Great episode of the Friday Power Lunch (“The Commander. The Author. The Farmer. The Future.”) yesterday, with Braddock District Democratic nominee Rachna Sizemore Heizer (special election to fill the seat formerly held by Rep. James Walkinshaw THIS TUESDAY!); former US Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA02), who explains why she’s running to take back her seat; best-selling author (e.g., “Dopesick”) and activist Beth Macy, who’s running to take on the godawful MAGA Republican Rep. Ben Cline (R-V06); and self-described “fourth-generation cattle farmer, small business owner, and proud Bedford County mom” Joy Powers, who’s running to take on the worse-than-worthless Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA09). See below for video, as well as a few highlights.
- First, Rachna Sizemore Heizer – whose election is THIS TUESDAY: “I will say the thing I’m most proud of is we’ve stood up to the extremism. We’ve protected our vulnerable students, our LGBTQ students. We’ve stood up to book bans. In fact, we along with Arlington are the first school systems to sue President Trump in order to maintain our inclusive and welcoming policies. And so, we’re no stranger to standing up to the extremism and fighting. We’re on the front lines of that. But we’re also getting stuff done, raising teacher pay, improving outcomes, and all sorts of things I could talk about forever. So, I can walk the walk and chew gum at the same time.”
- “So now, I’m running in a special election for Board of Supervisors to fill James Walkenshaw, who recently went to Congress to fill his empty seat. And with his support, he has endorsed my campaign. I’m running for and it’s a special election this Tuesday. So it is, you know, challenging in that people don’t know about it…We are door knocking all weekend long…And I’ll just finish with one last thing. I am the first Asian-American woman on the Fairfax County School Board, which is insane when you think about the that we’re 20% Asian-Americans. And…when I’m elected, I will be the first Asian-American person on the Board of Supervisors. And there’s only two women on the board of supervisors out of 10 right now.”
- Former Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA02): “I think, better than anyone else in this race, I know what it is to be there. I know what it is to have a target on my back. You can see behind me, that’s sort of the front window of our house. Just at the end of our driveway, we had a sheriff’s deputy sitting for nine months. We had people waving guns in our neighbor’s driveway. We had someone attempt to break into our house and continuous threat. So, I know and understand exactly what it is to get back into this. And it’s a decision that I made, you know, along with my family. And the understanding that it puts, you know, not just me as an individual, but our entire family at risk. But the mission at hand, holding this administration accountable, and our path to doing that is winning back the majority in the House and putting a check on Trump. And in order to do that, you have to have Virginia’s second congressional district. And so I realized that I cannot sit on the sidelines, scream at the TV, any of those kind of things. I have to be back in the fight and working to make a change. So just to summarize my answer, I know very well what I’m getting into. And you know, there are some of my colleagues who have thrown their hands up and said you’ve had enough, it’s too much. But I know exactly what I’m getting back into.”
- VA06 Democratic candidate Beth Macy: “I wrote that story, I helped put Purdue Pharma out of the business of selling Oxyconton. Their lawyers came after me. And I don’t know if you can see this is my home office here, but I just write at home. It’s just me. I don’t have a researcher. I’m in my grown kids former bedroom and it was pretty scary. So talk about being fearless. Not only was I following people’s stories who ended up dead of overdose or or victims of brutal violence, but also taking on billionaire companies. And when the show came out, one of the best things anybody said to us was, ‘hey, I just watched your show and for the first time in three years, I called my addicted son.’ Because the show told mothers and grandmothers and family members that it’s not your kid that’s sitting in jail for having dealt, you know, an amount of weed or heroin. It’s these billionaires who came into our communities, told lies, and got your kids addicted. My latest book is really my story of growing up in poverty. It’s called ‘Paper Girl’. And it really grew out of the experience I had with my family in rural Ohio. When I would go home during Trump’s first administration and I would say to my brother-in-law John, who had always been friendly with, ‘Hey, John, how you doing?’ He would go ‘deplorable!’. And all of a sudden, I noticed that…politics were intruding on everything. And I wanted to understand how we had got to this moment where 20% of Americans are estranged from their families and where my hometown, which was a hot spot on the Underground Railroad in Ohio, now was flying Confederate flags and where my own brother unfriended me on Facebook because of quote ‘all the liberal shit you post’. And I was posting fact-checked articles, some of which were mine. And so that’s really the story of what happened to rural America, how we got so siloed in our news ecosystems and where can we go from here? And at the end, Geraldine Brooks, the great writer, wrote of my book, ‘Beth Macy, has written not a memoir but a manifesto’. I sort of pose to my readers and post the second Trump win, what we can do about it. And I decided to take…my own voice and I’ll walk the walk.”
VA09 Democratic candidate Joy Powers: “The fact that we heard Donald Trump say that affordability is a con this week is ridiculous. And it’s Morgan Griffith’s job to pick up the phone and tell Donald Trump what the affordability crisis is in District 9. And if he can’t do that, then we have someone else who will. And so, you know, we have to have somebody who is tuned into the district. We have to have those issues. And I say and I really believe that if the economic policy coming out of Washington DC is that of 50-year mortgages, that every district in this country is winnable if we go and we talk to the people. And so that means that we can’t be afraid to talk to Republicans. That means when we see a Trump hat, we go and we find that common ground. I think we talked about that earlier. You know, maybe Beth said that, you know, that’s where we have to start. As I always talk about, these are the same. I go to the grocery store the same one you do. You know, we we’re struggling with the same things. Your struggle is my struggle. And then if we if we find common ground there, then we don’t have to agree on the answer exactly, but we have to address that it has to be addressed.”
