Cindy Axne touts record, warns of MAGA Republican extremism

U.S. Rep. Cindy Axne of West Des Moines visited voters in Perry Monday morning as she campaigned for a third term representing Iowa’s third Congressional district.

About 25 local Democrats welcomed Axne to the Perry Perk coffeehouse, which she described as “a cornerstone of the community” and just the sort of business kept afloat by Democratic pandemic relief — the CARES Act of 2020 and the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 — in spite of getting zero votes from Republican lawmakers in Washington D.C.

The two dozen Perry Democrats were also joined in the Perry Perk by one “Republican tracker,” who was filming Axne for later use in attack ads paid for by out-of-state supporters of her Republican opponent.

“He’s videotaping me,” Axne said. “Any picture that you see of me that you’re, like, ‘That’s not a very good picture of her,’ on TV, it’s because they did this, and they take every emotion that I have and do that. They spy on my children. I was telling folks that the Republicans are currently spying on my children. They’re running an ad on that. So that’s what they do. They spy on you.”

But Axne said she did not come to Perry to denounce the haters in the other party but to focus on the positive agenda that she has helped to forward in the Democrat-controlled Congress.

“I’m here to talk about the good, official work that I’ve done because that’s the side that I love the most, and that’s the most beneficial for the people here in this room right now and really why I do this,” she said.

Working backward from the most recent legislative accomplishments, Axne listed the bills that have made this “the most impactful president and Congress that we’ve had in decades” and that are “laws that people didn’t think we’d even remotely get done.”

She started with late August’s Inflation Reduction Act, a bill that succeeded in “lowering the cost of prescription drugs for the very first time.” The bill caps annual out-of-pocket costs for drugs at $2,000 and limits the price of insulin to $35 a month, which for some Iowans was running as high as $850 a month.

“After all the push back for years that we couldn’t negotiate prescription drugs, we’ve put our foot in the door, and we’re moving forward,” Axne said. She is not a member of the House Progressive Caucus, but she still praised the Inflation Reduction Act for moving the “biggest climate-change agenda that this country’s ever seen.”

Earlier in August, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, which seeks to correct supply-chain problems that became visible during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’ve decided that it’s time to quit talking about making things here in America and actually do make things here in America,” she said, “and we’re starting with semiconductor chips, and I think that’s a really good thing.”

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, sometimes called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, pledged $550 billion over four years, making it the largest long-term investment in infrastructure and the economy in U.S. history. Axne said she supported the bill in order “to expand internet access, reduce supply chain disruptions, and keep our communities safe — all without raising taxes on middle-class Iowans.”

Axne noted that the absence of Republican support for these laws has not stopped them for claiming credit for them after the fact.

“The money that you’re hearing the governor push forth in so many ways for connectivity in the state is straight out of what Congress authorized to make sure that that everybody could get connected,” she said.

Axne also voted for the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020, which included programs that kept Americans solvent during the prolonged economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic but that were also subject to stunning rates of fraud perpetrated by predatory Americans.

After praising Congress’ legislative accomplishments under Democratic leadership, Axne turned to some of the challenges that Americans still face, starting with the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent overturning of the long-settled Constitutional right to abortion.

“We have some incredibly important issues at stake right now in this country,” she said, “and they all come down to your rights, your rights as individuals. Right now, as you all know, women are under attack in this country, and I’ve got to make sure that I get back there (to Washington D.C.) so that we can codify the Women’s Health Protection Act that I just voted for, which would literally codify ‘Roe v. Wade’ essentially and make sure that the law of the land that we had known is back there for your kids and your grandkids We’ve go to get that done. Because one day we woke up, and our daughters had less rights than our sons did in this country, and that is not the country that I come from, and that is not the country that we are used to. Unfortunately, my Republican opponent actually believes that abortion should not be allowed no matter what the circumstance.”

Axne said Iowans can expect to see the Republican-controlled Iowa Legislature introduce an abortion bill when it reconvenes in January.

“They love to say, ‘States’ rights! States’ rights!'” she said. “Please make sure that people know that that’s their code word for bringing that back to a state like Iowa and implementing a six-week fetal-heartbeat bill that they plan to bring to the floor in January because the governor doesn’t have enough courage to bring it up right now and actually ask Iowans to vote for it on the ballot because she knows she’d lose the election.”

If Republicans gain control of one or both houses of Congress, they will pass a nationwide abortion ban, Axne said, and then the MAGA Republican extremists will train their sights on outlawing same-sex marriage and interracial marriage and contraception.

“The first thing that they want to do on the floor of the House is a piece of legislation that they have ready to go with 178 signatures on it that would take away women’s right to choose across the entire nation, and it would begin at contraception,” Axne said. “This is where they’re at. This bill is ready to go in the House. Make no mistake: when you hear these folks say that they’re reasonable, they’re not. Their leadership is planning on taking away rights from women across this country. The consent from Justice Thomas is that they would approach LGBTQ marriages then and interracial. We know this is the country that we want to be in, but this is where they plan to go.”

After morally policing Americans’ sexual practices, the MAGA Republican extremists will turn toward their longest cherished goal: rolling back the New Deal programs of social welfare. For example, the plan recently put forward by Florida’s Republican Sen. Rick Scott would “gut Social Security,” Axne said.

“They plan to take away these programs and then to craft them in some way that they would like, which in their case means gutting Social Security and gutting Medicare,” she said. “Make no mistake about it. They’ve been trying to do this for years. We saw what they did with privatized Medicaid right here in Iowa. We’ve seen what a disaster that has been for our seniors and their living situations, for our children.”

Axne said she is one of four Democratic Congresspersons nationwide in highly competitive swing districts, and the Republican national Committee is directing millions in out-of-state cash into defeating her.

“When I tell you that they’re gunning for me, they’re gunning for me,” she said. “”Their outside expenditures? They’re spending three-to-one against me. I’m having to raise all the money. I’m vastly outraising my opponent. He doesn’t even have local support. He’s barely making the funding that he needs to make, but he’s relying on the Republican party. I’m running against the Republican party at this point. That’s essentially what’s happening.”

The embattled Congressperson asked her Perry supporters to talk with their Republican neighbors who “understand how much is at risk if we don’t protect our democracy. Talk to those Republicans you know who have a good head on their shoulders, who know that if we keep going down this path, that we’re going to tear our democracy even further apart, who know that January 6 was wrong, who know that, unlike my opponent, who called it — what did he say? He said, ‘Just middle Americans coming to the House floor, and if those police officers there couldn’t handle it, well, then maybe they shouldn’t be doing their job.’ We don’t need any more people like that. What we need are people like me, who just helped write the Invest to Protect Act, because I do support the Perry Police like the sign out here says.”