By: Angie Craig, for the MinnPost
4/24/2020
In times of crisis, Minnesotans come together. We do our part and pitch in to help our neighbors. Right now, doctors and nurses are working tirelessly around the clock, often without the equipment they need to save lives. Grocery workers and small businesses are keeping the lights on to provide essential goods and services to our families. Truckers and farmers are making sure there is food to sustain us. Teachers and professors are innovating to keep our education system going. My own son is working in a factory manufacturing the parts for ventilators.
So, it was with profound sadness that I watched the demonstrators in front of the governor’s residence on April 17. While most Americans support social distancing measures, this small minority is putting lives at risk. Pettiness is playing out before our eyes in the middle of a pandemic. We are better than this.
I love representing Minnesota, even while I deplore the partisan politics of Washington. I have supported the Trump administration when I believe it has the right policies — like investing in infrastructure — and speak out forcefully when it does not. I have taken the same attitude toward unsound policy introduced by Washington Democrats, and at times felt the ire that comes with standing up to your own party, including my opposition to a pay raise for members of Congress.
We can be better than the bitter tone of our current politics. I see it every day as I watch neighbors celebrate and support our front-line health care workers and stay home, engaging in self-sacrifice to keep everyone safer. I see it each time I hold a town hall and the respectful way most folks who may not agree with me engage.
We all agree on the objective: We want to open businesses and schools back up, put people back to work and get back to growing the economy. But simply agreeing on the goal will not make it come true. We need greatly expanded testing with federal investment and coordination so that we know who has the virus and who does not. That fact must be acknowledged and addressed.
To open our economy responsibly we need every resource the federal government has at its disposal, such as the Defense Production Act, to manufacture the personal protective equipment needed for our first responders to take care of sick patients. We need a supply chain czar to ensure that medical supplies get to where they are needed most. We must ensure that bad actors are not price-gouging essential products and that Washington politicians are not using insider information to profit from this crisis.
Over the past few weeks, I have worked to ensure that small businesses have access to loans to survive. I continue to push for aid to our counties, cities and towns and for help for our local hospitals given the enormous pressures the pandemic has wrought.
I do not know how our politics got this broken, but I refuse to believe that it has to be this way. And I will not stop trying until, together, we change it.
Angie Craig represents Minnesota’s Second Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.