Editorial: For the 20th Congressional District, Paul Tonko
Reprinted from this Times Union Editorial Board
Editorial: For the 20th Congressional District, Paul Tonko
Voters keep sending Rep. Paul Tonko back to Congress because he's a smart, clear-headed public servant. He deserves another term.
Times Union Editorial Board - PUBLISHED NOV. 4, 2022 8:36AM ET
The 20th Congressional District race in New York offers voters a stark choice, not just in terms of political ideologies, but in terms of competence.
Incumbent Rep. Paul Tonko, D-Amsterdam, is grounded in facts and reality. His Republican challenger, Liz Lemery Joy, at times simply is not.
Mr. Tonko, an engineer by training, has long brought a clear-headed, no-nonsense professionalism to public service. He comes to the job with a long resume in government — elected to the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors at 26, serving in the state Assembly for 25 years, and leading the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority before being elected to Congress in 2009. The district, which now spans Albany, Montgomery, Saratoga and Schenectady counties, will stretch further north into the Adirondack Park as a result of redistricting.
The seven-term congressman is well respected for his work as a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change, and member of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee. He has called out the fossil fuel industry on its long campaign of disinformation on global warming, and pushed for legislation to phase out fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He authored portions of the CHIPS Act, which will make major investments in America's domestic semiconductor industry, and brought home federal aid for restaurants and other small businesses hard hit by the pandemic, as well as funds for home weatherization, roads and bridges, expansion of broadband, and a wide range of local projects.
He has quietly worked on a bipartisan basis to boost U.S. manufacturing, improve mental health services, fight opioid addiction, create national standards on medication and safety in horse racing, and strengthen limousine safety rules. And he's been on the right side of the nation's hot-button issues, supporting same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and intelligent gun control.
In sharp contrast comes Ms. Joy, making a second run for Congress. She talks about solving inflation with no stated plan. She says she'll fight against state criminal justice reforms that Congress has nothing to do with. In a world increasingly harmed by global warming, she wants more drilling for fossil fuels, not less. She opposes red flag laws that allow guns to be taken away from people shown in court to be dangerous.
And she traffics in disinformation. She has extolled the use of ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug, as a treatment for COVID-19, going so far as to claim that the National Institutes of Health lists it as such; it expressly does not. She falsely asserted in a debate with Mr. Tonko that COVID-19 vaccines cause miscarriages, another debunked myth. And she backed Donald Trump's lie that he really won the 2020 election, and suggested, entirely erroneously, that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Mr. Trump's supporters was actually done by people on the left.
We do not need more delusional people in Congress. We hope voters will send Mr. Tonko back to Washington to be a smart, thoughtful and entirely sane voice for the district, and for New York.
