 Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for North Central Minnesota, produced by Lakeland Public Television with host Ray Gildow. Production funding for Lakeland Currents is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airports, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport for information available at BemidjiAirport.org. Closed captioning for Lakeland Currents is sponsored by Niswa Tech Service, tax preparation for businesses and individuals online at NiswaTax.com. Hello again everyone and welcome to Lakeland Currents. The 8th congressional district is a geographic, huge place, 27,500 square miles, if you can imagine how big that is. The anchor of this is the city of Duluth, which is Minnesota's fifth largest city. And about 63, 64 percent of the people who live in the 8th district are considered to be urban, are considered to be rural, rather not urban. And it's my great pleasure today to have the congressman from the 8th district here, Rick Nolan, and welcome to Lakeland Currents. Well, I think I'm delighted to be here. It's great program, great show, and a great congressional district. By the way, it's bigger than 10 states. Is it really? Yeah. Wow, I can believe that because it's long. It's pretty hard to go anywhere without getting at least three or four hours coming and going in the car. And you know, at one time it was completely democratic, when it was a little bit of a different geographic stretch than it is now. Yeah. And over the last few elections, it's been a lot closer balanced between Republican and Democratic. But the Iron Range area, the Duluth area, still I would guess is pretty much democratic. That's probably worth it. Well, it is pretty good. Although, you know, there's this Nate Silver, he's kind of the quintessential guru of campaigns and election analysis. And he analyzes every district in the country for their competitiveness. And he just finished analyzing 194 Democrats. He'll do the same for the Republicans, but mine is the most difficult race in the country for a Democrat to win. So, and on some of the recent polling we're seeing on just a generic basis, you know, we're going to vote for, would you vote for the Democrat or the Republican? The Republican wins by about six points. Our most recent polling still shows me winning by about a similar amount. So, but it's a very, very competitive district. And tell the thing in Georgia, it was the most competitive or expensive in the country. It was well over $20 million, which is just obscene and begs the question, you know, how does this happen? And we need to fix and change that. During the Jim Obostar era, rather, pretty much a reliable district for the Democrats. Oh, gosh, I mean, you could never call any statewide election until the eighth district vote came in because it was always going to be huge. It was going to be 60, 75 percent Democratic, but it's not like that at all anymore. So now, from my perspective, whoever represents the district and you are representing it now in your second term, it's just a tightrope to walk, isn't it? Because if you look at supporting, say, mining issues, you're going to have the environmentalists who are against them. Yeah. And I don't know if people who don't get involved with politics understand how challenging that is to balance these things out. Well, it truly is. And, you know, you and I are in the same age bracket, even though you look a lot younger than I do. Yeah, right. Yeah. So, but you remember when we were kids, I mean, the rivers were running sewers and the lakes were catching on fire and acid rain was destroying the forest. The narrative then was, you know, we can't have all these environmental rules and regulations or nobody will be able to do any business. And unfortunately, now that narrative has flopped, they're flipped. And you have people saying, well, we can't do any mining or manufacturing because then we won't have an environment. But there were many of us then and who continue now, myself included, to say, no, no, we got the brains, we got the science, we certainly have the need, just muster up the political will when we should be able to do both. And we proved that we could. I mean, and we didn't know how they were going to do it, Ray. But, you know, the automobile industry came up with a catalytic converter to scrub the sulfur out of automobile exhaust and we stopped the acid rain and the power companies and the paper mills came up with scrubbers to take the toxins and other pollutants that were going into the rivers and the lakes. And we even have a thing now called reverse osmosis, which we did not have back in the day. You can take a pump and push some kind of a liquid through it. You can filter out a virus, you know, you can, how many parts of sulfur per million do you want, you know, 300, 100, 10, zero, obviously gets more expensive, the more you want to dial it down. But I'm of the view that we still have the smarts, the brains, the technology, and the technologies keep growing and getting better all the time. And we have, I think, a profound obligation to do both. You and the governor both have supported now the mining project up in northeast Minnesota. And could you just talk a little bit about that? Sure, sure. Before I do, I want to point out one thing. I just attended a lecture here recently by a Dr. Jim Boyer, who's written a book called The Irresponsible Pursuit of Paradise. And he talks about how dependent we are upon the import of so many of these extracted minerals that are responsible for our communications, responsible and necessary. Copper, uranium. Yeah, copper, nickel, iron, ore, you name it. And we're actually exporting the need for these minerals to developing countries around the world where they have virtually no environmental rules and regulations and a great deal of human exploitation. And that's something that people, I think, have to start thinking about. We don't want to be a bunch of a nation of nimbies exporting and degrading everybody else's environment in the world, especially when we have the capacity and we have the most rigorous rules and regulations anywhere in the world. We have the capacity to do it here and do it well. Polymet is a good case in point. They've undergone 12 years of scrutinization. They've been approved by the EPA, by the forestry, by Interior, by the DNR, by the PCA, by Fish and Wildlife Services. And time and time and again they've been asked to go back to the board and to demonstrate what kind of abatement procedures they're going to use and to demonstrate their effectiveness. And so I've been the same old guy always wise. I've been an ardent supporter of the environment, but I'm an ardent supporter of mining as well. And I got to tell you something else that people haven't thought about in this. Of course it's important for the jobs and the economy in northern Minnesota, but guess what? Homeland Security just did a study recently and they found that 13 percent of the nation's gross national product goes through the locks at the Sue Narrows. Now, why is that relevant to us? That's how Lake Superior gets into the Great Lakes. And the bulk of that material is iron ore from Minnesota's range going through the Port of Duluth. And the study concluded that if those locks failed it would throw the country into a great depression because that ore supplies all the Great Lake steel mills and they supply the automobile industry and all the heavy industrials, which is why we have military protection there. Because again, if that failed because we shut down the mines or they failed just from obsolescence and or they were some kind of an asymmetrical or overt military attack, it would throw the country into a great depression and put seven million people out of business. So bottom line is, you know, I've been working to get the, and I've gotten a considerable bottom money to do a feasibility study because the locks are obsolete and they're causing a lot of trouble. But more importantly, you know, this mining here in northern Minnesota is of course important for us, but it's important for the whole country. Our national security, our national economy and tourism is important too. So we have to make sure that we impose and insist on these rigorous state and federal standards. But for the most part, the industry is okay with that. You know, they used to fight that. They now understand the American people expect, you know, good strong standards. So as long as we have those good standards in place, there's no reason why we can't do mining and have a continuous of the clean water and the healthy atmosphere we have up here in the 8th district. We have the cleanest water in the state, by the way. In the 8th district. You want to keep it that way. Yep. Yep. Some of the key issues facing the 8th district are the same issues facing all of Minnesota. Healthcare is certainly one of them. Yeah. And now this week as they start negotiating the tax bill, at least on the Senate side or the House side, I can't remember which was, it looks like they might start looking at that American healthcare or the AC, the American. Yeah, the ACA. ACA. Yeah, American. And taking out some of them. Otherwise no one is Obamacare. Taking out the requirement that you have to have insurance. Yeah. Yeah. What's your take on what's, yeah. It's hard to figure out what's going on. I don't believe. Well, it's a moving target. I suspect you are the answer to all of this. No, no. It's changing from day to day. But the essential challenge here is that under the current system outside of Medicare and some Medicaid, everybody in America has got a different insurance policy, depending on how old you are, what your health is, what your income is, how many children you have, how many dependents you have, what's your zip code, and it's become an administrative nightmare. I introduced one of the first single payer proposals when I had served in the Congress back in the 70s. There were only four of us that supported it at the time. And what is single payer? You know, first of all, it's what most of the rest of the developed countries in the world do. And they get better results and they pay dramatically less for health care than we do. It's so fundamentally American. And here's what it is. Everybody's got the same policy, okay? So, administratively, you do it for two, three percent instead of 30, 40, 50 percent. And everybody pays. So, between and everybody pays the same rate. So, everybody pays, everybody pays the same rate and everybody pays. It's a wonderful formula. And of course, it doesn't cover some of the more exotic plastic surgery, but it covers all the basics. So, all the developed countries, and they do that. And that's fundamentally what Medicare is, which is why a number of people have called, you know, for Medicare for all, because that's a single payer. It's not a socializing, it's not socializing medical care, but it, the doctors remain independent businesses providing health services. But I wanted to tell you, when I introduced this, there were four of us back in the 70s, okay? And oh my gosh, the medical community, they were so upset with me. My gosh, it was frightening sometimes to go to a public meeting. I'm afraid I get my tongue ripped out or my eyes ripped out. And they spent a lot of money trying to defeat me. Well, here we are, you know, quite some years later. We have 130 sponsors now, and guess who's contributing to my campaign? The American Medical Association and the medical doctors. Why? I've had a doctor in Duluth tell me he's spending 90 percent. And I think on average they say they're spending about 50 percent of their time in their money, in their offices, processing all of these insurance claims. I've had doctors on the show, and they all say the same thing. And that's not what they went into medicine for. They went into medicine it's a healing arts profession. They want to heal people and fix people. They don't want to sit around being medical insurance process claimers. So that's exciting. And we're building more and more support for that. And we're going to get there. And I'm confident that it's just going to take a little more time. I believe last year you were voted as one of the most successful congressmen in working across the aisle. I was. And it actually wasn't a vote. Several of the universities, Virginia and Vanderbilt, they just looked at bills and amendments that all the members of Congress had introduced and followed them to see how many of them had become law as a land. And I'm proud to say that I became, I was the second most effective of all 194 Democrats in the house. And one of the 10 most effective. And then they concluded from that being that I'm in the minority. And I remind myself and others that I had bipartisan support for all that legislation. And you know you and I were talking earlier about the George Washington's farewell address and how poignant it is for today. It was kind of a message for future generations where he said the greatest threats to democracy were, as I recall, one is excessive partisanship. We certainly got that today. The other was the accumulation of massive deficits. And we certainly have that today. And the third one was influenced by foreign governments and our politics. And we certainly have that today. What an incredibly visionary view Washington had. And I think there was something even about the president or the whoever's in power starting to have influence in the Department of Justice and some of those people to use those for their own political game. I think that was another one that I think he touched on. One of the things that we needed to be aware of if we wanted to preserve and protect our economy. So it's kind of an ironic. And the other thing about it was that, you know, he epitomized civility and integrity. You know, an irritable lie. He made people then proud of our government and in our way of life. And to this day, as our first president, he makes us proud. And there's been a tremendous degradation of civility and kindness and integrity in government. And it breaks your heart to see so many people losing faith and trust in their governmental processes. There's a lot of things that need fixing. And I've got some ideas about how we fix them. But they definitely need fixing. I think we can all agree on that. One of the things you talked about when you were here two years ago was the pressure that's on incoming congressmen and senators to raise money. Is that still the same pressure you're dealing with? Yeah, it is. It's only gotten worse. They tell new members that they should spend 25, 30 hours a week in the call centers across the street. Wow. And then you should have another 10 hours a week in actual fundraising events. And, you know, in my case, it's an eight-hour trip out to Washington door-to-door. And I go out and come back every week. So, you know, do the math on that. And I made a decision. I said I'm not going to go to the call centers. They never used to exist when I served before or any other point in history. I just said, look, at this stage of my life, being a chance to go and serve and pay it forward, pay it back, because life's been a good, dark generation. And that's what's getting away from this country. I said I didn't go out to Washington to become a middle-level telemarketer and dialing for dollars. And so I haven't. So I'd like to say my success as a legislator is my ability to reach across the aisle, find public partners. But part of it just going to work on the people's business instead of going across the street raising money for yourself. It ain't a big secret. I don't care what business you're in. If you don't show up and go to work, you're not going to get anything done. So it ain't rocket science. But I want to see this Citizens United reverse. That allows all this dark money into politics, most of which is negative and degrading of the can. Discourage is good people from running for public office. I think we need a system of small donor contributions supplemented by public financing. I think we need to fix gerrymandering. The fact that there's 435 seats in the Congress in only 24 of them are competitive. That's not real democracy. We need to have regular order right now. I just saw a report yesterday. This current Congress has had more closed rules than any other Congress in the history of the country. When I served before, everything came up under an open rule. If you had an idea, you offered it and you debated it and you argued it. And that's how you find common ground. But this healthcare legislation, some of which would put as many as 25, 30 million people on the streets without healthcare and never been presented with an opportunity to make an amendment. The House just recently passed the Attacks Bill under a closed rule. It didn't matter if you were Rick Nolan or Clem Caddipelhopper from Alabama. If you had an amendment you wanted to offer, you didn't get a chance. It voted up or down. That's not real democracy. Real democracy is a lot of work. You have to hear everybody out and make some tough decisions. But now it's mostly just partisan positioning and one-party ruling and shutting everybody else out. Let's just talk a little bit about that tax legislation because that is the criticism coming from lots of places. That this is being rushed through after Thanksgiving there was going to be or was a vote and it's not involving people even from industry or people from the colleges who are experts and economists and those people when they get a chance to start looking at the legislation are pretty much petrified by what they're seeing. And it's the same claim was made against the Democrats with Obamacare that that stuff was rammed through. But that took over a year to develop that legislation and this legislation for the taxes was taking weeks. We didn't have one minute of hearings on this tax bill that the House recently passed. And I am of the belief that if we had a vote on whether or not kids who are struggling with their education, well they're no longer kids anymore, they're paying their student debt, if we had a vote on whether or not the interest on their loans should be deductible, we'd win that. If we had a vote on whether or not your state and local taxes should be deductible, we'd win that. If we had a vote on whether charitable contributions or you name it, we would win those but we don't have any votes on that. Everybody that contacted me in my office in the run up to this tax debate has really serious problems with it. Our Minnesota commissioners determined that under the House pass bill 450,000 Minnesotans are going to get a tax increase. They found that 320,000 people would lose the deductibility on the interest for their college education loan. Hey Ray, you know when you and I went to this college it was about a hundred bucks a quarter. I mean it was virtually free. Yeah it was. Come on. So the truth of the matter is if somebody does get a tax break under this thing in the middle class, although the CBO Congressional Budget Office said anybody making under $70,000 a year is going to get a tax increase, if you did get a break it'd be enough to buy a hubcap on a Mercedes Benz. Not a new car. But the upper one percenters, they'll be able to buy the whole Mercedes Benz and maybe a fleet of them. It's $1.5 trillion in tax breaks for the upper one percent. And it's increasing the debt significantly. Well, the things most egregious about this are one that's passing that debt on to our children. That's unconscionable. $1.5 trillion. And then this huge tax crate for the super millionaires and billionaires, the one percenter. I'm sorry, they're not struggling. I don't know a lot of them but you have a couple of them and you're doing just fine. And then it's going to impose a tax increase on the middle class that's struggling so hard. It's a terrible bill. Terrible bill. Bodes very poorly for our country's future. At a time when they're richer, getting richer in degrees unparalleled, the middle class is getting crushed every which way they turn. And the poorer just getting poorer. And this disparity in wealth has never been so great in this country since just before the Great Depression. So when you have private conversations with your peers across the aisle, they must feel some of the pressure of dealing with this too, even though maybe they have to take the party line. Because my experience has been when you get politicians in the back rooms and they're alone, they're just like we are. You know, Mark Meadows heads that Tea Party Liberty Conference or caucus. He's one of my better friends there in the Congress. And you know what? He and the Tea Party's not happy about the fact that everything's being decided in the Speaker's Office. You know, they didn't come there for the photo op either, whether you agree with them or not. We can find agreement on the fact that we need regular order where everybody's got an opportunity to offer their amendments and have them argued and debated and voted on. You know, generally, I talk to my Republican colleagues, you know, what's going to happen next week or next week or what's going to be in the bill. And I don't know. You know, they're not included. That's pretty discouraging. It's very discouraging. We're down to the last few minutes, and I know you want to talk a little bit about aquatic invasive species because I think you've done some work in that area. Yeah, I have. I most recently got an extra million dollars for aquatic invasive species research. You know, we've seen here in the Brainerd Lakes area how rapidly zebra mussels have expanded. And to the extent that that continues, it bodes very poorly for, you know, our sport fishing, which is such an integral, important part of our life and our economy. We've got to find ways, better ways to abate this. We've got to do more research, you know, to find ways to stop it and eliminate it. And that's just one of a hundred or more other invasive species that have come in who are threatening our tourism, our sport fishing. You know, I don't know about what you're to have, but my dad always said, you know, Richard, if you don't think you don't have time for fishing, you're just wrong. And I said, how's that dad? Because he said every day someone goes fishing as a day to their life, so it doesn't count in the span of life. That's a very good philosophy. And we've got to do a better job on that. That tourism is so huge in Minnesota. And the spiny water fleas, zebra mussels, you name it, it's exploding. It's growing and growing. CWD and other deer. I just talked to a friend who just came back from Montana. 22% of the deer tested in Montana have CWD. You know, it's not an invasive species. They don't really know it. It's affecting the nervous system. It's like the mad cow disease almost. It's threatening the moose population as well. By the way, I'm just saying also, you know how important the loon is. I mean, what an iconic bird and symbol for the beauty of our Great Lakes in northern Minnesota. Cross Lake, Minnesota is busy with an initiative to create a national loon center. I just had lunch with the president of the Audubon Society. And believe it or not, the loon is on their list of 300 species most likely to be extinct by the end of the century. Zebra mussels. They have a parasite in them. There were 10,000 loons have lost their life from zebra mussels. So we got to get going. And so much of this involves research. And you got to put the money up there to do the research, to find how you abate these, how you protect our important species. We've run out of time. I appreciate your jumping out with us and sharing some of this information. How do people get in touch with you if they want to? You know, just go on the web and just put in there Richard Nolan, member of Congress. And we get, I get anywhere from a thousand to several thousand communications every week. And I value it. I appreciate it. My staff gives me a report on every single one of them. And I look forward to that. That's one of the first things I do every Monday when I come into the office is look at the correspondence. Thank you very much for appearing on our show. You've been watching Lake Concurrents where we're talking about what you're talking about. I'm ready to yield out so long until next time.