Last night, our man on Capitol Hill, Jared Huffman, promised a group of several hundred Humboldt residents that he was doing everything he could to combat the excesses of the Trump administration — and that the Democrats would be ready to give the country a fresh start, should they retake Congress.

Around 200 people showed up to Representative Huffman’s town hall, held at the Sequoia Conference Center in Eureka. Most of them were on the saggier side of 60 — Huffman, perhaps a little self-conscious after being asked by an attendee why young people should vote for him, asked everyone younger than that to raise a hand. About two dozen went up.

He spent most of his time answering questions from the audience. Pretty much all of them were a variation on this: What will you do/have you done about [X issue of national importance]? And most of his responses were something like this: We, the Democratic Party, currently hold little power in Congress, outgunned as we are by a Republican majority in both houses. However, we’ve done what we can since Trump took office, and if the midterms go well, we’ll do Y. To ensure our victory, vote!

A few springs of anxiety: a complacent, rubber-stamping Supreme Court, a hypothetical Republican effort to prevent a landslide in the midterms by illegally trashing votes for Democrats, a subsequent Republican tantrum after a blowout, an emasculated Congress, a crushed student financial aid system, and a pervading undercurrent, in most of the audience’s questions, that the government was hopelessly corrupt and very few people had enough power to change that. 

“Hello, I’m Stephen, and I have a question,” one man asked. “If the Democrats do take the House, and, God willing, the Senate, what are you going to do day one to stop the corruption? Because the corruption is what’s hurting us. The corruption is what’s making prices skyrocket.”

The audience seemed satisfied with Huffman’s responses. He got a little flak from a couple audience members for his support of Israel soon after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, but Huffman made it clear that his support dried up when Israel began committing “war crimes,” “ethnic cleansing,” and a “de facto annexation campaign.”

The country’s surest route back to normal, Huffman claimed several times, was if the Democrats did well enough on November 3 to take control of Congress. “The best way to prevent all of these things we worry about,” he said, “is to just make sure everybody votes, and make this thing big.”

“It’s hard to get a full accounting when you’re in the minority,” Huffman said later, referring to Trump’s Freedom 250 Fourth of July celebrations, “because all we can do is use the information we can gather where people agree to cooperate. When we — if we are in the majority, and I am the chairman, and we’re holding gavels, and I have subpoena power, it’s a whole different story. All these folks are going to have to answer under oath.”

Local issues were mentioned a couple times. Huffman said he was hashing out a Two-Basin Solution to resolve the Potter Valley Project controversy. The Department of Agriculture’s attempt to convince two Southern California water agencies to revive the dam was a “political stunt,” he said, and he was working on conquering it.

“I’ve written really fantastic letters to everybody about this,” he said. “When you’re in the minority, sometimes that’s the best you can do. But if I am holding a gavel in the majority in the next Congress, those letters will be backed up with subpoena power, and we will continue this, and we will expose this political charade for what it is, to enable folks to move on with the real solution for the Eel River.”

The Trump administration’s wind power buyout got a shoutout; Huffman slammed it. “The corruption, and the lawlessness, is just unlike anything we have seen in the history of this country,” he said about the deal. “The difference will be when we finally get a Congress who will do something about it.”