Rodney Davis Tele-Town Hall, February 15, 2017

Oh yeah, I have a blog... Anyway, I listened in on Rep. Rodney Davis's tele-town hall this evening. I wanted to be at home and had a question, but I was actually in Meijer for most of it, so I couldn't take notes. Fortunately, @AnUncivilPhD live-tweeted the whole thing. I've taken the liberty of creating a Storify of that here.

• I knew the tele-town hall was coming today, but there was no indication of what time. So it's a matter of stay by the phone all evening and you might get to listen.
• There's no indication of when or even whether a recording of the town hall will be available. 
• About half the TTH was spent talking about repealing and replacing Obamacare. Presumably, that's why Davis had Texas Rep. Michael Burgess on for about half of it. 
• It's pretty clear Davis and the GOP have no clear replacement plan for Obamacare. There were two questions about how the replacement would pay for its provisions and they were mostly evaded. There was some vague talk about increasing competition (no indication of how) would cause rates to plummet.
• They intend to repeal the individual mandate. I think it was Burgess that said this would cause individual enrollments to increase, which doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. He claimed that requiring people to sign up for health insurance increases costs? 
• Davis is clearly proud of his bill requiring insurers to not discriminate against pre-existing conditions, but again, no indication of how he will pay for it.
• Several times Davis plugged the GOP's "Better Way" health reform framework. Republicans have had seven years to come up with a replacement for Obamacare, so I expect actual policy and analysis, not a framework.
• When asked about the repeal of the Stream Protection Rule, Davis's answer was basically: coal, more coal, coal jobs, oh and maybe some nuclear, in an obvious mention of the Clinton nuclear plant. No mention of the fact that it's cheap natural gas that's coal's main competitor, not poisoned streams.
• He did say that he wanted to see an investigation of the Russian interference in the election and that he was happy to see Flynn get fired. That's easy to say since none of his committees would have anything to do with such an investigation.
• When asked if there would be any in-person town halls, his response was basically, tele-town halls are great! Come on Rodney, we all know why you're doing this via telephone: because you don't want to give your constituents an opportunity to embarass you face-to-face.

This is a bit disjointed, but I wanted to get my thoughts down quickly.