Hayes, Santos spar on guns, health care
DANBURY — In a headto-head debate Tuesday night, 5th District candidates for Congress Jahana Hayes and Manny Santos presented dramatically different stances on policies affecting transgender students to health care to guns and the environment.
Santos, the Republican candidate who immigrated to the U.S. from Portugal at 5 years old, backed a government that will enforce the rule of law and support personal responsibiliy. He said too many Americans supported Medicare-for-all and free college tuition, policies that would “bankrupt” the country.
“We have become a nation divided on what America is and will be,” said Santos, a former one-term Meriden mayor.
Hayes, the 2016 National Teacher of the Year and the Democratic candidate, painted a vision of the United States as a big tent for all people, a place where the environment can flourish without hampering the economy, winning a standing ovation from many in the crowd. She called Santos’s vision “a fear tactic.”
Their 90-minute debate often hinged on what should happen in classrooms — where Hayes has spent the past 15 years.
The debate took place at the Portuguese Cultural Center in Danbury, just a few miles from Newtown, where 20 elementary school children and six teachers and staff were gunned down in 2012.
Santos said he would support arming teachers if local school districts wanted that.
“Right now, just every school is vulnerable,” said Santos, a product engineer and former Marine. “They’re soft targets.”
Hayes, whose husband is a police officer, called that idea “dangerous.”
She said the idea of arming teachers in the 5th District was “so incredibly tone deaf and does not recognize the hurt and the pain that this community deals with on a daily basis.”
Hayes, 45, favored “commonsense gun reform,” duplicating Connecticut’s strong gun laws across the country. Santos, 49, warned against “infringing” on Second Amendment rights and backed funding for mental health solutions instead.
In schools, he worried that students identifying as transgender unnecessarily divided people.
“I believe there are two sexes — a man or a woman — and if you are in school, use one or the other,” Santos said. “If we keep dividing people, the way we have been, that becomes a problem.”
Hayes rebutted, “People are different but there is nothing wrong with being different,” she said. “It is only people who pinpoint those differences and demonize them that are the problem.”
Hayes and Santos both supported a few aspects of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, such as requiring coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions, but they disagreed on the broad impact of the law. Santos said the current legislation drove up costs and forced people to find new doctors. Hayes said it made people healthier.
On the environment, Santos said he was not convinced climate change was human-caused. He supported lifting some environmental regulations on farmers.
Hayes said she “accepted the science” of climate change and environmental policy would be a top priority.