Tom on the representative’s wild event in Westchester County, New York. We live in a swing district in New York, the 17th District. Over the years we have been represented by such disparate folks as GOP wingnut Nan Hayworth, Democratic stalwart Sean Patrick Maloney and now alleged “moderate” Mike Lawler, a Republican serving in his […]
Tom on the representative’s wild event in Westchester County, New York.
We live in a swing district in New York, the 17th District. Over the years we have been represented by such disparate folks as GOP wingnut Nan Hayworth, Democratic stalwart Sean Patrick Maloney and now alleged “moderate” Mike Lawler, a Republican serving in his second term, a man reportedly with gubernatorial aspirations – and likely beyond. Lawler is holding a series of town halls across his district, and we attended the one in our county last night.
The event was raucous, indeed. The crowd was boisterous in its objections to Lawler’s rambling and off-point defenses of the Trump administration, to be sure. The post-event coverage to date has centered on the fact that two women were forcibly ejected from the event, carried out physically by New York State troopers. The coverage has generally not addressed what Lawler actually said to engender such an outpouring of emotion. We will attempt to redress that below.
But first, let’s review the event set-up, and how it contributed to the high tension.
The event started with a show of very tight security. A long list of “rules” for attending the event were posted, and each attendee was required to answer aloud that they would abide by them. These included “no shouting, screaming, yelling or standing” which of course was the Lawler camp’s attempt to prevent a public evisceration of their man. I had brought a pen and a small pad to take notes, and these were confiscated after they turned up in a scanning process. Apparently, they thought I might rush the stage and repeatedly stab Lawler with it. I thought the very visible state troopers with guns were enough of a deterrent, but apparently the Lawler team felt otherwise. Another woman near us on the line tried to clarify if she could use silent hand gestures to express displeasure and was told that no Nazi gestures were allowed. That was an interesting choice of an example to answer her generic question.
The crowd, which filled the 675-seat auditorium to near capacity, was largely comprised of senior citizens, clearly of an anti-Trump/Lawler bent. The Lawler supporters, such as they were, at times politely applauded his responses and managed to ask three questions (out of 16 that I counted), but they were no match for the opposition. The question process itself was managed fairly – anyone who wanted to ask a question was handed a numbered ticket on the way in, and then a lottery-style spinner was on stage for a local politician to randomly pull the numbers. This ensured that there was no monkeying with the questions to tilt them to Lawler supporters, which is exactly what happened on a recent Lawler phone-in event, that had been dominated by Lawler fans, including elected officials who asked softball questions of the congressman in fawning style.
But let’s be clear. While the constituents were certainly loud, this was not an organized disruption. There was never any attempt to shut down the event or to prevent Lawler from speaking. There was chanting when the women were dragged out but at no other time. The event proceeded apace, and only Lawler’s own answers brought forth the objections – that is, they were reactive and not pre-meditated or coordinated. The main problem was the format: specifically, that questioners were not allowed to ask follow-up questions. Thus, there was no way for Lawler’s pat answers to be probed or challenged, and since they were often off-point, redirected or misleading, the crowd was increasingly frustrated. Given that format, the only way for audience members to challenge his dissembling was to shout out corrections or requests for clarifications. And this they did, in abundance.
The questions covered what might be expected – tariffs (again and again), due process, the weaponization of anti-Semitism, the cutting of funding to the arts and science research, not standing up to Trump, the separation of powers, immigration, the anti-boycott act and more. Lawler was his usual slippery and smarmy self, often lecturing the crowd (at times incorrectly), but generally maintaining his cool, in robotic fashion, in the face of the onslaught.
Lawler’s answers were unsurprising. Anyone familiar with GOP talking points (and the crowd certainly was) and also Lawler’s adaptation of them to suit his swing district needs (mixing in occasional righteous indignation with Trump on certain issues, but devoid of any real passion or discussion of any ways his opposition to Trump translated into action) could have guessed his responses.
- On the 2020 election and January 6. Lawler said, as he has many times, that Joe Biden was properly elected president in 2020, and the events of January 6 were terrible, and he was against them. But, when pressed by the audience to answer the second half of the question – why he/we should believe anything Trump says in the wake of his election denial and January 6 — he weakly responded that the people elected Trump in 2024 and, as he accepted Biden’s election in 2020, he was duty bound to abide by the 2024 election outcome as well. The crowd was dissatisfied with this illogical, off-point response, and made that clear. So much for no shouting.
- Due process. Similarly, Lawler said that everyone was entitled to due process, including Abrego Garcia. He attempted to parse Trump’s refusal by saying that the next step was for the courts to issue contempt rulings if Trump did not comply. But he dodged entirely the issue of Trump clearly ignoring the court’s main ruling, that of “facilitating” Abrego Garcia’s return, and why he and Congress were doing nothing to try to get the Trump Administration to follow the law. In response to a shouted-out call for impeachment, Lawler unintentionally drew the biggest laugh of the night. He said that impeachment is just a political tool now and if it were undertaken again, it would result in “unnecessary chaos in government,” which drew belly laughs from the audience, obviously noting the irony of “chaos in government” being the operative mode of the administration Lawler was defending.
- Standing up for the Constitution and against Trump. Lawler chose to interpret this question – a question greeted with resounding cheers — as one regarding government spending. He did not discuss DOGE upsetting Congressional prerogatives, though – rather he rather drily described the various processes that Congress has for determining spending, such as the Budget, and the potential for a rescission bill. This rather ponderous and droning lecture was designed to lull the audience to sleep, and it darn near succeeded.
- Lawler’s accessibility. At that point a Lawler supporter managed to beat the odds and get a question, and lauded Lawler for making himself so accessible. Lawler gave his best “aw shucks” look and said he would keep his answer brief and then proceeded to give the longest humble-brag on record. He touted not only his accessibility, but his bipartisanship, his effectiveness as a congressperson and more. By the end, one might have thought that when we left that night, he was going to walk across the lake next to the school to get to his car. The crowd groaned through most of it. At one point when Lawler declared that he was cited as the “most-bipartisan Republican in the House,” a wag shouted out “Low bar!” (As an aside of my own, I am of the opinion that our representatives should not be congratulated for meeting with their constituents. That is their job, whether you are aligned with an unpopular administration or not. Giving kudos for fulfilling a basic responsibility of holding office seems insane to me.)
- Tariffs. Lawler was clearly uncomfortable defending Trump’s tariffs, and this was when the event began to come apart. He appeared to have decided the best approach to this issue was a long answer that had two themes – a Trumpian rant on how we have been ripped off for decades by other nations, especially China, and, more lawyerly, how Trump’s tariff powers were grounded in rulings by Chief Justice John Marshall hundreds of years ago. While the actual line between congressional and executive authority is blurrier than either Lawler or the protesters would concede, Lawler ignored the fact that Trump authorized his tariffs under the International Emergencies Powers Act of 1977, which was unprecedented and clearly unjustified. Congress could have called him out on that and used their power to constrain him and overturn his decisions. None of this was discussed by Lawler. Lawler was greeted with uproarious laughter when he said that Congress was indeed exercising its oversight powers and would “step in” if Trump failed to secure trade deals within his 90-day tariff period. The laughter gave way to boos at the mere mention of RFK, Jr., and then went straight on to rage and fury with the commotion near the back of the auditorium, when the first woman was being ejected.
As it became clear that she was being forcibly lifted and carried out by the State Troopers, the crowd quickly filled the room with thunderous chants of “Let her stay! Let her stay! Let her stay!” It was grotesque, watching her carried by the arms and legs, horizontally, out of the room by the troopers. Lawler stood on the stage watching this unfold, clearly worried about the optics of an older woman being physically ejected, and the crowd’s outraged response.
It took a fair amount of time for order to be restored, and then the questioning resumed. Lawler was asked about the GOP tactic of weaponizing anti-Semitism, and for the first time he spoke with confidence, taking a hardline stand against elite institutions, Columbia’s response to pro-Palestinian protesters, his own trip to the campus, his own bill-writing efforts, and so on. In short, while this is a complex issue, he embodied the very technique the questioner – herself Jewish – sought to decry.
He was then asked to reconcile his Catholic faith – specifically, as the questioner said, the tenet to “welcome a stranger” — with his hardcore views on immigration. He started, rather oddly, by telling a story about sitting at this father’s deathbed, his father telling him that “to whom much is given, much is required,” exhorting Lawler, his son, to spend his life helping others. Unmoved, a wag in the crowd shouted, “What happened?”
He then moved on to a rather clinical assessment of Trump’s “success” in shutting down the border and the need for a process to deal with the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country, without bothering to note the many times the Republicans had rejected attempts at meaningful reform that involved true compromise on both sides — tougher border security and a pathway to citizenship.
A question on Ukraine was met with a long diversion into middle eastern politics and Iran. Questions about cuts to support of the arts and scientific research were greeted with lectures on the national debt, and numbing sidebars on “multiple revenue streams.” Shouts from the crowd to consider that “taxing the rich” might be a better way to cut the deficit were ignored.
Another woman was ejected, in a very similar way, forcibly, and the crowd responded with equal fervor as the first time. At this point I myself had been given four warnings – a Lawler aide came over to me on four separate occasions and told me if I shouted again, I would be ejected – and one had to wonder about the gender fairness of the ejections. Why were they physically mistreating older women and ignoring similar behavior from the men?
At this point, perhaps Lawler’s aides were thinking the same thing, and they came to eject a man seated near me. The man engaged them with friendly banter, and he was a large man, so they appeared a bit confused as to how to manage his ejection. Ultimately, he walked out surrounded by the troopers, but Lawler, not sensitive to the gender dynamics, then ordered the guards to let him stay.
Another question on tariffs, met by Lawler with another mind-numbing answer, sparked a chant of “blah, blah, blah” from the crowd. There was a question – or statement — about a $2 million donation Elon Musk’s Super PAC had donated to Lawler’s campaign last November, which he uncomfortably danced around. As he answered his final question, about an Anti-Boycott Law, the crowd began filing out, not wishing to hear a Lawler closing statement on “democracy in action” (which is how he had started).
One striking fact was how Lawler kept underestimating the crowd’s knowledge. He pointed out at one point that if Abrego Garcia returned, he would not go home, he would be put in a process that could lead to his immediate deportation. Yes, the crowd responded, but that “process” is called the “due process” that Abrego Garcia (and the others) were denied. And Lawler seemed certain that the crowd would be stunned into silence when he informed them that Barack Obama had deported 3 million undocumented immigrants in his eight years in office – but the impact of the factoid was immediately negated when a number of audience members shouted out “legally!” and “with due process!”
All in all, the vibe of the event resembled more of a protest than an information session. Lawler was not terribly informative, more bobbing and weaving and dissembling than educating. And perhaps that was really the “democracy in action” that he was talking about – unhappy constituents letting him know it.
