Himes, Arora fling barbs in lively debate
WILTON — In a vituperative first debate, U.S. Rep. Jim Himes and Republican challenger Harry Arora repeatedly accused each other of distorting facts to suit their political purposes.
Arora painted Himes, who has represented the 4th District for almost 10 years, as a spinmaster who speaks “mumbo jumbo,” saying one thing on CNN and another to his constituents. Himes charged that Arora traded in “alternative facts” to justify his right-leaning positions.
In the first minute of the debate at Wilton High School, Arora accused Himes of trying to avoid sitting with him on stage at a candidate forum in Norwalk in August. Throughout the rest of the hour-and-a-half debate hosted by the League of Women voters, the candidates continued to spar.
They disagreed on how the country should move forward on health care, voting rights, immigration, guns and climate change. Arora called Himes a “socialist”; Himes said Republicans used that term only when they lacked “good ideas” of their own.
Himes, who worked at Goldman Sachs and the affordable housing nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners prior to his election in 2008, defended the Affordable Care Act, saying it had led to more people having health insurance, even if the system still had some kinks. He defended the need for the government to intervene in the health insurance market because a free market does not mean everyone will have coverage, which he said was an American value.
“(The ACA) dramatically improved the situation in health care in this country,” Himes said.
Arora, a commodities trader who launched a Greenwich hedge fund after working at Enron and Amaranth Advisors,
said the Affordable Care Act “is uneven, unfair and inefficient.” If he were designing a new health care system, he said he would separate people with pre-existing conditions into their own subsidized health care pool and allow healthy people “more options.”
Both candidates liked how the Obama-era law had provided coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and expanded Medicaid. When discussing security for the Nov. 6 election, Arora said he supported voter identification laws and believed that voter fraud was a significant issue. “Fraud is a very big things in elections we need to counter,” he said. He brought up the idea during an unrelated question later in the debate, adding, “Elections are always won on the margin. The last one vote can influence the election.”
Numerous studies on voting fraud have been conducted by universities and media outlets and concluded that the incidence of voting fraud is infinitesimally small. News21, a national investigative reporting project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, found just 56 cases of noncitizens voting between 2000 and 2011.
Himes pointed out this fact and suggested voter suppression is the real issue and is being pushed in red states to benefit Republican candidates.
Himes and Arora also disputed what percentage of illegal immigration is due to border crossings versus individuals over-staying their visas. Arora, who was born in India and became a U.S. citizen in 2004 after coming to the U.S. for graduate school, said he backed a “compassionate but firm” approach to illegal immigration, but was short on specifics of what that would entail.
Arora criticized Himes for opposing a House bill on immigration floated by the GOP in June, which provided $25 billion in funding for a border wall, barred the separation of children from their parents at the border and provided a legal path to citizenship for undocumented people brought to the U.S. as children — as long as border security funding was not reduced in the future. The bill, endorsed by President Trump, overwhelmingly failed when 112 Republicans and all Democrats voted against it.
“It was a brutal, brutal bill,” said Himes, who was born in Peru.
He favored a Senate bill that was never called in the House that would provide more money for border security (but not a wall, which he called “stupid”), create an e-verify system where employers could electronically check their job applicants’ citizenship status and supported a “rigorous path to citizenship” for people currently in the U.S. undocumented, setting criteria like holding down a job, learning English and paying a fine for breaking the law.
Both candidates agreed climate change was a priority, but pitched different visions for how to reduce carbon emissions.
Arora’s plan was negotiation with other high-polluting countries. He wanted to convince other countries to reduce their carbon emissions before the United States takes more steps toward emission cutting. He worried about America being “taken advantage of ” by other countries who continue to pollute and steal business from the regulated U.S.
Himes suggested the U.S. should lead on climate change by supporting automobile gas mileage requirements and regulating energy efficiency through building codes. He also supported a fully-refundable carbon tax.
While Himes appeared to have more supporters in the more than 200 person crowd, both candidates drew applause at times throughout the debate. During closing remarks, Himes won a standing ovation — and boos from a few — for promising to stand up to President Trump, listing many of his headline-grabbing comments.
Before Himes was elected in 2008, the 4th District congressional seat had been held by Republicans since 1989. Pitching himself as an “independent” lawmaker, Himes listed times when he has angered Wall Street and his party, through his authorship of the Dodd-Frank bill and his later vote to change it in 2016. Arora described Himes, who chairs a coalition of moderate Democrats, as a “rubber stamp” for the Democratic party.