The following article appeared in the April 23, 2019 edition of the Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle.
Congressman Mark Green met with constituents in Clarksville on Monday in a town hall meeting, hearing from a mostly conservative crowd who offered mostly conservative marching orders for what they want him to do in the U.S. House.
Namely tackle issues including tariffs, the border wall and abortion.
on issues ranging from abortion to tariffs to the border wall.
Prior to asking for input from the crowd of about 50 people, Green, R-Clarksville, outlined what he's been doing with his top committee assignments, to the Oversight Committee and the Homeland Security Committee.
"Oversight is probably the biggest one that gets me in the news," Green said. "Oversight Committee is where all the investigations happen, and right now there's lots of investigations going on. I think eventually we'll be investigating Donald Trump's lemonade stand when he was 12 years old, but we're investigating so that's what we're doing."
Green is on the Oversight Committee's National Security Subcommittee, which he said he appreciates because national security is in his wheelhouse.
"The thing that's frustrating is, and I'll give you an example, I want us to be looking at why active-duty suicides in the Army increased last year. It increased two years in a row. So let's oversight that. Unfortunately, the majority (Democratic) party runs the committee system. So the majority party directs what gets seen in the committees. So we're talking about (Michael) Cohen, talking to other people like that," Green said.
"But what we really ought to be looking at why ship maintenance in the Navy is 30% or 40% behind. Or why active duty suicides have increased in the United States Army and the United States Marine Corps."
Green said he is, however, able to use his position to ask the Secretary of the Army or the Secretary of the Navy to provide information so he can ask questions.
Green's legislation
Green discussed several bills he has sponsored in his first months in Congress, including bills to:
- Ensure Gold Star families maintain benefits during a government shutdown.
- Treat drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
- The Kids to School Act, which would allow universities to negotiate with students to have them defer tuition to a percentage of their future income.
- Fix the number of Supreme Court justices at nine.
- Require NATO countries to report what they spend on defense.
- Consolidate Homeland Security under one department.
Input from the crowd
For the rest of the town hall, Green polled the crowd on their priorities, asking them to raise their hands yes or no on a variety of President Donald Trump's initiatives.
Karen Reynolds with Clarksville Indivisible, one of the few non-conservative voices in the crowd, objected to the format, telling Green he was encouraging a partisan approach instead of allowing for a deeper discussion of the issues.
But Green responded that he would have to vote yes or no on these issues, and he needed to hear from District 7 constituents on how they wanted him to vote.
One issue that caught Green's attention related to a flat tax, which seemed to have a mix of bipartisan support from the crowd -- several people called for a flat tax with no loopholes.
There was also bipartisan support in the crowd for ending corporate loopholes that allow large companies to avoid paying their fair share in taxes.
This was Green's seventh town hall this month, at the end of a 12-day tour across the district.
