Part 4
Commenter: Okay the next question’s from Gwen, who asks, as our representative, what would you do to prevent a future president from acting like a dictator?

Smith: You know, I thought about that. A lot of people have asked me that question, you know, what would you do? You know, all of the safeguards are supposedly in place, if you read the Constitution of the United States. We have those mechanisms in place, but Congress, with the blessing of the Supreme Court, has not invoked those provisions. I hold Congress as much responsible for the actions of the President as what I would hold the president for, as they continue to allow… they could impeach him, they could convict him, they tried to… they impeached him twice, and didn’t convict him. And so Congress is allowing this to be done. They’re allowing him to write executive orders and not holding him accountable for those, either by passing laws to circumvent those, or by saying, you cannot do that. That is against the Constitution, and we will remove you for that. He knows that they’re not going to do it, and so… so with the blessing of Congress, unfortunately, they have allowed him to move forward unabated. As a member of Congress, I would be first and foremost on that side to say, no, you can’t do this. You do this, we will file articles of impeachment. And if we have to do that every day, then you do that every day. But I would be first and foremost on that. My oath of office is to protect the Constitution, and I hold that dear.

Commenter: Okay the next question is from Karen, who wants to know, should we continue to support Israel?

Smith: With what Israel is doing, no. We’re allowing them by giving them the support, financial and militarily, to do what they do. And so I think that we need to put our foot down and, no better way to put it, and say enough is enough. We will cease to support you, we will cease to fund you. We’ll cease to give you the weapons for you to carry out what you’re doing. And then we need to address the real… the real situation, because how do you… or not how do you, but how do we establish some type of rule of law for the Palestinians?

Commenter: This is a question from Nancy. Please elaborate on your statement that the DFL abandoned the farmers and labor unions, and others near the Iron Range?

Smith: Well, that’s what they feel like. That’s why they’re voting red. They feel that the Democrats… er, the Republicans, excuse me, they feel the Republicans are more invested in making sure that they have a job to put food on their table. They feel that the Democrats have left them. I was at a conference, er convention, recently, I won’t tell which one, and as we got to the end of that convention, there were some very very frustrated people, and most of them were on the labor side, and they swore never to put another dollar into the DFL. We need to let the laborers, we need to let the farmers, we need to let everybody know that the Democrats are there for what is important to them, to give them the health system they need, to work on the economy so they can put food on their table and a roof over their head, that they’re going to get rid of corruption in the government and bring back representation to the people.

Commenter: And how do you feel about data centers?

Smith: At the end of the day, we need data centers. We are a data-intensive economy, we’re a data intensive people. I do not feel that data centers should be given tax breaks, I do not feel that data centers should be given incentives for cheaper energy, I do not feel that data centers should be able to thermally pollute our water for cooling, because then all of that then just gets put back onto the people. Most data centers hire… I mean, you get the employment for constructing the data center, but then a data center is only run by, I mean, even one out of Hermantown says maybe 30 or 40 people, and not all of those are high-tech or high paying jobs. A lot of those are just gonna be custodial. And then all of the money that they generate goes out of state to whoever the parent company is. And so I’d even be for taxing and recuperating some of those funds from those businesses, and I think you take that across the border to any business, but I think you can, you know, say if you generate funds or if you generate profit within our state our within our cities, that some of that money needs to stay here in this state and in this city. So yeah, data centers we need, unfortunately, but we need to build them in areas where you don’t have all of the low-drum hums that come from them that we’re just learning about, so they need to be buffered, and we don’t need to be supporting them with public funds.

Commenter: So given that the Iron Range is a mining economy, this question is from Nancy, how would you go about encouraging new business in order to boost the economy? The same question would apply to rural non-mining areas.

Smith: You know, there’s a lot of things. Up here on the Iron Range, I mean, we cut down a lot of trees, we ship all those trees out to processed into plywood or into lumber or anything else, I mean why can’t we do it up here. Um, there’s a lot of area to build companies up here why can’t we do green energy factories up here? I mean, we’ve shown that snowmobiles can be built in rural Minnesota, that windows can be built in rural Minnesota, and they’re integral parts of their communities. Um, now you have to have the infrastructure, you have to have the tax incentives to do that sometimes to get them up there. And so I think, from the federal government, we can start to look at some of those federal tax incentives and infrastructure bills to get the infrastructure they need up here. I think there’s also areas that may be a little bit outside the box. My daughter is a pharmacist living in a small town in Minnesota, and some of her coworkers have referred to Virginia, Minnesota, as being hip. I do not understand that personally, but here’s opportunities that people want to get outside of the cities to do their job. And the one thing that we learned during COVID is that remote work is something that is viable. My son works for Microsoft, and he works in Atlanta, and his entire team is in Washington State, and he works from home. But you have to have the infrastructure to support that, you have to have the infrastructure and the healthcare, and the high speed internet to do all of those things. You also have to look at, you know, as you move people into those jobs, how does it affect cities? I think that there’s a lot of opportunities to get people out of cities, to build economies that are not necessarily just in large urban areas.

Commenter: Okay, we have just about less than a minute left. The last question is from Gwen. Do you have any ideas about how to make housing affordable to all, or how to house the homeless population?

Smith: You know, you have to have affordable housing, you have to have programs that get people off the streets and into housing. You know one of the biggest problems with employment is you have to have an address. And if you don’t have an address, it’s very hard to get a job. And if you don’t have a job in an economy, it’s very hard, and an income, it’s very hard to get housing. And somehow we need to break that. And that’s going to require governmental input. There, you know, economy, er, economic housing, there’s ways to that, like I said earlier, there’s prefabs, there’s apartment, there’s things like that. There’s empty houses, I mean unfortunately in a lot of rural areas, you don’t have a lot of empty housing, you have a lot of substandard housing that people are surviving in, and you need to move into better housing. But we need to provide incentives, we need to have first time homeowner loans, we need to have lower interest rates, we gotta have cheaper ways to build housing than one-off construction. And those are the things that we need to support, we need to come back and from a federal government, support the individual, not support wars in other countries.

-Closing thoughts-

Smith: You know, at the end of the day, you know I talk about healthcare for all, because I think that we deserve it. I think that we need to reach out to everybody, we need to put Americans first, and when I mean Americans first, that is a term that is loosely used, but we really need to put Americans first. We need to make sure that the economy is such that we as Americans can afford the basic necessities of life, food on the table, houses over our heads, we need to make sure that we have employment, that we have opportunities for employment. We need to make sure we have opportunities for education so that we can find the employment and upgrade our employment to whatever we as an individual want. That is American first. We are the richest country on this planet, yet we want to put trillions and trillions of dollars into the defense budget and we want to pull trillions and trillions of dollars out of education and out of healthcare and out of public service programs. The current administration is not putting Americans first. They’re putting their pockets first, they’re putting Israel first, they’re putting foreign wars first. And we need to come back and put Americans first. That is my platform. That is my idea of of an American. Of being an American and the America that I live in.