‘Constituent town hall’ invites complaints against Miller-Meeks, Trump

WASHINGTON — A locally organized “constituent town hall” in Washington Tuesday night saw a handful of area activists voice their grievances about federal spending cuts, and encouraged attendees to do the same.

The over 90-minute event featured speeches from community members who said a federal budget recently proposed by President Donald Trump and backed by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks threatened Southeast Iowans, largely due to expected cuts to Medicaid and the VA system.

While the proposed budget does not explicitly make reductions to Medicaid’s funding, it does direct the House Energy and Commerce Committee — of which Miller-Meeks is a member — to cut $880 billion in spending over 10 years from any of a handful of programs, of which Medicaid makes up the financial majority according to critics.

“We all depend on Medicaid. Whether you have Medicaid coverage, every single one of you in this room depend on Medicaid,” said Johnson County Public Health Director Danielle Pettit-Majewski, who lives in Washington. “The hospital that is just a few blocks down the road is the second-largest employer in our county, after the casino … it’s the physicians, it’s my child’s pediatrician, it’s where you go when you’re sick. Those hospitals won’t be able to stay open without Medicaid coverage.”

In an email Wednesday morning, a spokesperson from Miller-Meeks’ office pushed back on opponents’ framing of the issue, saying the Republican lawmaker sought only to combat misuse of the Medicaid program, not reduce its assistance to qualifying Americans.

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“On Medicaid, she believes we must protect the program for those who truly need it — seniors, children, people with disabilities, and low-income Americans,” he wrote. “That means stopping billions in waste, fraud, and abuse, and making sure illegal immigrants or those already ineligible aren’t draining benefits that hardworking Americans paid into.”

Advocates also stressed their worries about the future of hospitals run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, after an internal memo showed plans by the Trump administration to cut 80,000 jobs from the agency, according to AP News.

Pat Kearns, a registered nurse at the Iowa City VA Hospital and President of its union, said he found it hard to believe the proposal would make the system that provides health care to veterans more efficient. He called the expected spending slash a “grift” that would save money for high-income Americans through tax cuts, at the cost of quality care for others.

“The VA delivers care at the lowest cost of any health care system in our country, at the same time, it has the highest quality and the best outcomes,” he said. “Out satisfaction scores put the private sector to shame. To go into it and say you’re going to somehow bring efficiency to government, and we’re going to spend the money better and more efficiently, it’s just ludicrous.”

Harold Frakes, another Washington resident and speaker at the event, said he was disappointed with the congresswoman’s voting record, given her medical background as an ophthalmologist and her status as a veteran.

Frakes criticized Miller-Meeks’ support for Trump’s budget, and her vote against the PACT Act, a 2022 bill that established benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits which some credit for the growth of the VA Department’s staff under President Joe Biden.

“She still repeatedly says she is fighting for veterans every day,” Frakes said. “I recently called Miller-Meeks’ office, and then I sent a letter to her office, asking about her views on the impending cuts. To date, I have heard crickets, not a word from her.”

Miller-Meeks’ office’s emailed comments to The Union didn’t include a response to a question about VA hospitals.

Congresswoman pushes back on ‘town hall’ angle

Several similar events have popped up around Southeast Iowa in the last several months, billing themselves as grassroots town halls and sometimes claiming Miller-Meeks has “refused to schedule public forums” with constituents on her own.

Tuesday’s event at the Washington Public Library was less of a forum, and more a series of speeches by impassioned advocates from Washington and Johnson counties.

Jen Sherer, one of the event’s organizers, said she acknowledged that Congress was in session, making attendance by Miller-Meeks on May 6 all but impossible. Instead, she said organizers sought to gather handwritten notes to the legislator, which they plan to hand-deliver to the Representative’s office in Davenport.

“When she’s back in the district, we always look at the calendar and (at) the times when they have blocked off in the Congressional calendar saying, ‘This is when you’re supposed to meet with constituents.’ For all of those she gets invitations,” Sherer said. “This one, we didn’t because she’s in D.C. We’re continuing to gather messages.”

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Tuesday marked just one of several “empty chair town halls” organized by a handful of groups including Indivisible, an anti-Trump organization that launched its Washington County chapter in April. Similar gatherings were recently held in Mt. Pleasant and Fairfield.

Miller-Meeks’ office, meanwhile, framed the events as a “political stunt,” pointing to their predominantly Democratic attendance, and a partially inaccurate report from KCRG-TV9 which claimed “almost everyone in the room” Tuesday night was a resident of Johnson County, Washington’s far more left-leaning neighbor to the north. (The Union is aware of at least seven of the roughly 20 people at the event who live outside Johnson County, including three Washington residents who spoke to the small crowd.)

The lawmaker, meanwhile, hasn’t canceled efforts to stay in touch with constituents, according to her staff.

“Last week, she held a telephone town hall with more than 6,000 constituents — reaching more Iowans than Indivisible’s political stunts,” said the email from a Miller-Meeks’ spokesperson. “Rep. Miller-Meeks plans to hold in-person town halls and listening posts in all 20 counties of the district, just as she’s done every term.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com