, the internet,
and all of that stuff, but to hear it straight from the sena-
tor and have him look straight in their face, is a different
perspective.”
Martinez said one of the most important issues to him
is relevant to his position in the Army Reserves. “Person-
‘I support holding presidential elections
on the basis of a popular vote.’
— SEN. RON WYDEN
gowns calling attention to the shortfalls of health care cov-
erage under the current system.
Retired physician Michael Huntington, who worked in
a cancer center for 35 years, came to hear Wyden because
he wants both Oregon senators to sign on to a Medicare-
for-All bill.
“I saw many patients who came to the cancer center
with advanced cancers because they were afraid of costs,
and I don’t want that to happen anymore,” Huntington said.
Wyden suggested, as he has in previous interviews and
at town halls, that the West Coast states create their own
single-payer systems.
“He mentioned three states might be more powerful
than just one at a time. And that will help, and we’re fight-
ing for that, but it does not have the economic power and
the fairness of a full national system like all the other de-
veloped countries have,” Huntington said. “We need stan-
dards that everybody in America follows, not just state by
state.”
Junction City High School students also asked ques-
tions about the proposed Republican tax plan and the na-
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November 16, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
these multinational corporations that are already awash in
money.” He said, “When you do something like this maybe
you get a little sugar high for a while, but eventually you
have the deficits, and then they come back and try to go
after the domestic programs like Social Security and Medi-
care and food stamps.”
One question from the crowd concerned the relevance
of the Electoral College, pointed out the evidence of voter
suppression, and ended by saying, “This red state, blue
state bullshit has got to stop.”
Wyden said people concerned about hacking and voter
suppression should support his efforts to take Oregon’s
vote-by-mail system national because doing so would
leave “a paper trail for every ballot that’s cast.”
However, Wyden said that he has changed his mind
about the usefulness of the Electoral College. “What’s
happened today because of modern communications in
particular is elections have been nationalized — in other
words, folks in Oregon watch the same television stations
as people in Chicago. I support holding presidential elec-
tions on the basis of a popular vote,” Wyden said.
ally, because I am in the Army Reserves, my command-
er-in-chief is potentially putting us in a situation where
we’re going to get deployed in a lot of different places,”
he said. “Every drill that I go to, I’m the public affairs
officer, and I lose a lot of soldiers because they refuse to
re-enlist. Because they don’t want to deploy, when they
are on active duty, they don’t get paid very much. Think
about getting paid $200 dollars a month for hazard duty
pay.”
Martinez added that his son and daughter will inherit
current problems facing the country. “Besides what we
are getting into with what our president’s rhetoric is,
we have issues with Medicare, health care, we have so
many things that it’s hard to decide what’s more impor-
tant because they are all important,” he said. “So we’re in
trouble, and our senators, our House of Representatives,
they are the ones that have the ability or the complacency
to decide what will happen to us — to the next genera-
tion.”
For a list of Sen. Wyden’s upcoming town halls, visit wyden.senate.gov/oregon/
events.