Beatdown at the Sliman

U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon “took a beating” from a crowd of fiery residents Thursday night as he defended his recent voting record on several bills in Congress including the economic stimulus package, corporate bailouts and the federal budget.

During a town hall meeting at the Sliman, Melancon, D-Napoleonville, told residents and public officials in attendance that he used the widespread destruction of hurricanes Rita and Katrina as primary examples for why he voted yes on the bills.

The two hurricanes swept both ends of his district in 2005, and Melancon said the “free market” that so many residents want to see cannot yet return to southeast Louisiana because insurance rates are too high and levee construction is not where it needs to be.

“No one in the private sector is going to build those levees, and that’s just an example of what we’re faced with now,” Melancon said. “When the federal government was sending you billions upon billions of dollars to rebuild coastal Louisiana, you weren’t complaining. That was a natural disaster, and this is an economic disaster.”

New Iberia resident Pat Angers said he voted for Melancon in 2005, but has since backed away from supporting him after his vote for the “porkulus” bill.

“I’m not voting for you next go around because you’re not supporting our needs,” Angers said.

Another angry resident wanted to know why Melancon had not visited New Iberia and talked with constituents here before casting his vote in Washington. Though Melancon apologized for not “being at your table to talk with you,” he said he spent a lot of time talking with car industry leaders and other suffering industries throughout his district.

“I talked for two weeks before the (stimulus) vote with economists from the left and the right,” Melancon said. “They all had different ideas on what needed to be done, but they all agreed on one thing, that to do nothing was was not an option.”

Nationwide, 78 percent of Americans supported the stimulus package, Melancon said, while his district was split about 50-50, he said.

Although Iberia Parish holds mostly conservative values and voters, Melancon said the district as a whole is diverse in its political beliefs.

“I don’t know if I want that much government involvement either,” Melancon said. “But it is the only entity that may have the ability to do something about this.”

Though bankers in Melancon’s district argue that local banks are strong, Melancon said there is not enough money in them to support the state’s economy.

“Our banks, with every dollar they have in them, cannot support the economy of this state for one year, even if they use every dollar they’ve got,” he said. “There’s not enough money in this country to get the economy back up and running with private bankers’ money.”

A few residents praised Melancon’s voting record in Congress in previous years and said he worked with Republicans on many of his decisions, but added his voting record over the past 80 days has been the same as that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

“If we come out of this thing in a couple of years, I will be ecstatic, and I won’t rub it in anyone’s face,” Melancon said. “My more recent votes may have been the same as Pelosi, but I wasn’t voting with her. If you don’t agree with me, I understand. But I hope one day you’ll understand my reasoning and what went into my decisions.”

One woman in the audience commended Melancon for “taking the beating,” but said he needs to take their “frustrations back to Washington and let them know about the American taxpayer and why we’re unhappy and disenfranchised.”

“Do I think I was going to be enamored by conservatives by coming back, knowing the ads that have been running against me by the Republicans because I took that vote?” Melancon said, referring to a recent ad run by the National Republican Congressional Committee accusing Melancon of rubber-stamping Pelosi’s agenda. “Things they’re saying are not true, but I have to be bigger than that.”

When residents questioned Melancon on government spending and the new federal budgets, the crowd erupted when he mentioned the budgets of the past eight years that did not include war funding, Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements and more.

Residents screamed for Melancon to “stop blaming the Bush administration,” but Melancon said residents need to look at past spending to understand that the new budget is numerically a “mirror image” of President Barack Obama’s plan.

“That $10 trillion deficit didn’t show up overnight,” Melancon said. “And it didn’t just show up on Jan. 20.”

Melancon said the new federal budget does not include the proposed taxes on the domestic oil and gas industry because he and the Blue Dog Coalition of fiscally conservative Democrats worked to take them out.

The new budget also will bring “much-needed” reform to benefits to veterans, health care and other issues like the alternative minimum tax, he said, but many residents argued that the “government needs to get out of our way.”

“Things are getting fixed for the long term,” Melancon said. “The problem is people on the far right and the far left always want it to be their idea only. It’s time to make some sense out of things and not keep pitting sides against each other.”

Several audience members spoke out against the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill cosponsored by Melancon that in its current form would eliminate the secret ballot when employees vote to form unions in the workplace.

Melancon said he does not support a bill that would not include a way for employees to be able to have a secret ballot if they wanted to, but said he does support other parts of the bill that will help businesses and workers on both sides and is already committed to working on the passage of the bill.

“If you vote on this bill, you won’t lose even 10 percent of your union voters,” one resident said. “You’ll probably just lose the union bosses. But you’ll hurt every company at this Port (of Iberia) and you’ll lose all of these people. Is it worth seeing people go hungry so you can keep your word to union bosses?”

The only applause to come from both sides of the divided room was after Joseph Lockwood, president of the Hopkins Street Redevelopment District, stood up and said people were getting emotional over the issues without making the connection between all of the issues and how they came to be.

“People are over-extended because Congress removed regulations to extend credit to relieve lowered wages for workers,” Lockwood said. “The stimulus is not to put money in our pockets, it’s to get credit flowing. There is no private business in the world to create enough money to re-establish credit. We’re arguing the wrong things here.

“I’m angry, too, but not because I pay taxes, it’s because of where my tax dollars are going.”