Amanda Edwards, Christian Menefee debate in Humble ahead of TX-18 congressional runoff

From Houston Public Media:

Saturday, Jan. 31, the day when his former constituents go to the polls to choose his successor, Texas’ 18^th Congressional District will have been without a representative in Congress for 332 days.

On Tuesday evening, former Houston City Council Member Amanda Edwards and former Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee met at The Luke Church in Humble for the sole debate of the special election runoff for Texas’ 18^th, a district that winds from downtown Houston through some of its northern suburbs.

The first few questions in Tuesday’s debate dealt with health care coverage, a top issue for both Edwards and Menefee throughout their respective campaigns. Edwards lost her father to multiple myeloma at an early age.

“When I get to Congress,” Edwards told the debate audience, “my first priority is to make sure that we are extending the health care subsidies to be available for the Affordable Care Act that is currently being used as a political chip in this game.”

Similarly, Menefee spoke of his brother, who only survived a bout of cancer because their family’s military benefits fully paid for his chemotherapy, radiation, and bone marrow transplant.

“I believe that health care is a human right, and not a single person in this country should have to choose between putting food on the table and making sure that they get lifesaving treatment,” Menefee said. “These for-profit health care companies are racking up billions of dollars in profit on the backs of sick people. You send me to Congress, I’m going to fight back against them and push for universal health care.”

That discussion led to a question of what the candidates would do to deal with the rising cost of living. Edwards said she would support legislation to fight inflation.

“We cannot continue to have a nation where people are working several jobs and still not able to make ends meet,” Edwards said. “We have to have a nation that allows people to afford not only access to their day-to-day groceries, but housing and health care and other basic necessities.”

Menefee said one of his first priorities in office would be to abolish President Donald Trump’s tariffs. He also said he wants to raise the minimum wage.

“In 2007, I was working at H-E-B, pushing carts, and I was making $7.25 an hour,” Menefee said. “There are still people in this country right now making that same amount. I want to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour.”

The debate then moved on to a discussion of environmental issues, with a focus on how to balance the district’s need for jobs with the health of its residents. Menefee said one of the endorsements he received that was most important to him was from a woman who lived near the creosote wood facility in Houston’s Fifth Ward. The woman’s son had died of cancer at 15.

“She said, ‘In that house, there were two people who died from cancer. In that house, there were three people who died from cancer,'” Menefee said. “That’s why I was proud to be part of the team of folks that got the EPA involved and took that away from the hands of the state of Texas, because they have done nothing for Black people in those communities.”

Edwards spoke of her own background, having grown up in the Fifth Ward, reflecting again on the neighborhood’s high incidence of cancer. She said, for all the work that had been done to try to help the district’s residents, people still weren’t seeing equitable results. She pledged, if elected, to put more resources behind the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) so that it can do its job effectively.

“We have got to make sure that not only do we hold these entities accountable for the pollution that they have created, but also that they truly do remediate these sites,” Edwards said. “We continue to have people living, drinking and engaging in communities that are contaminated. We don’t monitor them sufficiently. We don’t put money into EPA and enforcement. And that is wrong.”

Next, the candidates discussed the district’s regular vulnerability to flooding, which gave both candidates an opportunity to point to work they had done in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Edwards spoke of her work on the ground immediately after the storm. She said, if elected, she would push for full funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

“I was in the houses. I was in the shelters. I was working side by side trying to help our residents rebuild. One of the things that was most troubling was how people were being discarded. Their needs were being discarded, and they were being left behind,” Edwards said. “I will be the first person who will be advocating to fix FEMA and make sure it has resources and proper training.”

Menefee stressed his work forcing the state to provide Harris County its fair share of federal disaster relief after Harvey. He also pledged to fully fund FEMA, and he said he would work to make sure the money would flow directly to local communities without having to go through Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration and the Republican-led state government.

“The Houston area was slated to get at least a billion dollars, but out of that total bucket of billions of dollars, Houston and Harris County got $0 from the governor of Texas,” Menefee said. “I was part of the team of folks that fought hard and got that zero bumped up to $750 million.”

Several of the questions focused on civil rights and civil liberties, which a University of Houston Hobby School poll previously identified as the top priority for residents of Texas’ 18th. Edwards said the district’s residents have been living in the nightmare of having no voice and no representation in Congress for the better part of a year since the death of Congressman Turner.

“We know why the Trump administration, why Governor Abbott has taken the liberty to try to take our vote away, because that is going to be access to our freedom,” Edwards said. “I will focus on restoring things like preclearance, for example, with the … John Lewis Voting Rights Act, because we have got to move in the right direction when it comes to the fundamental right to vote for our people.”

Menefee pointed to his experience combatting voter suppression as Harris County attorney and said it would remain a top focus for him if he wins the runoff.

“When Ken Paxton, our attorney general, came here and tried to get 2,000 legally cast ballots thrown out, I took him to court, beat him, and every single one of those votes was restored,” Menefee said. “I’m going to fight as hard as I can to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, because I believe in online voter registration. I believe it should be easy to vote by mail, and I believe access should be open for everybody.”

Throughout the debate, the two candidates avoided attacking, or even mentioning, each other. Instead, they reserved their fire for Republicans, especially Trump. Menefee predicted a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives in November and said that would be the signal to begin investigations.

“I don’t care if you’re in the governor’s mansion, if you’re in a corporate boardroom, if you’re in the White House, if you have done wrong by my community, you’re going to have to see me in those hearings,” Menefee said. “So, I look forward to standing up for the American people and holding the Trump administration accountable for how they have violated our rights.”

Edwards also pledged to hold the White House accountable through congressional hearings, though she said all three branches bore responsibility for Trump’s actions.

“Our civil rights are being violated because our congressional office and our legislative branch, our judiciary, our executive have all blended together and now, of course, acquiescent to President Trump,” Edwards said. “We have got to separate those branches of government again, hold the executive branch accountable to the abuses of power through the forms of executive orders and otherwise.”

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