By Mia Summerson | October 7, 2020
Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster developed a “roadmap to recovery” that she said is aimed both at curbing the impact of the crisis while also preventing a total economic collapse. If re-elected next month, she said she plans to continue pushing for those priorities.
On the public-health side of the plan, Kuster said she would like to see the federal government focus on ramping up testing abilities and contact tracing to help keep infected people from spreading the virus to others.
On the economic side, she said there must be support for small businesses that have been forced to lay off employees over the past few months and support for state and local governments that are facing extreme budget gaps due to the pandemic. She said the House’s most recent coronavirus aid package proposes funding to help state and municipal governments not only with the expense of responding to the virus but also for lost revenue.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump tweeted that he was ordering a halt to negotiations on another round of COVID relief funding until after the general election.
“For us in particular, that is the rooms and meals tax,” Kuster said of revenue losses, prior to the president’s announcement. “We had a 90 percent drop in tourism and hospitality and a huge hole in our budget for loss of rooms and meals tax [income] between March and when tourism started to come back in the summer. For the towns, it’s real property taxes. People have been out of work that haven’t been able to pay their real property taxes.”
Kuster, 63, a Hopkinton Democrat, is seeking her fifth term as a U.S. representative. She is being challenged by Steve Negron, a Republican from Nashua, and Libertarian candidate Andrew Olding, also of Nashua.
Prior to being elected to Congress in 2012, Kuster worked as an attorney. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in Hanover and her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.
Kuster also has concerns about the upcoming fight over the future of the Affordable Care Act, which the Supreme Court will consider in coming months. With Trump’s nomination of conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kuster expressed concern about the consequences of the law’s potential repeal. She said she feels lawmakers should broaden the program instead.
“I think Congress can go a long way, particularly with new leadership in the Senate and in the White House, to shore up the Affordable Care Act,” she said. “To expand it, to make sure that anyone that’s currently falling through the cracks is covered and to protect the coverage for pre-existing conditions.”
On the topic of health care, Kuster said mental-health services should be treated exactly the same as any other medical service when it comes to coverage. She also said she supports increased resources for battling the opioid epidemic and helping those struggling with addiction on their road to sobriety.
Kuster said the criminalization of illicit substance use has contributed to racism in America, and the war on drugs has failed to keep communities healthy while also driving them apart. Substance abuse and mental-health issues often go hand in hand, she noted, and when people are incarcerated, they rarely receive treatment for either condition, leading to high recidivism rates.
In the wake of months of protests stemming from the death of George Floyd, a Black man, in the custody of Minneapolis police, N.H. Gov. Chris Sununu launched a commission to research and recommend ways the state could improve police accountability and address systemic racism. Kuster praised the efforts of that body, which recently came up with several dozen suggestions for how police training, data collection and standards could be improved. But she said it shouldn’t have taken someone’s death to get us to this point.
“I believe there’s implicit bias throughout our society, and I think that’s what we’re all learning a great deal about,” she said. “It shouldn’t have taken this long, and it shouldn’t take people dying at the hands of the police for us to be addressing it.”
Kuster also said she’s in favor of wrapping up U.S. conflicts in the Middle East and bringing soldiers back home. She said the lasting impacts of war on service members, from post-traumatic stress disorder to medical issues related to chemical exposure, are only increasing as the years go on and those on the ground in combat zones also want peace.
“I’ve been supportive of our veterans, but frankly, I wish there were fewer of them,” she said. “I wish we weren’t creating more and more of them.”