Listening to Scott Peters This Week

I had a chance to listen to my Congressman, Scott Peters (CA-52) earlier this week.  I should have posted sooner, but not much of what he said in the 15 minutes was very newsworthy.  He comes across as a bit soft spoken and very reasonable sounding, and frankly a lot more appealing personally than the incumbent he defeated in 2012, Brian Bilbray.

He spoke about his work on the House Armed Services Committee, which is important to San Diego, as well as the Science and Technology committee.  He has urged flexibility in how the Pentagon allocates its funding to allow each service to reduce civilian employee furloughs, which was popular with his audience.  He discussed the increasing importance of defending against cyber attacks, but didn't really cover any new ground.

On the budget, he said that the freshman class was characterized by an attitude of wanting to get a deal done that reduced the budget deficit through some sort of compromise.  He said that lack of progress could be attributed to bad blood and memories of previous battles on both sides of the aisle.  He believes that President Obama has actually called for reasonable compromise with the GOP, specifically that entitlements must be reformed.  However, he characterized that in the context of asking for more tax revenue as part of a larger bargain.  I was also struck by the number of times he referred to the Democrat leadership with the term chain of command.

The audience questions were mostly related to cyber threats, furloughs and the direction of the fiscal year 2014 budget. But as I said, little new ground was plowed.