Only One Candidate Is Addressing Policy Issues
After state Sen. Jack Martins turned them down several times, the Nassau County GOP bosses finally dug up a candidate to put up against Tom Suozzi, Mazi Melesa Pilip, an Ethiopian-Israeli Democrat who has nothing to say about any policy issues and is staying away from the media.
Suozzi, a former mayor of Glen Cove, Nassau County Exec and congressman from the Nassau-Queens district, has been campaigning furiously in a 50/50 district “to,” in his campaign’s words, “demonstrate his belief that Congress needs to move beyond petty, partisan, and performative
finger-pointing and focus on working across the aisle to get things done for the people he serves.” So yesterday he released a 10-point plan that should give people of Nassau and Queens an idea about what he wants to accomplish when he gets back to Congress. It stands in sharp contrast to Mazi’s refusal to answer any policy-related questions at all. She could actually turn out to be worse than Santos! The special election is February 13 and the district— which has a PVI of D+2— stretches from Whitestone, Beechhurst and Bayside in northeast Queens to Great Neck, new Hyde Park, Mineola, Glen Cove, Roslyn, Westbury, Jericho, Oyster Bay, Hicksville, Bethpage and Massapequa in Nassau County.
You can read details of his plan here but this is as far as most voters are likely to look:
1. Lower the Cost of Living, Repeal the SALT Cap, and Further Reduce Prescription Drug Prices
Let me add that for people who have accused Suozzi of not being progressive enough, this sounds pretty good, especially considering the partisan makeup of the district:
Americans pay more for prescription drugs than anyone else in the world. In fact, Americans often pay several times more than people in other countries for the exact same drugs. When Donald Trump ran for President in 2016, he said that he would pass legislation to finally let the federal government negotiate lower drug prices with Big Pharma, who he said was “getting away with murder.” Unfortunately, President Trump broke his promise, and once he took office, he opposed drug price reform.
Fortunately, in 2022, Tom helped pass landmark prescription drug legislation that:
• Created a cap on out-of-pocket drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries.
• Capped the price of Insulin at $35 per month.
• Allowed Medicare to finally negotiate lower prescription drug prices with Big Pharma.
Tom knows that we need to build on these successes by increasing the number of drugs Medicare can negotiate and passing on the cost savings to people with private insurance as well. That is why we need Tom back in Congress to build on this progress, rather than someone who threatens to repeal it.
2. Address the Immigration Crisis by Passing the Tom Suozzi-Peter King Compromise [Let me come back to that below.]
3. Protect the Long Island Sound, Provide Clean Drinking Water, and Address Climate Change
4. Improve Public Safety and Get Guns off the Streets
5. Stand Up to Extreme Attacks on Reproductive Freedom
6. Support Israel and Ukraine
7. Never Forget the Vet
8. Expand Affordable Health Care and Long-Term Care, and Protect Social Security and Medicare
9. Defend Democracy
10. “No Wrong Door”: Comprehensive, Wraparound Social Services for K-12 Students
I found the immigration compromise Suozzi and King wrote as an OpEd for the NY Times (March 2019), noting that Suozzi was approaching the issue from the perspective of immigrant’s rights and King came from the perspective of border security. “come at this from different points of view and different parties,” they wrote, “but with a shared commitment to finding a solution to our country’s border-security issues. Together, we have found common ground to address the problems faced by undocumented immigration and the need for robust border security.”
The national emergency regarding immigration reform, however, is not on the border, but in the nation’s capital. We must work together— across party lines— to address these matters in a way that receives bipartisan, bicameral support, and gives the president legislation he feels he can sign.
On Long Island, we have one of the 10 largest populations of undocumented immigrants from Central and South America, as well as countless unaccompanied minors. Many have been in our communities for decades living productive lives, attending school with our children, working six days a week and going to church on Sunday.
It is our duty, as elected officials, to provide solutions to the problems, not sound bites to the press. That is why we are proposing a realistic set of reforms that would offer legal protection for five million undocumented people and, alongside it, enough funding to make our border secure.
First, our plan would create a path to citizenship for approximately 1.9 million immigrants brought by their parents, without documentation, when they were 18 or under, the so-called Dreamers. To be eligible, they must have graduated from high school; have no record of criminal activity; and be either in the military, working full time for at least three years or attending college.
We would extend similar coverage to the 400,000 people who were invited to America and given temporary protective status after facing natural disasters, violence and extreme poverty in their home countries.
Finally, relatives of Dreamers, of T.P.S. recipients and of others who are undocumented— approximately 2.7 million more people— would be eligible for three years of protective status, renewable indefinitely, if they have been in the United States for a significant number of years and have no record of criminal activity.
Taken together, this represents five million people.
Next, to qualify for protection, an undocumented person would be required to pay a $2,000 fee. If each of the five million paid that amount, our plan would generate $10 billion.
Some of that money, in turn, would be used to cover the administrative costs of this new program; we figure those costs would be $1.4 billion.
The remaining $8.6 billion would be split evenly: $4.3 billion would pay for additional physical structures along the United States-Mexico border, as proposed by the Department of Homeland Security, and $4.3 billion would go to aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to help prevent further out-migration from those countries, as well as to radar technology, improved ports of entry, immigration judges, border patrol personnel and humanitarian assistance along the border, as recommended by the Department Homeland Security.
For far too long, many people living in our country have been living in fear, and many others have grown frustrated by the inaction of our elected officials. The undocumented have lived in the shadows, facing the daily anxiety of potential deportation, even as they try to participate in our American communities.
As legislators, we know what we have to do: We must stand together and pass legislation that will help secure our borders while giving undocumented immigrants a path to permanent residency without the fear that at any moment they may be deported.