(bright music) (energetic music) (phone dings) - Welcome to "Meet the Candidates" ahead of the November 5th General Election.

I'm Jack Tichenor.

Our guest is Incumbent Democratic US Representative Nikki Budzinski of Springfield, who represents Illinois 13th US Congressional District.

Representative, good to have you on the program.

- Great to be back with you, Jack.

- Well, let's talk about the 13th a little bit.

It runs from the Metro East on the Southwest side through Springfield over to the Champaign-Urbana area.

It covers all of Macoupin County, parts of Champaign, Macon, Madison, Piatt, Sangamon, and St. Clair Counties.

So it's an interesting blend of urban academic centers like U of I, both at Urban or Champaign and U of I Springfield, and a lot of the rural heartland of the country.

Talk about the district and what its major concerns are.

- Yeah, well, I would say we're really kind of a microcosm of the Midwest.

To your point, Jack, I represent a number of universities, great community colleges as well.

And so I think, you know, a lot of the concerns that I hear about in my district are not completely unique to the rest of the Midwest.

It's about job creation, it's about economic development, it's about investing in some of our more underserved communities, it's about investing in education, specifically places of higher education, but also community colleges, helping workers get the skills training they need to get into good paying jobs in our communities.

So a lot of different issues, and I'm really proud of the first term that we've had an office in tackling a lot of these issues that I hear about every day.

- You're wrapping up, as you said, your freshman term on Capitol Hill.

I know you came out of the Labor Union area in your background.

What should people know about you and your record here in your freshman year?

What are the things that you would point to as your biggest accomplishments?

- Yeah, well thank you for that question.

You know, I would say my first term in office has really been marked by a lot of hyper-partisanship in Washington DC, but we've been able to really cut through that, Jack, and I think to deliver some real results in the district and throughout the district.

One in particular in the Metro East, Cahokia Heights, I'm really proud of the work we've been able to do collaboratively with local and state and other federal stakeholders to address some water infrastructure issues that have been going on in this community for decades.

One of the first things I did was I urged the Biden-Harris administration to appoint an EPA coordinator, be on the ground to really help traffic cop a lot of the resources that are coming out, in and out of the community to make sure they're used the most effectively, that there's transparency and accountability to this work, and that we get these issues finally resolved for the constituents of Cahokia Heights and the region.

Very proud that we have this EPA coordinator still on the ground going on almost her eighth month of coordinating, and I think we're making real progress on this larger project that we've been really prioritizing.

You know, the second, and something I'm probably the most proud of in my first term in office is that we urged the Biden administration to utilize the Antiquities Act in order to get the site of the 1908 Race Riot in Springfield designated as a national monument.

I think it's so critically important that we tell a truthful version or truthful history of what happens in our community, whether it's good or it's bad.

I think learning from our history is really important as we're making progress and looking forward and looking ahead, and telling the story of what happened in Springfield in 1908, I think, is a really important component to that.

So working with Senators Duckworth and Senator Durbin, we were able to get the president to designate the site as a national monument, and just had about a week ago, a really nice celebratory service with the National Park Service, as the site is now entering into the care of the National Park Service and we're discussing how we're gonna be building out the memorial in our community.

And then just lastly, Jack, if I could mention the iFAB, we were one of only 12 congressional districts in the country to win a Tech Hub designation out of the CHIPS and Science Act.

We are now building out a tech hub in biomanufacturing and fermentation on the eastern side of the district.

With that came a $51 million federal grant.

These are the types of deliverables that I'm really proud of being able to be a part of and helping to lead in my first term in office.

And this is kind of instructive of the type of work I wanna continue in a second term.

- As you make your way around the district in the final weeks leading up to the November 5th election, you're talking with a lot of people out there.

when you talk to voters, what are the key issues that they want their member of Congress to address when the new Congress takes office next year?

- Well, I would say job creation is, so we have steady job growth, but creating good-paying jobs in our community is something that's really important.

I'm actually headed to Granite City later today where I'm gonna be meeting with the steel workers, meeting with the mayor, as we continue this fight to make sure that we keep steel manufacturing happening in Granite City.

This has been a fight that I've been prioritizing alongside the steel workers since I came into office, fighting to make sure that we keep the jobs in our community while growing jobs in other areas.

Some of the other things I've been really proud of is, you know, Wieland is a larger company in the district, working to make sure that they have some of the infrastructure needs that they will need to continue to expand and grow as a large employer in our community.

We were able to help being a part of making those investments, and Wieland is staying in the Alton community and growing.

I think that's a real positive story in creating and protecting jobs.

The next I would mention is infrastructure.

I've really prioritized trying to go after larger federal grants to make really critical investments in our infrastructure.

We were able to get a $22 million grant for the Village of Savoy, a $21 million grant for the City of Edwardsville.

These are large infrastructure projects for each of these communities that are so important for economic development, public safety, but also job creation.

So that's been something that we've really been focusing in on.

- You were saying at the beginning of the interview that the 13th district is kind of a microcosm of the Midwest.

- You have urban areas like Springfield, Urbana-Champaign and then down into the heavily populated Metro East area of the district.

How do you fine tune your approach to job creation between the larger ones, like you were just mentioning with US Steel and the like, all the way down to, let's say small business that employs maybe 25 to 50 people at a time.

When you think about those and the numbers of the small businesses, they're a huge part of the economic clout of the district.

- Yeah.

We're actually hosting our first Workforce Summit and we're bringing together some of the superintendents in the district.

We're bringing together employers, unions, to come together with the Illinois Manufacturers Association.

This is just one example, Jack, of how we're kind of trying to lead on workforce development and job creation and helping workers get the skills that they need to get into good paying jobs.

I feel very passionately that doesn't have to mean that you're on a track to a four-year degree.

For some folks, going to the University of Illinois or Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville or Milliken, those are the paths for some folks, but that's not the path for everyone.

Getting a good job could mean going to a community college or getting into a union apprenticeship program.

It's why the first bill that I actually introduced was a small business tax credit called LEAP, the LEAP Act, which would incentivize small business owners to hire apprentices by providing a small tax credit to them to incentivize that hiring process.

I also believe very deeply in vocational education programs and CTE programs.

Those are gonna be really top of mind for our first Workforce Summit.

How are we introducing younger and younger people into all of their different options when they graduate from high school?

Some will go on a four-year college degree track, but some might wanna work with their hands and get into welding or become an electrician.

These are good-paying jobs in Central and Southwestern Illinois that have vacancies today, and so how do we get those workers into those jobs and into good paying middle-class jobs is something that I've really tried to prioritize.

- One of the big issues over the last couple of years of the Biden administration has been the cost of living with inflation.

- Mm-hmm.

- Consumer prices rose about 2.9% during July.

That's the first time the inflation rate's been below 3% since 2021.

Even though inflation is cooling, most Illinoisans are still filling the pinch of higher prices for food and other necessities.

What's Congress's role in trying to reign in inflation along with the Federal Reserve?

- Yeah, that's an incredibly important question and something that I hear about from constituents on a daily basis.

How are we helping them keep more of what they've earned?

How are we helping to bring down costs?

I've tried to look at it practically from a number of different ways to support initiatives like what I've done on a bipartisan basis with my Republican friend from Columbus, Ohio, Representative Mike Carey.

We've introduced, jump starting again, the Affordable Connectivity Program.

The Affordable Connectivity Program helped to provide working families with some assistance so that they can afford high-speed internet access.

That's a daily service that families have come to rely on in order to get to work, to learn, oftentimes for access to healthcare.

High-speed, internet access should really be a public utility, something that is accessible and affordable to everyone.

By introducing, again, the Affordable Connectivity Program, restarting it, it's a program that ended in May, I have some communities in the district that are up to 95% reliant on the assistance of the affordable connectivity in order to afford high speed internet access in their home.

That's one kind of common-sense legislative initiative that we can be leading on in Congress to help working families keep more of what they've earned.

The second, I'm a really proud original co-sponsor, again, bipartisan legislation called the Pharmacist Fight Back Act.

What I've been able to identify with Republican and Democratic colleagues is that the PBMs, which are really the middleman between pharmaceutical companies and the patient, they were established to help bring down the cost of pharmaceutical drugs, prescription drug costs.

What the FTC has basically found out is they're actually instrumental in raising the cost of prescription drugs in this country.

So I think we need to be cracking down on them, because we need to ensure patients have the flexibility and the freedom to go to any pharmacist that they'd like, whether it's the bigger guy like a CVS Caremark or whether it's your local pharmacist.

PBMs are really putting the squeeze on local pharmacies, driving them out of business, which means driving out competition, which then means higher prescription drug costs.

We need to take them on, we need to urge PBMs to share in some of the rebates.

80%, I'm proposing, in the Pharmacists Fight Back Act share up to 80% of the rebate with the patients directly rather than keeping that profit.

These are the kind of common-sense things, I think, Jack, we can be doing to help get to the cost of everyday goods and services and make them more affordable for working people.

- Former Republican President Donald Trump has placed border security at the top of his reelection campaign.

The Border Patrol and Customs Agencies reporting now that border crossings are actually down because of stronger security measures there, but it still remains a major issue for a lot of folks.

Illinois is not a border state, but we've been impacted to the tune hundreds of millions of dollars a year- - Mm-hmm.

- When it comes to taking care of people who have ended up in Illinois.

- Yeah.

- What sort of specific border protection plan would you endorse?

- Yeah, this is an important issue and something that I have been openly critical of the administration for taking too long to act, but as you've mentioned, Jack, they finally have, and we are seeing those border crossings, those numbers go down.

I think the crisis that we see at our southern border is really the symptom of the larger problem, which is that we have a broken immigration system in this country.

We don't have a pragmatic, a practical way for folks that wanna enter our country legally and attain legal status to get that, where it doesn't require decades of waiting.

I think we need to fix our broken asylum system.

I think we need to fund, and I have very aggressively supported more funding for our southern border, specifically around concerns around fentanyl getting across the border, and what we need to be doing to invest in more border patrol officers.

I've advocated for more additional funding for that.

I've also advocated for more technology.

I have the opportunity, Jack, to actually visit the Arizona border, and with Democrats and Republican colleagues to see firsthand as to what was going on.

You know, anymore the border itself, the physical border, while that infrastructure is being built, we really need to be relying more on technology to detect illegal border crossings, to also detect those that might be carrying across the border illegal drugs like fentanyl.

And so we need to be investing at the border, but we need to fix our broken immigration system more holistically, and we have to do that on a bipartisan basis.

There was, as you know, a bipartisan deal to address many of these concerns, but sadly, politics got in the way.

Our Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, didn't wanna call it for a vote on the House floor because he called Donald Trump, and Donald Trump wanted to use it as a political issue in these last 18 days of the election.

So we haven't been able to put the American people first here and get to real resolution on these issues.

- Majority Democrats in Springfield and Governor Pritzker have made sure in the last couple of years that Illinois remains a state that is strongly in support of reproductive health rights for women in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

At the same time, though, a number of congressional Republicans are still pushing the idea of a national ban on abortion, even though the issue has been, as they say, handed back to the states with the possibility of the House being at another, again, at another razor-thin margin.

- Right.

- What would you do to protect reproductive health rights?

- Look, I very much believe this is a critical issue in this upcoming election, protecting the right to privacy, protecting the right of a woman to make her own decision as it relates to her body.

I very strongly believe that a politician does not belong in the doctor's room with the woman and her doctor as she's making this very difficult decision.

I am a very a strong advocate for the right of women to choose.

I believe that we should be codifying Roe versus Wade at the national level, and I've been trying to be supportive of the number of women's clinics that are in my district that are now seeing a surge of women crossing the border from out of state into the state of Illinois, as we're a safe haven, women looking for access to full reproductive healthcare.

I'm gonna do everything I can in Congress to continue to fight to protect that, and I do think this is a critically important election that draws a real contrast between the Democrats and the Republicans in this November election.

- I wanna turn to the topic of gun violence.

Mass shootings as defined by incidents in which four or more people are involved still dominate the headlines to a large degree.

As of July 31st, nearly 500 people have been killed thus far this year, and over 1500 wounded in about 400 shootings.

What's your solution to the problem on Capitol Hill?

Tougher federal background checks, renewing the national ban on assault style weapons?

- Mm-hmm.

Look, I support the Second Amendment, but I think we need to be doing more to making sure that we have common-sense gun safety on the books.

Last Congress was able to do some of those things successfully, which would be strengthening red flag laws, passing universal background checks.

I think those are the kind of common-sense measures that overwhelmingly American voters support, over 70% of American voters support them.

I think we need to be doing more to get military-style weapons off of our streets and out of the hands of the wrong people.

But I do think that this is a problem that we have as an epidemic in this country.

Weapons are a part of that, but I do also think, and I think we need to, and something I've been really focusing in on is mental health services, getting access, especially as I represent, as we've talked about, Jack, some more rural communities, where we really struggle to have mental health specialists for young people, for everyone, and in order to tackle, I think a lot of these issues, we need to also be investing in things like mental health services.

- Home ownership is one of the most important keys to building generational wealth, but it's out of reach for a lot of Americans.

What role does Congress have to play in making home ownership more affordable to more people of all income backgrounds or levels?

- Yeah, home ownership is a part of the American dream, and it feels too far away and out of touch for too many Americans in this country right now.

We have a real supply issue in this country as it relates to housing, not just on home ownership, but affordable housing.

I was just in East St. Louis yesterday where we were able to award Parsons Place, which provides affordable housing to a number of seniors, but to the East St. Louis community more broadly, investment, $500,000 of investment in infrastructure improvements that they're trying to make.

And you can see how home ownership is such an important tool to building wealth for people individually, and getting access to that, getting access to lower interest loans, getting access to homes that are on a spectrum, I think, is really critically important, and I think that housing is something that should be a bipartisan issue, and I'm hoping is something that we can tackle with a Democratic majority in the House, next Congress.

- Student loan debt is skyrocketing in recent years.

It's one of the largest forms of consumer debt in the country now.

Somewhere over $1.7 billion.

Roughly one in five Americans hold student debts, averaging around $30,000.

As you look at this, the Biden administration has tried a couple of times, a couple of different approaches to try to resolve that with only varying degrees of success.

What should Congress do, if anything, in terms of addressing that problem?

- Yeah, I think college affordability is another very large issue for people that are trying to pursue their dream.

If they're worried about being saddled with personal debt for the rest of their lives, they might stop short of doing that.

And so I think ways that are common sense that we can be making college more affordable, one of the things I support is doubling Pell Grants.

Pell Grants are something that are targeted for those individuals most in need that otherwise wouldn't be able to afford pursuing a four-year college degree.

If they are eligible, then they can receive assistance that can help bring down the cost of college and making it more affordable.

I think that's an important step.

I also think we need to be prioritizing the professions where we need people.

We need teachers, we need nurses, we need mental health professionals, and I've introduced a number of different pieces of legislation to say, if you go into those professions and you practice in those professions for say, five years, we will help you bring down and pay down the cost of your debt.

I think it's really important that we be prioritizing in a very targeted way, kind of how we're incentivizing what professions people are going into, and matching them with where our needs are in our communities.

And then lastly, I would just say that I'm trying to really talk more about the fact that the four-year college degree path is really not the only path.

You can get into a good-paying job that you love that would probably maybe only require a community college degree, an associate degree, or a degree from a trade school.

I've worked with a number of employers that are actually now providing their own apprenticeship-based training program within their own company, and they're hiring from within, giving those employees the skills training they need to move up within the company that they're already employed.

These are the type of common-sense measures that help people get into jobs that they love, that pay good middle-class wages, and really tackle the larger issue of college affordability.

- In the last three and a half minutes or so that we have left, I want to shift over a bit to foreign policy.

Continued military and financial support for the state of Israel continues to divide the American public nearly, actually, over a year after the Hamas terrorist attacks.

How does United States help broker a lasting peace settlement in that region, given the circumstances and the difficulty of trying to achieve a solution?

- Yeah, I think that what the Biden administration has been doing to try to lead with diplomacy, to deescalate what's been happening in the Middle East region, I think, has been important.

We wanna see peace, lasting peace in this region, but we also, I think, need to continue to support Israel and its right to defend itself.

We just saw, several weeks ago, Iran launched 180 ballistic into Tel Aviv.

What prevented a catastrophic loss and damage in Israel was because of the United States' investment in the Iron Dome technology, which allowed Israel to defend itself.

I think you make the right point, Jack, that we're just now past the one-year mark of the October 7th attack where Hamas, a terrorist organization, infiltrated Israel, killing over 2000 individuals, taking captive, now still to this day, over 200 hostages remain with Hamas.

Some of those, four, I understand, up to four American citizens.

We need all hostages to be released.

We need to not turn a blind eye to terrorist organizations like Hamas or Iran's proxies like the Houthis and Hezbollah.

And so this is a very complicated situation.

Obviously, I've always been a very strong believer in making sure we're getting humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.

We need to have an approach that is multi-pronged, and I think that is unfortunately something that's gonna be continuing into the years ahead.

- In the last minute we have, Ukraine continues to hold its own against the Russian invasion from February of 2022.

How long and how much of the United States continue financial and military support for Ukraine?

- It's critically important that we continue to stand with Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.

The Ukrainians were the underdogs taking on Putin.

Putin attacked a sovereign country, a democratic country, the country of Ukraine.

We need to stand up to democracy, for democracy, we need to stand up to Putin.

I think it is critically important that we continue to provide aid to Ukraine so that they can continue to successfully push back on Russia and Putin's aggression.

Because I do believe that if we can't do that, Putin is not going to stop at Ukraine.

Next, it's Poland, and then we're looking at a much larger, scarier World War situation.

And so the investment that we're making in the Ukrainians to defend themselves is smart in both the short and long term for the United States Incumbent Democratic Congresswoman Nikki Budzinski of Springfield.

Thank you for your time on "Meet the Candidates."

- Thank you, Jack.

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