Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. The last time I spoke with John Mannion, it was about six months into his first term in Congress. He's now finished close to a year, so it's a good time to check back in and get his reflections. As always, it seems a lot has been happening in Washington in the last six months. John Mannion represents New York's 22nd congressional district, which contains all of Onondaga and Madison counties and portions of Oneida, Cortland and Cayuga counties, including the cities of Syracuse, Utica, and Auburn. Congressman Mannion, welcome back to the program and it's good to see you again.
John Mannion: Great to see you. Thank you for having me on again, Grant.
GR: Well, I have to say our listeners can only hear this and I can see you, I'm going to jump right to a question I was going to ask you later, but, you look pretty relaxed. You don't look like a beaten down member of Congress. (laughter)
JM: Well, it's still early in the day. (laughter) Listen, there will be times where, you know, I'll be in a grocery store back home or somewhere, and people go, you know, hey, I support you, you know, thank you for everything you're doing, I hope you're doing okay. Every now and then, I'll get a, you look tired, you know, you look tired.
GR: (laughter)
JM: But I understand the gravity of the position that I hold. And, of course, I love the place where I'm from. I consider it an honor to be able to represent it and we're going to do everything to make sure we do a good job. And we uphold, you know, the history of this country and the norms of this country, the values of it. And, you know, some days are longer than others, but, I appreciate the compliment, and I'll take it wherever it comes.
GR: Okay, great. Well, a little more serious version of that, though, if I could. You know, when I think about, and we'll come back to getting your sense of, you know, the things that you've accomplished and all that, but when I think about the weekly life of a member of Congress, knowing a bit about it, it really does seem to me to be kind of a grind in a lot of ways. I mean, you're going back and forth to D.C. constantly. You're always having to raise money. So, I imagine it has been an adjustment from the state Senate, even though that was a challenging position as well. I mean, how, do you have strategies for coping with it?
JM: So, I do think my four years in Albany was a great preparation for this. And it was in many ways, no offense to the state Senate and state Assembly, because there's important, very important, if not just as important legislation there, but just the calendar itself. It was a six month in-session session, so January to June, and then you had six months to get back in the district and really get a chance to talk to folks. The D.C. schedule is three out of every four weeks a month on average. August is not a month we’re working and we won't get into the government shutdown or even the cancellation of votes around that time. But it's about four days a week, typically. And when you're here, you're going, you know, from first thing in the morning, all the way through the evening, you get up and you do it again. And there's a lot of committee work, as I think we talked about a few months ago. The committee work here is really intensive, and there's amendments to legislation and multiple hearings, so you can count on those every week. But the travel is something for sure. We're fortunate that, you know, I mean, I have driven, but as far as flights go from Syracuse to D.C., there's a lot of them and they're direct flights, so we could do a lot worse than that. And I feel fortunate that I live where I do. And both airports are great and easy to get in and out of. So, you know, that's the least of it. It's really the importance of the work. And then what's tough is, because it's usually the full week or close to a full week, I miss a lot of stuff at home that I really want to be at, and certainly want to get to new areas of the district that may not know me as well, and let them know that I want to hear from them and that I'm fighting for them.
GR: I just can't imagine, for example, how a member of Congress representing a rural district in California manages that with the flights and the travel involved. But, well, let's get to the meat of some of this. You've been in a year, it’s a two-year term. So, what do you regard as your most important accomplishment so far in this first year?
JM: You know, some of those things, Grant, have really come up recently legislatively, and I'll get to that. But when I was elected, you know, this past fall and so was the president, I said, I wish for the country's success and therefore I wish for his success. But what we've seen immediately with the executive orders that came out on Inauguration Day was that the backstops of many things to keep executive powers reined in were removed. And that includes the removal of the inspector generals and, you know, clearing out of the DOJ and the FBI. So, you know, a lot of my time has been devoted to, and I say this, I'm just telling the truth, I'm letting people know that regardless of where you land on the political spectrum, that we should always maintain the co-equal branches of government and a system of checks and balances. And when we hear either secretaries or the president himself talk about defying court orders, that's, of course, incredibly concerning. And congressional oversight is not happening to the extent that it has in the past, historically, regardless of which party is in power. So that's a lot of what we work on. But, when we've gone through, I will call it the Big Beautiful Bill, the reconciliation process, there was a lot of work there, a lot of amendments were attempted that were voted down basically by party lines, and some of them were very logical moves, including extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies, also returning what legally has been found to be illegal firings of the federal workforce and returning veterans to that workforce. But most recently, what you've seen are a couple pieces of legislation is that despite, you know, the president really having a tight grasp over the speaker is that we have found, and I do think this is inspiring, bipartisanship within the discharge petition process. So, you know that I come from a union family and I was a union president while I was still teaching in my last eight years. So, there was a discharge petition, passed the House, bipartisan support to restore the collective bargaining rights of some of these, you know, government entities. And I was grateful to see that happen. You know, additionally, a lot of media attention, and justifiably, is around the release of the Epstein files that, two, we should have accountability and justice for victims. And that was something that has happened recently as well. So, you can imagine my frustration in having really logical amendments stall, even though sometimes I'm advocating even more for, proportionally other congressional districts that might benefit from an extension of the Affordable Care Act's tax credits. But, you know, that's what's frustrating, but we have seen some movement. I've got my own legislation that we're going to continue to build support around and consensus around and gain co-sponsorship and try to move that legislation forward while finding our spots to insert our voice and insert our amendments and trying to make some of the legislation that's moving by the majority better.
GR: I want to come back to a couple of things you mentioned. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Congressman John Mannion. The freshman representative is in New York's 22nd congressional district. So, one of the things, you mentioned this, was, you referenced our earlier conversation where you observed that one of the biggest differences and surprises in some ways for you was the intensity and the importance of the committee work relative to what you had experienced in New York State. Are there any other big surprises now that you've had a year that you just didn't see coming as far as the nature of the job down there?
JM: Sure. I, you know, I'm going to shift again to executive powers here, I think I have to. So, you know, I have to remind people that in a previous Congress, appropriated dollars were obligated to different organizations, you know, including like, NEH and NIH grants, Department of Ed grants, Department of Defense and Energy grants. And that was a Republican majority in Congress that passed that, even though it may have been signed by a Democratic president. But the appropriations process is one of those, what I like to call forced bipartisanship. So, we all want bipartisanship, but the Appropriations Committee and other aligned committees make sure that we're not playing hunger games, we're not playing winners and losers. And I hate the term blue districts and red districts because my district is a purple district. They happen to have a blue representative right now, but I consider myself here for everybody and every district across this country has Republicans and Democrats. So, I wish we weren't playing this game and I know the people I represent, by and large, feel the same way. So, the fact that those appropriated dollars were frozen and sometimes grants ended when universities or not for profits or municipalities had to plan a budget, that, again, was, I think, surprising to everyone. We know that there can be rescissions, but there's a process. But these were done, the damage was done. You go to the court to try to restore, but honestly, a lot of that had already occurred. And then the other one, and we did see this in the first Trump administration, would be the tariffs. You know, we're watching again, with precision, tariffs make sense. With it being so dynamic and so unpredictable, the people that I talked to, this is not good. Particularly being on the AG committee with our farmers. I've heard statements from some of my colleagues about we have a bumper crop across this country and soybeans and corn, but demand is down. Well, demand is down because we have ceded our tariff power, execises and imposts in the Congress to the president and we should rein that in. And there are, you know, discharge petitions and legislation to do so, although it's already written into law. So it’s that overextension of the powers that is surprising. And I'll say one more, you know, the president promised that he would go after the worst of the worst when it comes to immigration and that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing racial profiling, we're seeing cruelty. We're seeing people who are trying to abide by the law and follow the process and going to their immigration hearings. And they're being, you know, taken away, separated from their families. I know from speaking to people that's incredibly unpopular here. Yes, we need to enforce our immigration laws, there's a way to do it. And we also should not ignore how we got here, which is exactly that, that we have ignored many of our immigration laws over a long period of time. And we have members of our community that are doing what a lot of ancestors did, which is trying to put in a hard day's work and provide for their family. Let's work with the people who have been here a while, have comprehensive immigration reform and be true to our values as the country that we are.
GR: Let me ask you a question about your party here for a minute, actually, a couple of them. The first one is, how would you assess Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ leadership of your caucus?
JM: Well, Hakeem Jeffries I am supporter of. We actually went to college at SUNY Binghamton, we called it back then, Binghamton University, at the same time. And we did not know each other there, or if we did, we’d forgotten, I guess.
GR: (laughter)
JM: But he's proud to be a graduate of that university as am I, and also Eugene Vindman. Hakeem Jeffries is a principled man. I know that there's times where people want him to, you know, metaphorically, you know, throw bombs, right? But he, I do believe that his steady hand in getting through this chaotic time is important to maintain, you know, our character and our principles. We only have so many tools to use in the minority. And we certainly can use our voice, we can assist in amicus briefs in the litigation space, we can amend legislation. But what you saw in fighting for the ACA subsidy extensions was great leadership, very unlike what our party can be criticized for, disciplined message. We prioritized what we were going to do to try to lower health care costs for everybody in this country, not just people on an Affordable Care Act plan. And Hakeem Jeffries was the leader of that message, and I think did a fantastic job as it relates to it. In this moment in time, I know myself, I will question, should I have spoke up louder on this issue? Should I have not elevated that issue? Is that just a distraction? And we're always going to question that. But I know his heart's in the right place, mine is too and, you know, we were definitely laser focused on that issue in unison. And then also, we made it the priority that I think it needed to be.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Congressman John Mannion, who represents New York's 22nd Congressional district. So, you mentioned the effort to extend the subsidies for the premiums in the Affordable Care Act and I did have a couple of questions I wanted to ask about that. One was related to the shutdown, you've already brought the shutdown up. And that's, do you think in retrospect, the Democratic Party's approach toward funding the government, which was, as you point out, you know, took a pretty hard line for holding out for an extension of those premium subsidies, was that a wise move relative to the shutdown negotiations?
JM: Just stepping back quickly, is that, I mentioned forced bipartisanship, the appropriations process. One of those other forced bipartisanships is the 60 votes in the Senate, right? So that means we've got to negotiate. And that could be leadership. Hakeem Jeffries, Mike Johnson, Senator Thune, Senator Schumer, that didn't happen, you know? There was not consensus, not negotiation, none of that. And as a result, if you need the votes, I mean, I hate to be a partisan or political hack here, but if you need the votes, you have to negotiate. And it's just not our rule, that's always the rule. So that was worth standing up for. Again, we weren't going to get everything. But I do think that extending those tax credits should have been a priority because of the cost that it's going to, that people are seeing already in their premiums increase.
GR: Yeah, I wanted to follow up with that with a question. It's going to take me just a couple minutes to develop, so if you’ll bear with me. But I really do want to get your reaction to this. I've been thinking a lot about these subsidies and reading about them. And the holdout did, you know, it accomplished a serious and separate look at that question. The Senate, though, has recently rejected both Republican and a Democratic version of health bills that would have addressed those things in different ways. As you mentioned, the subsidies expire on January 1st. There's about 24 million people that get health insurance through these market exchanges with these premiums and that's about 7% of the American population. People earning less than four times the federal poverty level qualify for subsidies, but the additional subsidies that are going to expire on January 1st, they applied to people regardless of income. They were instituted during the height of COVID, I think the thinking at the time was it would be a temporary source of help. The Kaiser Family Foundation, which is a nonprofit and nonpartisan research group, reported recently that the people that are going to be hardest hit by the expiration of these subsidies are basically two groups, high earners who are going to pay a lot more and then lower earners that will pay a little more, but it will feel like a lot to them, I'm sure. So, I wanted to put an argument to you though and get your reaction to it. Explain to me and to our listeners why all of us, as taxpayers, should support people who are this less than 10% of the population, and the rest of us, who are either outside these exchanges or in government funded programs like Medicare or Medicaid, why should the rest of us subsidize less than 10% of the population who are getting their insurance through these exchanges, particularly if they're high earners and they're getting these very, very large subsidies, which were never intended to be permanent?That answer doesn't seem obvious to me. So, explain this to me.
JM: It's a great question. It's a complicated question, and it requires a complicated answer and I will do my best. But I think we can all agree that we do need comprehensive health care reform. If we go back to the Affordable Care Act being passed, the attempt was made there to make sure that people in this country all had coverage and it was all affordable. What we've seen since then is sometimes a partisan attack to try to dismantle it, and some of that has contributed to it not being, you know, perfect, let's say. When it was passed, not all about polling, but it was underwater, negative 10. Now the Affordable Care Act is plus 30 because of a lot of the positives there, like your kids being able to stay on your insurance up to age 26. There's things that are really beneficial out there. In a state like New York, we do have a lot of people with really good private insurance through their employer and also the state has tried to create their own programs to make it affordable care and affordable coverage. So, your question is, you're a taxpayer, I'm a taxpayer, why do I have to help someone else other than that? And this is where when we don't have a national health care system like we do in other countries, I think we're trying to make sure that there is accessibility and affordability for everyone, and that is where that comes from. Now, do we need to continue to work on it? We absolutely do. When you talk to the hospitals and the doctors, they will tell you that the fewer people that they have covered with health insurance, their revenue goes down. So, we want to make sure that people are covered, and that is quality coverage and affordable coverage. I'm all for committing to a bipartisan work group on comprehensive health care reform. You know, Medicare is a program that is widely popular, and yes, there's advantage programs beyond that. But, myself as Disabilities Chair of the New York State Senate, there's a lot of people that rely on Medicaid. And we have, these are big programs, but by and large, they're successful programs. And when you talk to people, if it weren't for Medicare and Medicaid, honestly, people would have worse coverage and may not be able to get the health care they need and therefore not be with us. So, you know, the mission of this country, like in public education, is to make sure that we are taking care of each other. We have to make sure that there's accountability, accountability for private insurance, accountability for waste, fraud and abuse, which is a term that's widely used by the other side. But there are auditors and investigators to make sure that we catch that, and we need greater accountability around that. Could we wipe out every public health care plan in this country, social safety net plans? I think by and large, people would say, no, let's not do that. But we do need reform and we can't get reform if we're not talking. And as you've seen, we don't have anything on the floor because we're not talking enough.
GR: When I was mulling through this, and maybe this is just a two sentence way of saying what you said with a lot more detail, but, my answer to my own question was, yes, we have a patchwork system, which you just described, this is one piece of that patchwork, and we all have a collective interest in making sure that it doesn't unravel. And so that's, you know, another possible system where we would all be in the same boat, is not what we have. And so, until we do something like that, we have to prop these things up.
JM: And I think more people are paying attention to where their tax dollars are going as it relates to health care. And honestly, you know, when they hear about Medicare or Medicaid, I think there's more robust conversations around that. I was on a different radio program where I talked about how hospitals, because the Medicaid, Medicare cuts and people falling off their insurance, was going to cause hospitals to lose revenue and make difficult decisions about what services they provide. And the person who's probably an avowed anti-Medicare for all person said, well, they're the hospital, like, they've got to provide that service and that's not how it works.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Congressman John Mannion. Well, we could keep talking about health care, but we got about four minutes left. I want to try to get some other topics in. So, there's one, and I'm just dying to ask you this, it may push out the other ones, but I'm going to do it anyway. It's another thing I've been thinking a lot about. I'm wondering, in your caucus, there's got to be some conversation about looking toward the future and saying, at some point we're going to have to shift from the critical argument, the negative argument about Trump and the administration to putting forward a positive vision. And that's certainly going to have to happen in 2028. And I'm just wondering, I guess if you could be brief on this. Are you folks talking about that, are you wrestling with that? Is that something that, you know, behind closed doors you're hashing out?
JM: We absolutely are. And we want to bring forward a positive message. And I do think we have it, and it's about affordability. You know, we've got these tariffs. The tariffs have only made inflation worse. They are a tax on the people, we have to rein in those. I think part of the health care conversation is also an important one in an opportunity economy. So, we as freshman members actually in our caucus said we need to work together to develop an agenda. We have, you know, for what it's worth, listening sessions. But for me, it really is living in this area of the country my whole life. It's about affordability and opportunity and making sure that people have the opportunities here and they can afford to live here as it relates to homeownership, you know, groceries, insurance, etc..
GR: Two quick questions at the end. First one, you have been and have been in this conversation, a very strong critic of President Trump. Anything that the administration has done so far that you like, that you approve of?
JM: Well, listen, absolutely. You have to give credit where credit is due. Our air traffic control system with the FAA is long overdue and there's a commitment and investment to supporting that, I support that. You know, advancing legislation which is referred to as, you know, take it down legislation to make sure that people's privacy is protected. So, there are positives in there. And just like we talked about, with the discharge petitions, a restoration of collective bargaining rights, that is not, you know, signed into law by the president, but it is a show of bipartisanship and where we're working together. But I will always reject, including, you know, whenever this is broadcast, today there was the death of Rob Reiner, right? A tragedy, an American icon. And to take that opportunity and further divide us is not going to get us in a better place. And I'm always going to reject that as should all Americans.
GR: Yes. Well, last question, and just a few seconds here. Have you been trying to work across the aisle? You've talked a little bit about it, but can you just give me maybe two really quick examples of where you've worked across the aisle, who you've worked with?
JM: Absolutely. So, you know, I have legislation around supporting local journalism where we have co-sponsors that are out there. These are ways to make sure that we maintain and restore local journalism tax credits for the entities themselves who hire local reporters, tax credits for advertisers, tax credits for subscribers to get around the paywall and EMS Counts Act. Which means that we count our first responders appropriately so that they receive the appropriate amount of funding. We continue to build bipartisan support around those pieces of legislation and others. And this week, going to the floor of the House, whole milk back in schools.
GR: All right, we'll have to leave it there. You've been very busy, that's obvious. That was Congressman John Mannion. Congressman Mannion, thanks again for making the time to talk, really appreciate it.
JM: Thank you so much, Grant. Always a pleasure to be on.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
