Lindsay James, a Presbyterian pastor and politician, is ready to shift into fall soup mode with her two teenage children. But first, she has an election to win.
Across Iowa’s 2nd District, James has been talking with voters ahead of her competitive race. As it stands, the polls show James in a dead heat with Republican Joe Mitchell.
A state representative, James is “very familiar with working across the aisle,” she told Daily Kos, adding that it’s “needed on the federal level as well.” In our conversation, she recalled a time when bipartisan efforts in the state House of Representatives were needed to establish emergency access to insulin for families in need.
“We shouldn’t have to send a caravan of moms in Iowa across the border to Canada [every year] to buy insulin medication for their kids because the cost is so much cheaper. These are policy choices, and I would argue these aren’t just policy failures; they’re moral failures, and we’ve got to take care of our kids and our family,” she said.
Check out highlights from our conversation, and watch the full video interview below.
Lindsay James on how to the Trump administration’s claims that Christianity is under attack:
Part of the reason why I’m talking about my faith a lot on this campaign has to do specifically with how I’ve been shaped by the “Parable of the Good Samaritan.”
What I love about that parable—I think that this parable really meets this moment—is how Dr. Martin Luther King talked about it. Because what King said about this parable is, it’s not just our moral obligation to pick up the person who’s hurting and harmed on the side of the road. It’s our moral obligation to fix the road, because what King knew about the road was that it was a place that was notorious for being dangerous, where people were regularly exploited and hurt and harmed. And too often, this feels like what’s exactly happening in Washington, D.C.
Politicians who have the power and the ability to actually fix this person’s circumstances are turning a blind eye and walking the other way, and we need leaders who have the courage to help their neighbor but also to fix the challenges that have caused the harm in the first place.
On the state’s high cancer rate:
We’re No. 1 in the country for rising cancer rates, and as you said, we’re No. 2 in the country for the sheer number of cancer cases. It’s also very clear that there are personal behavior choices that lead to cancer like binge-drinking, obesity, smoking—those are some of those indicators that we know are evidence-based that are leading to high rates of cancer in our state.
[…]
There’s a number of factors in this, including that we have a water-quality crisis. So that is part of the environmental factors that we need to research and study here in Iowa. What we know is that there are 300,000 Iowans who are drinking from unregulated water wells. We know that there are already high levels of nitrates in those wells. We know that there are big fertilizer and pesticide companies like Bayer coming to the Iowa Legislature and to the federal government and asking us to release them from liability if someone gets sick from their product. Those are what we know.
So we have to put resources and funding into our water-quality monitoring system and cancer research. And then, as you’re saying, these underfunded areas where we see an incredible strain on our rural healthcare system needs help, and this One Big Beautiful Bill, which I would argue is only beautiful for billionaires, has slashed an already financially strained healthcare system.
On helping mothers and families:
We need to increase the child and dependent care tax credit for folks who are caring for kids and folks who are caring for aging adults. Those times are difficult on families. I’m a mom of teenagers. I’m also caring for parents who are aging, and their healthcare needs are greater. … And we need to be able to help support families who are trying to figure out how to negotiate these dynamics in their own lives, and we can do that by supporting tax relief for those families.
But we also need to take very seriously the cost of childcare and cap those costs based on people’s incomes and invest in assistance, so that our childcare centers have the kind of financial resources that they need to keep their employees and pay them good wages.
On how her personal experiences inform her politics:
There was a time in my life when we were working to get my husband through school, and I was cutting a lot of coupons, and we were eating a lot of rice and beans at dinner at our family dinner tables because the cost of childcare and life was hard. So I know what that’s like.
I know what it’s like to have to fight to save for a down payment on a house and pay those childcare expenses, and I do think that story and living that experience has made me connect with my voters in a way that someone who has spent his whole life—Joe Mitchell—rigging the system for himself, who is a millionaire, who is clearly going to Congress to enrich himself even further.
Folks, again, they’re longing for someone who will go and fight for them.
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