WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Republican U.S. Representative Mike Flood endured a contentious town hall meeting in Nebraska on Monday, as opponents of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax- and spending-cut bill booed and heckled him for over an hour.
Flood fielded questions about Republican funding cuts to the Medicaid healthcare program for lower-income Americans, food assistance and funding for Trump’s controversial crackdown on undocumented immigrants from his Lincoln audience.
He argued that it was important to deny public health coverage to immigrants living in the U.S. illegally and to able-bodied adults who refuse work and then drew cheers backing the release of government files on disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
With Congress on its summer break, Republicans including Flood are trying to promote Trump’s landmark legislation, nicknamed the “big, beautiful bill,” which extended the president’s 2017 tax cuts and ramped up spending for border security and the military. It will also add $3.4 trillion to the $36.2 trillion federal debt and leave about 10 million people without health coverage.
“There’s a lot of information out there that’s wrong. We protected Medicaid. We cut $2 trillion out of the future debt. We worked to get results. And this bill builds for growth,” he said to a chorus of boos.
At times, angry audience members chanted: “Vote him out!”
“How much does it cost for fascism? How much do the taxpayers have to pay for a fascist country?” asked one woman, who was irate about Trump’s immigration crackdown and the use of disaster relief money to pay for an immigration detention center in South Florida nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Flood’s district is heavily Republican and not among the roughly three-dozen House seats expected to be competitive in next year’s midterm elections, when Republicans will be defending their narrow House of Representatives majority, currently 219-212 with four vacancies.
At his town hall, Flood, 57, responded to critics by saying that voters backed Trump’s policies in the 2024 election: “Americans voted for a border that is secure. And I support the president enforcing our immigration laws.”
He later told another questioner who criticized him for not speaking out against Trump: “When I see something that I don’t agree with, I don’t run to the TV station as my first stop. I try to stop it before it gets worse.”
After the meeting, Flood told reporters: “I like to think that I was able to answer their questions. They may not agree with my answer. But the questions are always good and that makes me a better member of Congress.”
(Reporting by David Morgan, Editing by Scott Malone and Deepa Babington)
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