League of Women Voters of California Education Fund
Santa Barbara, Ventura County, CA November 4, 2008 Election
	Marta Ann Jorgensen Answers Questions Candidate for United States Representative; District 24

The questions were prepared by the League of Women Voters of California and asked of all candidates for this office.
Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

Questions & Answers

1. What, if anything, do you believe the federal government should do to control global climate change?

The next president must make reducing carbon a central focus of his or her administration if we want to avoid the worst impacts of global warming: catastrophic sea level rise, widespread drought and desertification, and loss of up to 70 percent of all species.

I will stand up to the commercial interests profiting from our current energy situation. We need a major environmental health agenda that challenges these entrenched interests with major new initiatives in solar energy, doubling motor vehicle fuel efficiency, and other quantified sustainable and clean energy technologies. Promote recognition that current fossil fuels are producing not just global warming, but also cancer, respiratory diseases, and geopolitical strife. Work to fight environmental racism that leads to more contaminated water, air, and toxic dumps in poorer neighborhoods.

1. Freezing carbon emissions now.
2. Instituting a carbon tax.
3. Passing on revenues to lower income groups.
4. Signing a strong global treaty ( not named Kyoto) with de facto compliance date being moved from 2012 to 2010.
5. A moratorium on construction of coal powered plants not fitted with carbon capture and sequestration features.
6. Electranet-smart grid.
7. "CNMA" or Connie Maes for home buyers.

2. What should the federal government do, if anything, to ensure that every American has health coverage?

H.R. 676, the United States National Health Insurance Act (USNHI), establishes a unique American universal health insurance program with single payer financing. The bill would create a publicly financed, privately delivered health care system that improves and expands the already existing Medicare program to all U.S. residents, and all residents living in U.S. territories. The goal of the legislation is to ensure that all Americans will have access, guaranteed by law, to the highest quality and most cost effective health care services regardless of their employment, income or health care status. With 47 million uninsured Americans, and another 50 million who are underinsured, the time has come to change our inefficient and costly fragmented non-system of health care.

3. What, if anything, should the federal government do about immigration?

Congress should pass the End Racial Profiling Act.

Congress should pass the USA Family Act (HR 440). It offers immigrants a clear road map to legal status in the United States. Among other changes, it grants legal permanent residence to immigrants who have been living in the U.S. for five or more years. It offers conditional legal status and work authorization to all law-abiding immigrants living in the United States for less than five years. And it revokes current laws that bar certain people who live abroad from re-entering the U.S. for a period of three to 10 years. The Department of Defense should not have control over border security. In our democracy, it is important that we preserve the distinction between our armed forces and domestic law enforcement. Also, I am concerned about the threat of vigilantes intimidating or attacking individuals at the border. Border security is a job for state and local authorities, not soldiers or splinter groups.

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Responses to questions asked of each candidate are reproduced as submitted to the League. 

Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

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Created from information supplied by the candidate: September 29, 2008 11:57
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