Rep. John Mannion wearing a blue suit jacket and light blue shirt, smiling in front of a brick building. — (Ciara Feltham / Mannion for NY)

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. The last time I spoke with John Mannion, it was about six months into his first term in Congress. He's now finished close to a year, so it's a good time to check back in and get his reflections. As always, it seems a lot has been happening in Washington in the last six months. John Mannion represents New York's 22nd congressional district, which contains all of Onondaga and Madison counties and portions of Oneida, Cortland and Cayuga counties, including the cities of Syracuse, Utica, and Auburn. Congressman Mannion, welcome back to the program and it's good to see you again.

John Mannion: Great to see you. Thank you for having me on again, Grant.

GR: Well, I have to say our listeners can only hear this and I can see you, I'm going to jump right to a question I was going to ask you later, but, you look pretty relaxed. You don't look like a beaten down member of Congress. (laughter)

JM: Well, it's still early in the day. (laughter) Listen, there will be times where, you know, I'll be in a grocery store back home or somewhere, and people go, you know, hey, I support you, you know, thank you for everything you're doing, I hope you're doing okay. Every now and then, I'll get a, you look tired, you know, you look tired.

GR: (laughter)

JM: But I understand the gravity of the position that I hold. And, of course, I love the place where I'm from. I consider it an honor to be able to represent it and we're going to do everything to make sure we do a good job. And we uphold, you know, the history of this country and the norms of this country, the values of it. And, you know, some days are longer than others, but, I appreciate the compliment, and I'll take it wherever it comes.

GR: Okay, great. Well, a little more serious version of that, though, if I could. You know, when I think about, and we'll come back to getting your sense of, you know, the things that you've accomplished and all that, but when I think about the weekly life of a member of Congress, knowing a bit about it, it really does seem to me to be kind of a grind in a lot of ways. I mean, you're going back and forth to D.C. constantly. You're always having to raise money. So, I imagine it has been an adjustment from the state Senate, even though that was a challenging position as well. I mean, how, do you have strategies for coping with it?

JM: So, I do think my four years in Albany was a great preparation for this. And it was in many ways, no offense to the state Senate and state Assembly, because there's important, very important, if not just as important legislation there, but just the calendar itself. It was a six month in-session session, so January to June, and then you had six months to get back in the district and really get a chance to talk to folks. The D.C. schedule is three out of every four weeks a month on average. August is not a month we’re working and we won't get into the government shutdown or even the cancellation of votes around that time. But it's about four days a week, typically. And when you're here, you're going, you know, from first thing in the morning, all the way through the evening, you get up and you do it again. And there's a lot of committee work, as I think we talked about a few months ago. The committee work here is really intensive, and there's amendments to legislation and multiple hearings, so you can count on those every week. But the travel is something for sure. We're fortunate that, you know, I mean, I have driven, but as far as flights go from Syracuse to D.C., there's a lot of them and they're direct flights, so we could do a lot worse than that. And I feel fortunate that I live where I do. And both airports are great and easy to get in and out of. So, you know, that's the least of it. It's really the importance of the work. And then what's tough is, because it's usually the full week or close to a full week, I miss a lot of stuff at home that I really want to be at, and certainly want to get to new areas of the district that may not know me as well, and let them know that I want to hear from them and that I'm fighting for them.

GR: I just can't imagine, for example, how a member of Congress representing a rural district in California manages that with the flights and the travel involved. But, well, let's get to the meat of some of this. You've been in a year, it’s a two-year term. So, what do you regard as your most important accomplishment so far in this first year?

JM: You know, some of those things, Grant, have really come up recently legislatively, and I'll get to that. But when I was elected, you know, this past fall and so was the president, I said, I wish for the country's success and therefore I wish for his success. But what we've seen immediately with the executive orders that came out on Inauguration Day was that the backstops of many things to keep executive powers reined in were removed. And that includes the removal of the inspector generals and, you know, clearing out of the DOJ and the FBI. So, you know, a lot of my time has been devoted to, and I say this, I'm just telling the truth, I'm letting people know that regardless of where you land on the political spectrum, that we should always maintain the co-equal branches of government and a system of checks and balances. And when we hear either secretaries or the president himself talk about defying court orders, that's, of course, incredibly concerning. And congressional oversight is not happening to the extent that it has in the past, historically, regardless of which party is in power. So that's a lot of what we work on. But, when we've gone through, I will call it the Big Beautiful Bill, the reconciliation process, there was a lot of work there, a lot of amendments were attempted that were voted down basically by party lines, and some of them were very logical moves, including extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies, also returning what legally has been found to be illegal firings of the federal workforce and returning veterans to that workforce. But most recently, what you've seen are a couple pieces of legislation is that despite, you know, the president really having a tight grasp over the speaker is that we have found, and I do think this is inspiring, bipartisanship within the discharge petition process. So, you know that I come from a union family and I was a union president while I was still teaching in my last eight years. So, there was a discharge petition, passed the House, bipartisan support to restore the collective bargaining rights of some of these, you know, government entities. And I was grateful to see that happen. You know, additionally, a lot of media attention, and justifiably, is around the release of the Epstein files that, two, we should have accountability and justice for victims. And that was something that has happened recently as well. So, you can imagine my frustration in having really logical amendments stall, even though sometimes I'm advocating even more for, proportionally other congressional districts that might benefit from an extension of the Affordable Care Act's tax credits. But, you know, that's what's frustrating, but we have seen some movement. I've got my own legislation that we're going to continue to build support around and consensus around and gain co-sponsorship and try to move that legislation forward while finding our spots to insert our voice and insert our amendments and trying to make some of the legislation that's moving by the majority better.

GR: I want to come back to a couple of things you mentioned. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Congressman John Mannion. The freshman representative is in New York's 22nd congressional district. So, one of the things, you mentioned this, was, you referenced our earlier conversation where you observed that one of the biggest differences and surprises in some ways for you was the intensity and the importance of the committee work relative to what you had experienced in New York State. Are there any other big surprises now that you've had a year that you just didn't see coming as far as the nature of the job down there?

JM: Sure. I, you know, I'm going to shift again to executive powers here, I think I have to. So, you know, I have to remind people that in a previous Congress, appropriated dollars were obligated to different organizations, you know, including like, NEH and NIH grants, Department of Ed grants, Department of Defense and Energy grants. And that was a Republican majority in Congress that passed that, even though it may have been signed by a Democratic president. But the appropriations process is one of those, what I like to call forced bipartisanship. So, we all want bipartisanship, but the Appropriations Committee and other aligned committees make sure that we're not playing hunger games, we're not playing winners and losers. And I hate the term blue districts and red districts because my district is a purple district. They happen to have a blue representative right now, but I consider myself here for everybody and every district across this country has Republicans and Democrats. So, I wish we weren't playing this game and I know the people I represent, by and large, feel the same w...