Lowey Blasts Republican VP Candidate Ryan
Rep. Nita Lowey wasted little time in going after Rep. Paul Ryan this weekend after he was named presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s running mate, while also pointing out her opponent’s support for the Wisconsin Republican.
“Mitt Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate shows he is fully committed to House Republicans’ extreme policies,” Lowey (D-Harrison) said in a statement released Saturday, hours after Romney announced his selection. “The Ryan budget – which I opposed – would end Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher program that will increase seniors’ out-of-pocket costs by more than $6,000 per year. It would gut investments critical to middle-class and working New Yorkers while giving tax cuts to the highest-income individuals.”
Rep. Ryan has become a hero in Republican circles since he proposed a plan to limit the long-term increase in Medicare spending. The plan, though, has also made Ryan a target for Democrats, who have criticized the cuts to Medicare.
Rye Town Supervisor Joe Carvin, Lowey’s Republican opponent, has had high praise for Ryan since entering the race.
“Certainly, Paul Ryan is the kind of reform-minded congressman that I want to be,” Carvin said in June in an interview with The White Plains Examiner. While he called Ryan’s plan “in the right direction,” he hedged by saying “I’m not going to support the Paul Ryan plan A to Z.”
Carvin reiterated his support for Ryan on Sunday, saying his presence on the ticket would elevate the presidential campaign and that he’d “treat the American people as adults.” Carvin said Medicare would go bankrupt without reform and noted the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature health care reform bill which Lowey supported, also cut funding from Medicare.
As far as tax reform, Carvin pointed to the plan put forward in 2010 by a commission chaired by former Republican senator Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, a Democrat who served as President Clinton’s chief of staff. Like Ryan’s budget, the Simpson-Bowles plan would cut tax rates while eliminating tax loopholes and expenditures, but the plans differ greatly in the specifics and Ryan offers no details on which loopholes would be axed.
Carvin lamented the tone of the presidential campaign, saying it had seemed on the way to deteriorating into one of the nastiest in recent memory. He hoped the addition of Ryan would put the focus on the differences between the candidates’ policy positions.
“The problems that we’re facing are no longer ideological, they’re mathematical,” Carvin said. “The nation’s at a crossroads. The stakes are high.”
Lowey, first elected in 1988, is seeking her 13th term in what will become New York’s 17th Congressional District, which encompasses Rockland and part of Westchester, including White Plains. Carvin, who’s been Rye’s supervisor since 2007, is looking to unseat Lowey in what’s been a reliably Democratic district in past years.
Adam has worked in the local news industry for the past two decades in Westchester County and the broader Hudson Valley. Read more from Adam’s author bio here.
