By Beacon Staff
Former U.S. Rep. and current U.S. Senate candidate Abby Finkenauer has always been a die-hard Democrat.
Still, she says she respected U.S. Senator Charles Grassley, even though she rarely agreed with him. That changed for her after the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, she said, while speaking at the IBEW Union Hall in Burlington on Friday, Feb. 4.
“He was someone I expected to sound like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney. Just tell the truth. You don’t have to agree with somebody all the time or their party, but it was about the truth, and it was about democracy, and it was about having the backs of our Capitol police officers,” she said. “It was about being honest about what happened that day. And not only could he not be honest about what happened that day, he pushed lies about the election and conspiracies later.”
Finkenauer is one of three Democrats running to unseat Sen. Grassley in Iowa’s 2022 U.S. Senate race. Iowa’s other U.S. senator, Republican Joni Ernst, does not face re-election until 2026.
Finkenauer and fellow Democrat Cindy Axne became the first women from Iowa elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018. The daughter of a union pipefitter and a public school teacher, Finkenauer,33, also became the second-youngest woman ever to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
“It was different than what you saw on CNN or Fox News. My day was different. We tried to cut through the red tape, and we did, a lot of times,” she said.
Finkenauer, who sat on committees for Economic Growth, Labor, Transportation, and Ways and Means, helped pass a lot of bills but expressed frustration at the overall lack of progress.
“We just kept running into roadblocks. And those roadblocks began in the United States Senate, because we had senators there who were so obsessed with power, and holding onto power, that they opposed anything that moved us forward,” she said.
Finkenauer said it’s a bipartisan problem, not limited to just Republicans. Sens. Jon Ossoff and Mark Kelly introduced the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act last month, and Finkenauer is aghast that it isn’t already illegal for politicians to use insider knowledge for stock trading.
“I saw folks who had been there (the U.S. House of Representatives) for decades, but I honestly don’t think they know why they’re there anymore. It’s Democrats and Republicans, who’ve been sitting there, just getting re-elected, as cozy as can be, and aren’t even sure what they’re fighting for or who they’re fighting for anymore,” she said.
A pro-union candidate, Finkenauer also spoke of how she watched the passage of an Iowa bill in 2017 that limited public sector unions. She raised in her arm in solidarity with the union workers in the galley above at the Iowa House of Representatives as the bill was passed.
“They were watching their government makes their lives harder. And I thought to myself, ‘This is not how we treat people, that is not how we treat people in my state or in my country,’” she said.