U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-7th, and her Republican challenger, Prince William County Supervisor Yesli Vega both seized on the sunshine to participate Saturday in Lake of the Woods’ Fourth of July Parade in eastern Orange County. Both, no doubt, won’t miss a chance to spend time with voters on Independence Day itself.
Spanberger’s walk in the LOW parade continues the general-election campaigning she kicked off June 25 in Prince William County, Vega’s home turf, with a “Weekend of Action.” After Dale City, the two-term congresswoman barnstormed in Culpeper, Orange and Fredericksburg.
All along the way, voters have voiced concern about the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe reversal, she said in a phone interview Saturday.
But people also discuss gas prices, baby-formula shortages, the price of prescription drugs, farming and environmental issues, and rural access to broadband internet—important for agriculture, education and health care—with Spanberger.
“What’s happening in people’s daily lives, what is top of mind, are always among the top issues I’m working on,” she said. “... I’ve always been focused on bread-and-butter issues, but not to the exclusion of the larger-scale reforms and good-government issues that I think are so important.”
Spanberger noted one of her first campaign planks, back in 2018, was pledging not to accept donations from corporations’ political action committees.
“These reforms really matter to people,” she said. “At the end of the day, if people think ‘Congress isn’t working,’ or ‘Oh, what’s the point?’ or ‘Ugh, All the negativity,’ then people turn away from their own civic duty of voting or being engaged.”
Asked about U.S. lawmakers’ ability to simultaneously tackle difficult issues big and small, she replied, “If you can’t, you shouldn’t be in Congress.”
Spanberger cited the nation’s baby-formula crisis as an example.
As a mother of three who relied on formula to feed her daughters, she said she immediately understood the dire nature of the emergency.
Spanberger leapt into action, calling White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain to spotlight the problem, and urging the Biden administration to remove tariffs, invoke the Defense Production Act, and import formula from foreign sources to boost the U.S. supply.
Many people called her office about the problem, and news reports about it came in from across the country, she recalled.
The crisis posed grave dangers, Spanberger said. If a 3-month-old baby can’t feed, it affects their brain and body development, she said. And people who say, “ ‘Just breastfeed your baby’ are tone deaf,” she said. “It’s not like you just flip a switch.”
During her telephone town hall Wednesday, a woman talked to her about having to drive 100 miles to get the specialty formula that her granddaughter needs, she said.
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Spanberger is still asking how the crisis happened. If a U.S. manufacturer runs out of the materials to make medicine or insulin, they have to raise a red flag with the Food and Drug Administration.
To avert an infant emergency from happening again, she has introduced legislation with Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., to require baby-formula companies that can’t meet their purchase orders to report the problem to the FDA, just as with prescription drugs.
On the campaign trail last week, many people shared worries about seeing their freedoms rolled back by a U.S. Supreme Court willing to ignore its previous precedents, she said.
In Orange on Saturday, one man asked her why abortion opponents aren’t content to be pro-life for themselves but want government to mandate limitations on other people.
In Prince William County and Fredericksburg on Saturday, June 25, two women related their very different experiences with the issue, when each was 18 years old, in the early days after the court’s Roe v. Wade ruling, Spanberger said.
Deciding against an abortion, one woman started her family when she was very young, and told Spanberger she wants other women to be able to choose what’s right for them, the lawmaker told people at Culpeper County Democratic Committee headquarters later that day.
The other woman said she chose to have an abortion so she could continue her education. She later entered the medical profession. “Her whole career, being able to serve her community, was predicated on the fact that she didn’t have to start a family early,” Spanberger said in Saturday’s interview.
Asked about Axios’ report last week that Vega, in a conversation recorded in Stafford County, minimized the likelihood of pregnancy resulting from rape, Spanberger called those remarks “extreme, egregious, outrageous and and not based in fact.”
“I’m a thoughtful legislator who recognizes that everything is complicated and getting policy right requires a lot of thought, so I have real concerns that someone who would make such incorrect and offensive comments, disrespectful toward rape victims, now has set her sights on writing policy for the rest of us,” she said.
On June 25, Spanberger traveled to downtown Culpeper, the Orange County Democratic Committee headquarters and then spent the afternoon and evening attending the Orange County Fair at the county fairgrounds.
In Culpeper, she described herself as a lawmaker committed to working on “issues that matter.”
“I am a legislator who is focused on solving problems, focused on addressing issues, focused on the challenges before us,” she told Culpeper Democrats. “... I am working every single day to address them head-on.”
She urged her Culpeper-area supporters to celebrate recent successes, whether House passage of a mental health and substance bill she introduced—the Summer Barrow Prevention, Treatment and Recovery Act—or President Biden’s signing into law, that day, a bipartisan compromise on gun violence “to keep our communities safer.”
The new gun law will toughen background checks for the youngest gun buyers, keep firearms from more domestic-violence offenders and help states put in place red-flag laws making it easier for authorities to take weapons from people adjudged to be dangerous.
On Sunday, Spanberger visited her campaign headquarters in Fredericksburg to encourage dozens of student volunteers eager to canvass city residents’ homes in search of votes for the Virginia representative in November’s general election. The high-school and college volunteers were fellows in Democracy Summer, a program begun by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to train and deploy the next generation of Democratic organizers.
Raskin joined Spanberger in Fredericksburg to inspire the students, before everyone ventured out to knock on voters’ doors. Raskin is a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Original source can be found here.
