On June 27, one of our writers made a phone call to the office of Brian Maienschein and spoke with one of his staffers. The writer began the call with, “I am a concerned constituent and student who after watching last night’s debate, wanted to know if you agree with Senator Elizabeth Warren’s stance regarding the elimination of all private health care insurance as a part of a broader Medicare-for-All policy?”
The representative’s first response was, “I apologize, we are a state-elected office, and we don’t deal with national issues. Cause that’s a federal debate, right?” He went on to tell our writer that asking that question was the same as asking us the state’s role in foreign policy. Since Medicare is a federal program, he would not be able to give a stance.
Our writer went on to ask him about California’s previous attempt to pass universal healthcare in 2017 with SB 562. To which the representative responded, “SB 562 is a property tax exemption for veterans and their unmarried spouses,” and had nothing to do with healthcare or the state. The writer went on to inform him that the 2017 version of SB 562 was The Healthy California Act, which was very relevant to local health care.
The representative was then asked if Assemblyman Maienschein has a stance on the issue. He responded that “the Assemblyman generally does not take a stance because the bill was stopped before it went to any committee at all. Two-thousand legislations per house are introduced per year. He cannot discuss every legislation in each house per year.”
The representative claiming that there are too many bills for the Assemblyman to take a stance on shows that Maienschein is not as locally involved as he should be.
After a bit more conversation, the representative offered to share the discussion with the Assemblyman. Our writer went on to ask, “Can you relay the information to the Assemblymember?”
Not even a minute later he told us, “I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get a meeting anytime soon so. There’s that. I mean but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to share your thoughts.”
He continued to tell us how busy the Assemblyman is, and he’ll check if he can find the time, but that it “probably wouldn’t work out.”
We tried asking once more if he could see about just asking him, to which he replied, “Well I said I’m not sure if I can even get a meeting with him. The Assemblyman is very busy. He is normally up in Sacramento.” So Assemblyman Maienschein is rarely even in San Diego and working with the people that he’s representing.
Overall, Maienschein is not spending enough time working locally with the people who elected him. How is he supposed to do his job if he is not even in the area that he represents?
