Protesters Pack Lungren Town Hall in Elk Grove

A protest was held against Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Gold River) before Tuesday's town hall meeting at with the protesters voicing their disapproval of the congressman.

Mark Hefflinger of the CREDO SuperPAC helped organize the protest along with other constituents. Hefflinger said the main message that he and the protesters hoped to get across is Lungren's "extreme" views makes him unfit to run for congress.

"Congressman Dan Lungren is a leader in the Republican war on women," he said. "He has voted to redefine rape, he has voted to de-fund Planned Parenthood and Californian women need to hold him accountable for these stoned-aged views and vote him out in November."

Hefflinger also said that Lungren and his members of Congress are far behind in science because he claims they do not believe in climate change.

"We are also an awareness campaign to tell these five members of Congress, who aren't even accepting the basics that scientists agree on, which is that climate change is real," he said.

Scott Sanders, a U.S. Navy veteran who is now a sophomore at American River College, also protested against Lungren before the town hall meeting because he does not agree with his views.

"Everything he's for, I'm against and everything he's against, I'm for it," Sanders said. "He's part of the war on women and I find that hypocritical because I feel that if you truly believe in smaller government, which is what the Tea Party believes in, then that should mean that government should be out of our lives without exception, and for him to say that, 'Oh we want government out of everything, except women's lives and their ability to make a choice,' I find that very hypocritical."

During the town hall meeting, dozens of Elk Grove and Sacramento County citizens came up to voice their opinions, most of them disapproving of Lungren. There was only one instance where the protesters heckled Lungren and he immediately asked for order and civility. The few supporters of Lungren in the crowd applauded him for restoring order.

The supporters of Lungren included Lisa Garcia, a Sacramento County resident and state employee. She praised Lungren for supporting Megan's Law and the Three Strikes Law.

"We need to live in a society that keeps us free from criminals and although there are some flaws of the Three Strikes Law obviously, I think we need to be able to protect our communities and get people off our streets, especially when they're habitual offenders," Garcia said.

Garcia also said she does not believe money should be taken out of her paycheck to pay for entitlement programs that most of the protesters were asking for.

"I work part-time because of a back injury yet I've been furloughed, they take money out of my paycheck and tell me how to live without it, but yet I hear these people constantly asking to be given more and more and more. We can't sustain this entitlement.

"Don't get me wrong, we got a lot of people who got a lot of issues, but our government isn't going to be able to fix it all because there isn't enough money to go around. We're broke in the state of California. Where do these people think that money is going to come from?"

Jake Rambo of the Elk Grove Unified School District Board of Education told Lungren that George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act needs revision because it is a broad, nationwide act that does not focus exactly on each cities' school district's individual needs specifically.

"The needs of Elk Grove are different than the needs of Waukesha, Wisc. The challenges that each school system faces in other cities are different than the challenges of south Sacramento," Rambo said. "We've got to have a system in place that addresses all that so that the kid in Rancho Cordova is getting the education that the kids in Rancho Cordova need, while the kids in Sandy, Utah, are getting the education they need–not the education that's designed one-size-fits-all in Washington by the bureaucrats."

Lungren will also hold a town hall meeting Thursday in Folsom at the Folsom Community Center and one in Carmichael on Aug. 22 at the John Smith Hall of the La Sierra Community Center. The protesters plan to be at those meetings as well.

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