The debate produced no obvious knockdown moments, but there were exchanges that could provide fodder for campaign attacks or closing arguments in the final weeks of the election.
Republican Dino Rossi and Democrat Kim Schrier met Wednesday night in their sole debate of the 8th District Congressional race, battling over taxes, President Trump and Medicare for all.
The debate produced no obvious knockdown moments, but there were exchanges that could provide fodder for campaign attacks or closing arguments in the final weeks of the election.
Here are four notable clashes.
ONE: Not running on abortion, but Special Olympics?
Asked early in the debate whether women “should continue to have the right to a legal abortion,” Rossi gave an answer that careened from abortion, to caring for the mentally ill, to the Special Olympics.
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“I’ve never run on that issue. My opponents have always run on that issue,” he said, while not shying away from his personal beliefs. “My wife and I are both Catholic, believe every soul has a value. I’ve really never believed that abortion was really intended for anything but cases of rape, incest or life of the mother.”
He then pivoted, as he often does, to budgets he wrote in the early 2000s as chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, saying he’d “laid down on the railroad tracks” to protect the most vulnerable.
“I protected the mentally ill. I protected the developmentally disabled, people in nursing homes because I really believe that’s important. I just recently finished as chairman of board of Special Olympics for the state of Washington … So the most vulnerable are very important to me and that’s where it comes from. My belief in the importance of life.”
Schrier said Rossi “can say you are not running on these issues, but this is a really important issue for women in this district,” adding that she’d defend women’s rights to legal abortion and to Plan B medication.
On Thursday, her campaign spokeswoman, Katie Rodihan, pointed to the abortion exchange as “something we will be coming back to” along with groups like Planned Parenthood and NARAL, and that Rossi “can’t get away with claiming he is not running on the issue.”
TWO: An insult to farmers?
Asked about problems with the U.S. guest-worker program, Schrier said the system doesn’t work well for farmers or immigrant workers. She said the system “can lead to sort of a pattern of indentured servitude, where a worker is sort of held hostage by a potentially abusive farmer, or farm owner.”
Rossi responded, “I don’t believe our farmers are abusive” and that political posturing has prevented the kind of immigration reform the country needs.
On Thursday, Andrew Bell, Rossi’s campaign manager, pointed to Schrier’s comment as evidence she’s out of touch with the 8th District.
“Calling farmers abusive seems a strange way to court voters in a district that is rural,” he said, adding that the campaign already has heard from farmers offended by the comment who are considering how to respond.
Schrier’s campaign backed away some from the statement Thursday, with Rodihan saying, “that’s not how she would normally word it.” Rodihan said the larger point is that the farmworker visa program “is broken and both workers and farmers believe the program should be fixed.”
THREE: Who’s raising taxes on whom?
Another point of attack against Schrier by the Rossi campaign centered on her alleged predilection for raising taxes. Schrier says that’s a distortion and attacked Rossi for his own support of Republican tax-cut legislation that has ballooned the deficit.
In the debate, Rossi mashed many of his tax accusations against Schrier into a single statement when asked about threats to the economy.
“My opponent wants to raise people’s taxes by $2,821 for every family in the 8th Congressional District. Actually pulling money out of people’s back pockets isn’t going to make it better. My opponent wants to double income taxes by actually having a government takeover of health care. My opponent supports a 57-cent-a-gallon gas tax that won’t go to roads. My opponent also supports a state income tax,” Rossi said.
Schrier has been strongly critical of the Republican tax-cut bill that passed Congress, but pushed back on the idea that she’d reverse the cuts for middle-class families, as Rossi implied.
“My positions have always been clear, that I opposed the part of that tax plan that gave the majority of the benefits to the wealthiest and corporations, and we know that does not trickle down, and it did not do nearly enough for the middle class. So if I were reworking it I would take away some of those cuts for the wealthiest, close the loopholes that let people get away without paying their fair share and keep benefits for the middle class,” Schrier said.
In interviews, Schrier has not offered specifics on what level of income she’d consider wealthy for the purposes of reworking the tax bill.
As for her support of a state income tax and carbon fee, Schrier has said those are state-level issues that she wouldn’t be dealing with in Congress. But that hasn’t stopped political ads about her stances, and Bell said Thursday, “if you support these policies at the state level there is no reason you would not support them at the national level.”
Both Rossi and Schrier said they support making the federal tax cuts for individuals permanent. Unlike the corporate tax cuts in the bill, the personal tax cuts are due to expire after 2025 absent congressional action.
FOUR: Does anyone have a plan for the deficit?
Both candidates were asked about how they’d deal with the federal-budget deficit, which is projected to increase to $1 trillion a year — an outcome that had been predicted when Congress approved the tax-cut bill last year.
Schrier said she would not have approved the bill and returned to the idea of taxing the wealthy — while offering no specific ideas to reduce spending. She mocked Republicans for eyeing cuts to social programs after passing the massive tax cuts.
“It exploded our debt and now all of a sudden fiscal responsibility has returned to Congress and they want to pay for it by cutting our Social Security and Medicare … and other public benefits. Look, if everybody pays their fair share then we don’t have to talk about making draconian cuts to services that help the vast majority of people in this country …” she said.
Asked how he’d trim the federal budget, Rossi also offered no specifics, but returned once again to his experience as a legislative-budget writer years ago.
“It’s not one thing. It’s not five things. It’s thousands of decisions you have to make line by line in the budget, and that’s what I’ve done. There are a number of things that you can do to make this work, but you have to go through the budget,” he said.