BARD FREE PRESS

U.S. Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand, of Bard’s very own 20th Congressional District, was just elected to her second term, and as Governor Paterson chooses an appointment to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate, Gillibrand has found herself somewhat in the national spotlight. After weeks of requests, the FREE PRESS somehow managed to convince Gillibrand’s fixers to set up a 10-minute phone chat, which we actually managed to stretch into 14:52. Her henchman cut off the interview just before I could ask whether Governor Paterson was accepting bribes.
Excerpts from her conversation with the FREE PRESS’s Travis Wentworth.

FREE PRESS: First of all, congratulations on your reelection last month. You were up against Sandy Treadwell, an established and well-funded challenger, with the national Republican party hoping to oust you.  Did your margin of victory surprise you?
It did surprise me. I think it was due to the work we had done over the past two years. I think what people reacted positively to was my commitment towards more transparency and open government, and the way we did that over the past two years was visiting local communities. I went to a local bookstore or grocery store or coffee shop and just meet with constituents for an hour or two. And they really appreciated it in my district because they got to talk to me about their concerns and their priorities and things they wanted me to be working on. It also allowed me to open case files for direct constituent services–if people needed help with veterans’ benefits, or social security benefits, those kinds of issues. So they really appreciated me doing that, by going into communities directly, places where they really felt comfortable meeting me. And we did a lot of this on the internet: we posted all my earmarks, we posted all my schedules and financial disclosures. I’m the only one in Congress who does all three. So I think that kind of new approach to government service was valued by the district.
In your first term in Congress, what leadership vacuums have you seen—both in the House and in the Senate—that you might try to fill?
On the House side, we made progress on energy independence legislation and we made progress on a new direction in Iraq, but in both instances the Senate failed to pass key legislation. And that was very frustrating and troubling.
Even with a Democratic majority?
It just wasn’t enough, because they need 60 votes. The two big areas where I believe the voters had given the last Congress a mandate, Congress was unable to succeed and unable to put forward what the American people wanted. And I think that was largely due to the fact that the Senate could not get 60 votes, and also due to the fact that the President vetoed key legislation. For example the President vetoed children’s health insurance, a $50 billion commitment to fund children’s health insurance for the ten million kids who don’t have access to affordable health care. The President vetoed that. The new President will not veto that. We will succeed on that legislation.
Same thing with a new direction in Iraq. I think the new president wants to see a new direction in Iraq, wants to see troop redeployment in the next year, wants to focus only on terrorism and not policing. So I think there’ll be a new approach and that it will pass, unlike in the last Congress.
Even without the 60 Senate votes the Democrats had hoped for.
Yep, I think it’ll pass, because the veto was the thing we had trouble with.
And last, on energy, we still need to work with the Senate, because the House side really focused on paying-as-you-go. We really want to have fiscal discipline, so when we have spending we want to have cuts elsewhere to offset that new spending. We wanted to fund energy independence—we wanted a $15 billion fund passed immediately for a research-and-development grant. It passed in the last hour as part of the tax part of the bailout. But the reason it couldn’t be passed earlier was that the Senate wouldn’t pay for it. They didn’t want to take away the tax cuts for the oil companies that we were going to use to pay for it. We wanted to take those tax cuts away and refocus them on tax credits and tax incentives for energy independence. And so those kinds of votes I think are still going to be a challenge, because we still don’t have 60 votes in the Senate.
Related to energy independence, the auto bailout package was just voted down. I assume you were a supporter of that?
Yes.
Do you think the American auto industry can actually come around to designing products that are energy-efficient?
We have passed already a $25 billion fund to invest in alternative energy and new conservation technology specifically for the auto industry. How we agreed to do that was use those funds specifically for the bailout, and make them discontinue product lines that weren’t effective, to make them stop paying dividends and bonuses, to make them all restructure the plants to create the cars that were energy-efficient. The Senate couldn’t pass that. So now what’s happening is, unfortunately, they’re going to use $15 billion in TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program, aka the Wall Street bailout] funds, to just give to the industry. The TARP legislation, which I did not support, had none of those oversight mechanisms, so they’ll still pay bonuses, they’ll pay dividends, they won’t get rid of dysfunctional product lines. All the work that was put into the bill that I voted for is not present in the TARP. So some restructuring, I fear, may not happen, whereas it would have had to happen for them to access the money on the bill that we passed.
So it seems like they’ll probably be coming back for more money at some point, but hopefully by then—
—We’ll have a new administration in place, so we can actually help them restructure. They basically need to do all the things they do in bankruptcy, but not call it a bankruptcy. It’s the fear that people won’t buy cars if they’re in bankruptcy. But my view is, do the hard choices of a restructuring, and have the car czar be the same thing as your bank bankruptcy administrator. So make the tough choices, everybody takes a haircut across the board, and re-form a new industry that’s actually going to be competitive and build cars that are energy-efficient and that people will want to buy.
I think there’s a design gap too between American cars and foreign cars—they’re just ugly, they’re your grandparents’ cars.
It’s all got to be taken into consideration.
Switching gears—some time ago I was listening to Saxby Chambliss’s acceptance speech after he wone the Georia Senate runoff. He was saying that as soon as the President-elect starting tinkering with the Second Amendment or taking away people’s choice of doctors, he’d be the first to stand up in opposition. And his supporters went nuts. But these are things Obama has specifically said he wouldn’t do. Why is the GOP rehashing culture wars and inventing controversies?
That’s bizarre. Taking away their doctors, I think, is a reference to universal health care. No one’s proposing universal health care—what they’re proposing is making Medicare, or something like Medicare, more accessible for people to buy into, which would be very different because that would be just adding more competition to the system, adding a not-for-profit public system that people could choose if they want. So you’re not taking away doctors if you just create Medicare for all that people can buy into, and still have the choice of whether they want to participate or not. That seems like a red herring. And I haven’t heard the Obama Administration say they’re going to be anti-Second Amendment.
You’ve been supportive of the Second Amendment, which speaks of a “well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state.” But it was written at a time when a national army or police force did not exist. Why is the Second Amendment not obsolete?
Because I really think it goes to the right to bear arms. It’s a fundamental right that we’ve always considered that we have through jurisprudence, through Constitutional debate, for centuries. And so people believe that we have a right to bear arms. So you can’t just rewrite that fundamental belief that people feel that that’s what the Second Amendment is talking about. For my district, for upstate New York, people enjoy hunting. It’s not only a sport, it’s also a part of how they provide for their families. For many families in the north country, the meat that’s on their table is what was hunted over the weekend, whether it’s deer, or duck, or other types of game. That’s what we do in upstate New York. I come from a hunting family, my mom is a great hunter, she shoots the Thanksgiving turkey. My brother is a great hunter, my dad is a great hunter. We all like to fish. One of the bounties of upstate New York is having vibrant, beautiful natural resources, and you can be in the woods and you can hunt and fish and have that food for your family, and also to enjoy the outdoors and be stewards of the environment.
Obviously you have to balance that with smart gun safety laws.
We should have hunter safety—every hunter has to take a hunter safety course to get your license. It’s a weekend course, it takes two full eight-hour days. So in New York State we’ve got very good regulations to make sure people are safe with weapons. You’ve got to know how to load and unload and use your guns properly.
The job market right now isn’t exactly welcoming. What advice do you have for Bard students graduating and trying to settle themselves when everyone is  talking about how opportunities are all disappearing?
I think there is some real job potential in the future for our region. There’s very good potential for growth in the high-tech sector, specifically towards high-tech manufacturing and high-tech development. I talked to some students who just graduated from RPI, and a lot of them were actually creating new businesses in the energy sector for alternative energy. One RPI grad created his own business to figure out how to make new insulation for building materials literally out of a plant. So it was not only green, it was energy-efficient, it was cost-efficient, and it was in fact more effective. So I think for young people graduating they should be looking towards entrepreneurial businesses focused on the energy market that are high-tech oriented, because that’s the area of growth for our region. We have AMD coming into Saratoga County, and when that comes in there will be a lot of other businesses that will grow around it because they like to collaborate. So there will be opportunities for development and for manufacturing and for management, all in the high-tech sector, particularly in the energy market.
And that’s all happening right here nearby.
Yep. It is, I mean we’ve got wind, we’ve got solar, we’ve got fuel cells, we’ve got hydropower, we’ve got cellulosic ethanol, we’ve got all these different opportunities for energy. If we can focus our graduates on those businesses, those are going to be the growth areas that the federal government is going to support through tax incentives and research/development grants. So that’s the area of growth. So I’d focus people on the new energy market, for research, for development, for manufacturing, for management. All of the various aspects, there’s going to be growth there.