Senator-elect Adam B. Schiff doesn’t really want to talk about President-elect Donald Trump. He wants to talk about the economy.
“The question of the last election – which we did not answer satisfactorily, which we will have to answer as a country – is that if you work hard in America, can you still make a good living?” Schiff said in a recent interview. “For too many people, that’s not the case.”
Yes, California’s new senator is “sadly confident” that Trump will “abuse his office” during his second term, and has vowed to expose such abuses if they occur. He believes several of Trump’s Cabinet picks are unqualified and their nominations should be rejected.
But as he heads to the Senate after nearly a quarter-century in the House of Representatives, Schiff said he is more interested in tackling the economic problems that many analysts say are behind Trump’s victory — especially skyrocketing housing costs and entrenched homelessness, which Schiff said were “overriding concerns” for many of the Californians he met during his campaign.
He also has his sights set on faltering health care systems in rural areas, along with unaffordable childcare and water access problems facing farmers, he said.
“We can’t wait four years to address housing. We can’t wait four years to address child care challenges, or the fact that the economy isn’t working for a lot of people,” Schiff said. “We have to solve these problems.”
Schiff’s emphasis on economic issues is not new. While much of his campaign and prolific fundraising efforts were traced to his disdain for — and opponent Steve Garvey’s support for — Trump, Schiff also often encountered economic problems. He established policies on housing and other issues and promised to work for the many Californians struggling to make ends meet.
Read more: Schiff vs. Trump: The real head-to-head battle that defines California’s U.S. Senate race
But now, in the wake of a nail-biting election in which Trump and Republicans took control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, Schiff is leaning even harder on that economic message — which has drawn both ridicule and respect.
Jessica Millan Patterson, chair of the California Republican Party, said she would “like to take him at his word that these are the issues he will now tackle after nearly 25 years in the House of Representatives,” but “history tells a story.” different story’. story.” She noted that Schiff has made statements in recent weeks condemning several Trump Cabinet choices, as well as decisions to close criminal cases against him.
“He’s still obsessed with Trump,” Patterson said. “He is not someone who has found solutions for Californians. He is not someone who is focused on the problems Californians face. He is a person who has focused solely on the president for the last eight years.”
Kevin Spillane, a veteran Republican strategist in the state, said Schiff’s refocus on economic issues seemed genuine — and a smart political move, given the outcome of the election.
“His change in tone is simply an acknowledgment of political reality,” Spillane said. “He is a smart and pragmatic politician.”
Instead of addressing Trump’s every misstep, Spillane said, Schiff could choose to focus on getting things done, including by taking a page from his less partisan past.
“Before his role, his image, as a resistance fighter against Trump, Schiff was actually known as a more pragmatic liberal, both in the [California] Legislature and Congress,” Spillane said, “and that probably fits his personality more.”
Schiff is also starting a new job – which always requires recalibration. He knows many Californians want him to keep fighting Trump, but he also believes many voters want him to solve things for them.
“When people see that the quality of their lives is becoming lower than that of their parents, they are open to any demagogue who promises that they can solve it alone,” he said. “And so we have to figure this out: how to make the economy work for people.”
A big part of that, Schiff said, is housing.
Too many Americans can barely make ends meet to pay rent, and far too few can afford to buy a home, he said. Many more people are frustrated by the related fight against the “epidemic of homelessness” in their communities, he said.
According to him, “both problems can be traced back to the lack of supply,” Schiff said. To that end, he plans to look for ways to “remove barriers” to new housing, in part by pushing for a bipartisan expansion of low-income tax credits, which he says are “small, oversubscribed and generally unavailable are for most people’. who want to use it.”
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the program provides approximately $10 billion in annual tax credits to state and local agencies that build or renovate low-income rental housing.
Schiff also plans to look for new ways the federal government can encourage local municipalities to approve affordable housing projects more quickly, and then “bring urgency” to their construction.
Shane Phillips, housing initiatives project manager at UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, said the problems with housing affordability and homelessness won’t be solved if “we don’t start building a lot more housing.”
Phillips said expanding the tax credit — as well as housing vouchers “and other supply-side and demand-side subsidies” — would help, but they will serve fewer people and cost more “if we don’t address the housing shortage problem.”
He proposed several other measures that could both help and find bipartisan support in Congress — including changes to the tax code and to loan products that would encourage production of more affordable or mixed-income multifamily projects, and revisions to the standards for mortgage loans that require “more people with good – not great – credit scores” to qualify.
Another problem Schiff wants to try to address is rural health care, which he says is “in total free fall.”
Schiff raised concerns about such care before the election, including during a campaign stop last month at Madera Community Hospital, which went bankrupt and closed early last year but will now reopen with support from state emergency funds.
Read more: This rural California county lost its only hospital, leaving residents with difficult health care choices
Schiff said rural hospitals across the state and country are “basically hanging on by a thread,” in part because government reimbursements for low-income and elderly patient care are “way too low” and attracting and retaining staff is too difficult has become.
He said he hopes finding solutions will be a bipartisan priority, “as the rural red states are in much the same position as the Central Valley or the Imperial Valley.”
Steve Stark, CEO of Madera Community Hospital, said he was “very encouraged” by Schiff’s visit and the interest in addressing such issues in Washington.
Stark said about 70% of his hospital’s patient base relies on Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program for people with lower incomes, and another 22% relies on Medicare, the federal program for the elderly and people with a disability. That significantly limits the hospital’s ability to generate revenue from the remaining 8% of its patients, he said.
In addition, population growth in the region caused the hospital to lose federal rural health designation because it serves a community of fewer than 50,000 people, and with it a slew of additional fees that would have greatly boosted the bottom line. Without these perks, attracting and retaining staff and providing certain types of care — such as obstetrics — became much more difficult, Stark said.
Stark said a good start in solving the problems facing rural hospitals would be to increase the population limit for cities to remain eligible for rural health care benefits — especially in states with large populations, such as California , where even rural towns are “still pretty big.”
Another major help would be making more types of care, including obstetrics, cost-based services under Medi-Cal and Medicare, meaning their full costs would be covered by the programs, Stark said. Otherwise, hospitals like Madera lose about $7,000 per delivery, he said.
Without such help, Stark said, hospitals like his will continue to balance on a “very fine rope.”
A third priority Schiff mentioned was child care, which has become so expensive and difficult to obtain in California that many people — especially women and women of color — are “being kept out of the labor force because they would have to pay more for child care than they would for child care.” . that they can make on the shop floor,” he said.
That’s just “bad economics,” he said.
Read more: Childcare is a ‘textbook example of a broken market’. Where do Harris and Trump go from here?
Schiff said he hopes his influence as a lawmaker in the state’s most populous state will help him make progress on all of the above issues — and on other tough issues like immigration. “When you represent over 40 million people, it gives a certain weight to your representation,” he said.
He said he also hopes to forge new relationships with Republican colleagues, with whom he is sure there is common ground. He said he has done that in the past — citing his work in the House of Representatives with former Assemblyman John Culberson (R-Texas) as an example.
Schiff and Culberson, who were in the same freshman class, both had a strong interest in NASA; Culberson was from Houston and Schiff had the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in his district. After they and their families met early in their terms at a bipartisan retreat, they ended up working together on space initiatives for years, despite disagreeing on many other issues.
Culberson agreed in an interview about their collaboration after discovering that a “common passion” was an example of the kind of bipartisanship that is possible in Congress — and that Schiff is capable of continuing.
“We have worked closely – along with other Democrats and Republicans – to maintain America’s leadership in space exploration and scientific discovery,” he said. “Adam has always been a strong supporter of both and can work with members from both sides of the aisle – and across the country.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
