Rep. Lieu talks health care, North Korea at women’s group event

South Bay Congressional Representative Ted Lieu (center) with (from left) Brian Siemak, Bob Siemak, Renee Siemak, event organizer Melita Siemak, and Michelle Nelson at Shade Hotel. Photo

 

According to Rep. Ted Lieu, there are “no good military options” for the United States in North Korea, and the Graham-Cassidy health care bill could make now-common protections harder to find in future insurance coverage.

But it wasn’t all doom-and-gloom from the South Bay Democratic Congressman, who addressed a packed gathering at Shade Hotel organized by the Manhattan Beach Women’s Empowerment Huddle last week. Lieu, whose popularity has exploded in his second term in Congress thanks in part to his ceaseless online tweaking about the Trump administration, also offered thoughts on practical fixes for cybersecurity and protecting credit information, and mused about the coming 2018 mid-term elections.

Lieu, a former state senator, and assemblyman, began by addressing North Korea and health care, then moved on to questions from the audience. In responding, he was alternately funny, serious, and occasionally hopeful.

“I was pretty sad until Jan. 21. Then I saw the hundreds of thousands of people taking part in the women’s marches and I thought, ‘Huh, that’s the country I know,’” Lieu said.

The Congressman was an ideal guest for the women’s group, which formed in reaction to Trump’s election. Since then, they have attempted to channel what would otherwise be scattered frustration, organizing efforts such as sending postcards to potential voters in a recent South Carolina special election.

“The group was created after the women’s march with the focus and intention of keeping that spirit alive, to address issues we’re passionate about,” said event organizer Melita Siemak.

Many in the audience were curious about the prospects of the Democratic Party. Following his reelection, Lieu became one of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s five regional vice chairs, a newly created position designed to better address local concerns in congressional campaigns. Lieu, who oversees the effort to win seats in the House of Representatives in the western part of the country, said that California would be key, noting that there are seven Republican members of Congress in the state whose district favored Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.

The local focus, however, could only go so far. One attendee asked what Congress could do about the recent road closures on Vista Del Mar and in Playa del Rey. Lieu said that his office had gotten in touch with Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin’s office shortly after the closures were implemented. And he noted that Congress has approved matching federal funds for local transit projects. But he conceded that traffic issues were mostly the preserve of state and local governments.

Although the crowd was a friendly one for the congressman, the most detailed replies generally followed questions that were not explicitly partisan. Lieu was asked what the government could do about the recent hack of credit reporting agency Equifax, which is believed to have exposed personal identifying information of more than 100 million Americans. He initially highlighted a much-panned attempt by Equifax to invoke an arbitration clause. Then, as one of four computer science majors in Congress, he quickly shifted to a broader discussion of weak points in cybersecurity, particularly mobile phones and public Wi-Fi.

One of the biggest lessons of Trump’s victory, Lieu said, was the need for an affirmative message, something he said Clinton’s campaign lacked. By way of comparison, he said that the Trump campaign’s frequent laments about manufacturing jobs lost to foreign nations distorted the issue — by some estimates, nine times as many jobs were lost to automation as were outsourced to other countries — but resonated in a group that had faced hardship.

“If you just have a high school degree, the last two decades have been terrible for you. But it’s sort of hard to run a campaign blaming robots,” Lieu said.

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