By JUDY RATTNER
The six-term Democrat, who has served as the 4th Congressional District's representative in Congress since 1996, is running for re-election in November against Republican Jack Martins, the mayor of Mineola. A member of the House of Representatives' Financial Services and Education and Labor committees, McCarthy was recently named chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities. She appeared at Central Synagogue last Sunday morning in a forum hosted by its Caring Community and Social Action committees.
"We have to stop the bleeding," McCarthy said of the crisis that has rocked the financial world. "During the last eight years there has been no oversight, problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, predatory lending and unlicensed mortgage brokers." McCarthy said the House passed legislation to deal with many of those problems, but then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Delay blocked the bills from reaching the Senate floor for debate.
"There was too much money on the books, with bad debt and loans to people who shouldn't have gotten them," McCarthy said. "No one thought the bubble would burst." The country now has 2 million foreclosures, she said, with 1,000 happening every week. "Piecemeal approaches, one day up then one day down" resulted, she said, in the devaluation of money markets. "And that affects everybody -- pensions, and people who have nothing to do with the housing market at all.
"The government can't do everything," McCarthy said, "but especially with the crisis we're facing, we have to step in."
She told the group that she would return to Washington on Monday to work with her fellow legislators on a financial bailout package, and predicted that it would total close to $1 trillion -- which would be added, she reminded them, to the highest federal deficit ever.
"The administration has a plan, not really a great deal," McCarthy said, "and we [Democrats] will have to fight for Main Street. The papers will say we're holding it up. But we can't give the administration carte blanche. There have to be safeguards." She said she hoped the federal government would finalize a plan by the end of the week, and she predicted that the government would actually end up making money on it. "There have been 32 recessions -- we've come back better from each of them," she said. "I see this happening from this too."
The crisis in the stock market, McCarthy said, creates a "perfect storm," coinciding with an energy crisis. "The opposition says drill, drill, drill, but everything has to be on the table" -- including, she explained, nuclear energy where it can work, cleaner coal and renewable energy sources. "We need to be self-reliant on our energy," she said, and when the political season is over, everything must be considered to create "a balanced bill."
McCarthy told her audience that earlier this year, President Bush signed legislation she wrote that grew out of the shootings at Virginia Tech last year. "I'll never forget why I'm in Congress -- that's to end gun violence, but I'm working on other things, too," she said. "I was definitely naive, but I was full of hope, and that hasn't changed."
Among the other issues McCarthy mentioned were the No Child Left Behind legislation, which, she said, "has to be more than a bumper sticker." She spoke of the Higher Education Act, which cut interest rates for students, opened up career schools and technical colleges and addressed the nursing shortage: "Not everyone wants to go to an Ivy League school or a community college," she said.
McCarthy said that every child needs to be insured, and that achieving the goal of universal health care would depend on who's in the White House. She spoke about gaps in Medicare coverage, saying, "Too many doctors are not accepting Medicare." She also expressed concern about winter heating bills and those caught in the financial crunch, explaining that Congress is working on offering help to seniors and middle-income families who are struggling.
McCarthy touched only briefly on foreign affairs in her 40-minute talk, saying that said Iran is a definite threat to Israel and that the U.S. has to take a "strong stance." She added that regardless of who becomes president, it will take 18 to 24 months to pull 140,000 troops and their equipment out of Iraq. And she said that the U.S. has to rehabilitate its reputation around the world.
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