U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz, the Ontario Republican, supports whacking away at federal spending.
“I’m just happy that somebody is finally stepping up and trying to get this out-of-control spending situation under control,” he recently told the Bend Bulletin.
In an earlier interview with Portland station KATU, Bentz said, “Now’s the time to try to restrict, slow down, slim down government.”
But his penchant to save your money stops at his Congressional door. He has not volunteered to reduce the nearly $2 million a year he gets for staff, travel and other expenses.
Instead, his communications director said, Bentz engages in “responsible stewardship.” She said a House committee was considering a 10% reduction in congressional spending and that Bentz would go along if that was enacted.
Bentz himself is silent on his own federal spending.
Meantime, federal agencies are being cut, including some mighty important to life here in Malheur County.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is enduring forced reductions. The agency is mum about how many workers have been and will be cut loose. BLM has prime responsibility for fighting wildfires in Malheur County and managing rangeland vital to ranchers.
As far as I could determine, Bentz has been silent about those cuts. My guess is that ranchers, farmers and property owners in Malheur County would like more certainty about what’s ahead. Gaps in federal crews could be worrisome. Think back to Malheur County’s suffering from the megafires last year.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture also is being reduced. That agency, too, is mum about staffing cuts. Little is shared about what help for local farmers, ranchers and land owners will be diminished.
As far as I can find, Bentz has been silent about this too.
In some instances, Bentz concluded that the budget cutting went too far. He told KATU he had already reached out to the White House “a number of times” to contest cuts. He stayed silent when I later asked for details.
More recently, he told KOBI, a Medford television station, that he needed just three hours to restore the flow of federal money to Head Start programs in southern Oregon.
He hasn’t seemed so determined to contest other cuts. Food programs feeding school children in Malheur County have been cut. The supply chain to food banks is being pared.
His detachment from ordinary Oregonians was evident when a Medford viewer asked Bentz about children and families being devastated by federal cuts.
“They’d have to tell me how they’ve been devastated,” Bentz said.
WATCH: KOBI interview
He has pushed back on reports that the federal government plans to cut Medicaid. Half of Malheur County’s resident rely on that for their health care.
Bentz said he only wants to root out fraud.
But even Bentz’s Republican colleagues in the House are worried cuts are coming for that health care program.
To head that off, 12 of them last week wrote to House leaders.
“Balancing the federal budget must not come at the expense of those who depend on these benefits for their health and economic security,” they wrote. They said they would not support “any reduction in Medicaid coverage.”
Bentz didn’t sign. He stayed silent when I asked why.
Another viewer asked what he was doing to safeguard federal programs mandated by Congress but being slashed by the federal government. Bentz essentially said: I’m not doing anything.
“This should be shocking not only to judges, but the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
– U.S. Court of Appeals order
He said that was a matter for the courts to handle.
Indeed, court cases are pending to stop possibly illegal compromises of government agencies. Judges in case after case have frozen the federal actions. They are responding to cases brought not by congressmen but by nonprofits, schools and local governments.
The hot topic in recent days has been immigration. Bentz has been quiet about the federal government’s recent actions, though he generally has supported an immigration crackdown. But his concern is situational.
At another time, he was willing to look the other way on immigration violations.
In 2021, he voted to award special treatment to undocumented workers who were in the words of the legislation “inadmissible or deportable.” Those individuals could avoid deportation by becoming a “certified agriculture worker” under legislation that Bentz supported.
READ IT: Bentz on immigration
To qualify, they had to prove they had been working in agriculture the previous two years. They would have been undocumented that entire time. In other words, their work was illegal.
Bentz justified the plan as necessary “to address the labor shortage faced by many food and fiber producers in Oregon’s Second Congressional District.”
Now, Bentz seems to be looking the other way again, this time as the federal government appears to be violating the law.
The federal government recently admitted it didn’t follow the law, making a “mistake” in how it deported a man to El Salvador. Federal officials in charge say that’s just too bad.
The arrogance and lawlessness of that attitude has riled federal judges, including those appointed by Republicans.
One judge said in an order that “the U.S. government has no legal authority to snatch a person” and “remove him from the country without due process.”
READ IT: Federal court ruling
The judge found the federal government’s behavior in ignoring the law and court orders to be “unconscionable.”
I messaged Bentz to get his reaction to that powerful language: Unconscionable.
He stayed silent.
Another judge – appointed by Ronald Reagan – couldn’t believe the federal government was stiffing the law and federal courts by claiming that “nothing can be done” to return the illegally deported man.
“This should be shocking not only to judges, but the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear,” the order said.
Bentz, long time a lawyer, likely treasures the standard of due process in America. He certainly used it to the benefit of his clients over the years. He should not stand silently by while that right for everyone is clipped by the federal government.
Yet, this conservative rural lawyer apparently isn’t offended as federal officials smirk at the rule of law.
“I’m a Republican. I support the administration,” Bentz told KOBI.
A southern Oregon person asked why Bentz was “sitting silently” while Congress cedes power and authority to the administration.
“We’re not sitting silently,” Bentz said. “What we are doing is watching carefully.”
People in Malheur County, no matter their affiliation, should be alarmed by Bentz’s hands-in-the-lap attitude.
Remember, Germans watched carefully, too, as Hitler’s Nazi regime marched one German after another into concentration camps, never to come out.
Contact Editor Les Zaitz: [email protected].
EDITOR’S NOTE: Bentz talks tough on federal spending , but mum on his own luxury stays