California continues to be in the grip of a worsening coronavirus pandemic, with local governments and school districts struggling to figure out how to handle the crisis. Meanwhile, Congress is at an impasse over another major relief package with Democrats calling for a $3 trillion measure, while Republicans say that’s way too much.
For more on this and much more, U.S. Congressman Ro Khanna joined KCBS Radio's "The State of California." The Congressman is in his second term representing the 17th District, which covers parts of Santa Clara and Alameda Counties, from Sunnyvale and Cupertino to San Jose and Fremont.
Thanks so much for being with us today, Congressman, and let’s start with the schools. So far, most major districts in the Bay Area say they will open the new academic year with distance learning only. There may be some new safety guidelines coming from the governor tomorrow that could push them even more in that direction. Do you think that is the right approach, and do districts and families have what they need to make remote learning work a little bit better this time?
That's certainly what I'm hearing from my constituency, people are concerned that having kids return to school and having teachers return to school will put families at risk. And especially when you hear about these awful diseases of young kids getting inflammation. Now it's very rare, but I don't want to take a risk of having young kids get the disease and complications, or putting teachers at risk. But we need more resources for schools to be able to do distance learning and I wrote an op-ed with Senator Baldwin, calling for those kinds of funds in our next stimulus bill and I've spoken with the Speaker's team and really will push for that to be part of the final package.
I want to ask you about the HEROES Act as it pertains to all of this as well. Nancy Pelosi is pushing hard for it, you and your colleagues in the House passed it, however Senate Majority Leader McConnell wants to condition school funding on schools agreeing to reopen and not teach remotely. Is that a deal breaker for you?
Well it's such a hypocrisy. I mean here you have the Republican Party, which has always been about federalism, local control of education, and now you want Senator McConnell sitting in Kentucky or Washington, D.C. to tell Bay Area schools whether they should open or not? I mean, it makes no sense. How does he know what the conditions are of the Bay Area, or what the risk factors are? So I absolutely don't think that there should be conditional funding on reopening. I never will have a red line, because there are so many factors, as you know, a state needs help or a locality needs help, people who are unemployed need help, so you can never say, "I'm just going to vote against a bill on a particular provision," but I definitely don't think that provision should be in there.
I want to ask you a broader question about the state of the pandemic. For a lot of us it feels like we are just right back where we started from in mid-March when we started the sheltering in place. Do you think we need to go back to that? Do you think a stricter lockdown might be warranted?
Well I think it was a mistake that was made at the state level of disregarding what Sara Cody, the Santa Clara public health official was saying, what the Bay Area counties were saying and a rush to reopen. We should never have reopened in that way, we shouldn't have allowed the bars to reopen, we shouldn't have been as fast. And I do think now, starting again from square zero and trying to get this under control makes sense, and then having universal masking and not having the bars and others reopen until things are much further along. So I think we have to listen to the people in the Bay Area counties that got this right. And there was a rush to reopen.
Senator Feinstein today said she will propose an amendment that no state without a statewide mask requirement gets any money, proposing no federal funding for states in the next coronavirus package if that state doesn't have a statewide mask rule, as California does. Would you support that?
You know, I'm not sure. I mean I obviously think we need a national standard and should have masks, but I don't know if we should be penalizing poor people in a red state because their governor is being political. People need help, I'm not sure I would condition funding on that, but I'd be open to looking at it.
You know the interesting thing is, I was reading the history and apparently in 1918 there were anti-masking clubs that emerged in the United States. 670,000 people died of the Spanish Flu, which would be about 2 million in today's numbers, and there was this whole debate we had 100 years ago and people were anti-masking and organizing against masks. To me it's just sad that 100 years later we haven't learned.
Congressman let me shift gears and ask you about the presidential election. You have been chosen to co-chair California's delegation to the Democratic National Convention. You were initially a huge Bernie Sanders supporter, not a Biden guy. How comfortable are you with Mr. Biden's platform as it's emerging right now?
It's much better than during the primaries. He's made some significant moves in the progressive direction on climate change; he's now saying we need to have a carbon-free economy by 2035, not 2050, he has embraced a bold plan for investment in solar and wind and infrastructure. He's talking about investing in creating new technology hubs around the country. He has embraced a lot of good policies on immigration to strengthen asylum and not criminalize people who come across this border with young kids and families. So, you know, obviously I was for Bernie Sanders and I'm more of a progressive, but I'll be fully behind the vice president. And Trump is such a threat to our democracy. Look, polls are good for Biden right now but when you see the Supreme Court today refusing to strike down Florida's law which basically disenfranchises ex-felons, you realize that we're going to be up against voter suppression, we're going to be up against disenfranchisement, so this is going to still be a close election.
