Haley Stevens
Haley Stevens (Facebook photo)
New year, new Congress, maybe a new era: Four Michiganians will raise their right hands in Washington D.C. today and solemnly swear that they will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic -- among other things. The Free Press has a roundup.
Andy Levin, Elissa Slotkin, Haley Stevens and Rashida Tlaib are all incoming freshmen, two in slam-dunk Dem seats and two in seats they wrestled from Republicans in November's midterm elections.
While most national attention has been on Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American elected to Congress, the other three have their agendas, too. Levin is concentrating on workers' rights, Slotkin on health care, Stevens on job training and Tlaib on minimum wage and health care issues.
Todd Spangler writes:
With many votes on legislation still requiring a 60-vote threshold in the Senate to move forward, that means compromise may be difficult on an array of issues, including:
- Immigration reform, with questions remaining about whether immigrants who came into the country as children should be able to remain.
- Border security, with Trump insisting he’ll secure funding from Congress to build a wall along the southern border.
- Health care reform, with a Texas judge finding in a Republican-led lawsuit that the entire Affordable Care Act, including its coverage of pre-existing conditions, should be overturned, though that decision remains on hold.
- Trade, with Trump still engaged in a tariff battle with China, threatening taxes on auto and auto parts imports and congressional approval far from certain on the president’s renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement, which is now known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA.
We will live in interesting times, for sure.
