Sixth District Congressman Ben Cline held his “town hall” in Lexington on Thursday, in front of 33 apparently very lucky folks, in a room that one attendee said could have easily accommodated 100, and another estimated, 120.
The restrictions on attendance even kept local media out – News Leader staff writer Lyra Bordelon reported that she had made a request to cover the event in person, but was declined, and was told by Cline’s office that “due to heightened interest in the event and our concern that all interested Lexington residents should be able to attend, we are unfortunately unable to grant you admission at this time.”
“Heightened interest.”
There were 33 people there.
And plenty of good seats still available.
I understand from Bob Stuart at The News Virginian that he was also in Lexington for the “town hall” on Thursday, and focused his time on talking to a small group of Democratic protestors outside, but I’m not finding his article on the event online, so I’m not sure if he was able to get inside, or if he’d even asked.
That could be a factor of mass layoffs announced on Friday by Lee Enterprises, the parent company of The News Virginian, affecting operations at its Virginia properties.
Speaking here for Augusta Free Press, we didn’t even try, because we knew what the answer would be.
The Cline folks stopped communicating with us, except to offer the occasional complaint, years ago.
Anyway.
The Cline team broadcast the “town hall” on Facebook Live, but the audio was, to say the least, amateurish, to the point that, it was hard to follow.
I downloaded the video and ran it through an AI transcription program, and it’s still hard to make out a lot of what Cline was saying.
Some of the highlights, of what I was able to get down, and verify:
“We have a problem with political violence, and I’ll take questions afterwards, and the problem is largely on the left,” Cline tried to say, in reference to the murder of MAGA provocateur Charlie Kirk on a college campus in deep-red Utah.
The awkwardness there – his quote broken up by the line about taking questions afterwards – is the result of how Cline did the “town hall,” which was done in two parts: the first, he went over a PowerPoint presentation that his staff created for him to make sure that he hit the MAGA talking points; the second, he took questions from the few people in attendance.
The “problem with political violence” – fact-check time here – is not “largely on the left.”
It wasn’t “the left” that tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, for instance; that was MAGA, whipped up by a Donald Trump speech urging his followers to “fight like hell.”
Nor was it “the left” that assassinated the former Democratic House Speaker in Minnesota in an attempt to tip the balance of political power in the state legislature there; that one was just a couple of months ago.
Appalling line from Cline on that one: “Melissa Hortman was killed tragically in Minnesota by an individual who was appointed by Tim Walz to his position, and who, in his manifesto reference wanting Tim Walz to be a senator.”
The murderer – Vance Boelter – also shot a Democratic state senator and his wife the night of the Hortman murder; found in his vehicle was a list of nearly 70 targets, including other Democratic politicians, abortion-rights advocates and abortion providers.
Cline either knows this, and thinks you don’t, or somehow doesn’t know this, and reveals himself to be unqualified to speak on the topic.
“Right now, the House and Senate are in a standoff,” Cline went on next, addressing the federal budget situation, which is where it always is this time of year – at an impasse.
“We would like to continue negotiating until Thanksgiving. Just keep the funding as is going until Thanksgiving. To do that, we need 60 votes in the Senate. That means seven Democrats, and Chuck Schumer has refused to allow any Democrat to vote with Republicans to continue the funding until Thanksgiving so we can continue negotiating and avoid government shutdown,” Cline said.
Here, Cline is trying to pin blame on the budget impasse on Democrats, when Republicans have majorities in both the House and Senate.
His line about needing “60 votes in the Senate” is a blatant misrepresentation.
If Republicans really want to pass a budget, they can blow up the Senate filibuster – but they don’t want to do that, because they know the political pendulum swings back and forth and back again, and one day not too far down the road, they’re going to want to use the filibuster to obstruct a bill they don’t like.
“It’s my hope that Democrats recognize that now is the time to at least continue things to November, and then we can talk about extraneous issues as part of an overall budget resolution,” Cline said.
Key among the “extraneous issues” is the trillions pulled from Medicaid in the Big Ugly Bill that Cline voted for in July, and forced Augusta Health – right here in the heart of the Sixth District – to shutter three of its primary care centers last month.
Is Cline really meaning to intone that less access to healthcare is an “extraneous issue”?
“Border security is another big one. We hired over 18,000 new ICE and Border Patrol agents supporting states who were forced to police the border due to the past president’s policies, which allowed over 10 million illegals into the country, more than the Commonwealth of Virginia,” Cline said.
Again, wrong. Even according to the MAGA-majority House Budget Committee, the number of “illegals” – people aren’t “illegal,” they’re “undocumented”; being in this country without documentation is not a crime, it’s a civil violation – who entered the country during the Biden years was 1.7 million.
Total growth in the foreign-born population in the Biden years was 8.3 million – that’s people who are documented and people who are undocumented.
I know people who watch Fox News and Newsmax and the My Pillow Guy on TV every night think and feel otherwise, but their thoughts and feelings aren’t facts.
One interaction I want to highlight involves a self-identified social studies teacher who asked Cline: “Why are we sending billions of dollars to the Israeli government to drop bombs on hospitals and schools rather than using those billions of dollars to properly fund hospitals and schools?”
Cline gave a long answer, highlighting the “bonds” with the Israeli government “that tie us together.”
In essence, folks on the left, you guys who stayed home and didn’t vote for Kamala Harris because Joe Biden didn’t do anything to deter Israel, Republicans are even less interested, so, congrats.
“You have prices that are very high, the price of hamburger, the price of bacon, the price of steaks are very high right now for consumers, for families, that is challenging as well,” said Cline, who may be about to get himself a MAGA primary challenger next year, for admitting that prices are higher under the new president, particularly given what he said next.
“We need to open up more markets. This administration is trying to renegotiate a large number of trade agreements at once, and doing so, I’m hopeful that we will see prices stabilize.”
Cline seems to be acknowledging here that the issue with higher prices is the dumb Trump tariffs, and the misguided effort to “renegotiate a large number of trade agreements at once.”
We were promised “90 trade deals in 90 days” – we’re still waiting for the first one.
Editorial comment here: no farmer bailouts.
Farm counties voted for Trump; let them pay the price for their politics.
Last one from me:
“I’m a strong defender of free speech rights, whether it’s journalists, whether it’s entertainers or whether it’s you on your social media, talking about COVID, talking about whatever it is you want to talk about, you should have that ability without being censored by the government.”
Cline’s office removed Augusta Free Press from its media list years ago.
Ben Cline is about as government as government gets.
He might want to try harder to live up to being a “strong defender of free speech rights.”
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Chris Graham
