Roe Town Hall

After a tremendous amount of goading, Representative Roe decided to announce his Town Hall event. Although it was planned for Monday, March 6, his announcement for this event did not appear until Friday, March 4.

Nevertheless, we persisted.

We organized our car pools and attended the event on March 8. Below, please read Sam Miller's synopsis of the event, view our photos, and the links from news agencies.

From Sam Miller's public Facebook post:

"I will give credit to Congressman Roe for holding tonight’s Town Hall meeting. The turnout was good. They filled all the seats in the upstairs courtroom (where we were) and had overfill with live video feed to the lower courtrooms. There was also a crowd outside of folks who were unable to get inside and some obnoxious pro Trump supporters who chose to shout vile comments to attendees.

The folks who attended inside were respectful and courteous and Dr. Roe even commented on the civility of all.

The Congressman answered some questions and ducked and weaved on others. Most of the topics on my earlier list were covered.

There was a disabled Veteran in a wheelchair who spoke to the issue of pain medication and management at the VA. He was an impassioned man who had done his homework before addressing the issue. I don’t feel like he was suitably answered but I also felt that the answers to his questions would have required much more time than was available.

The Wall and immigration was discussed, but not to the satisfaction of many there.

School vouchers and the desire to NOT eliminate public education and the programs for special needs students was raised.

I felt that he stayed on track as to how these issues would affect Tennessee and rarely addressed how they would affect the nation except when he wanted to justify his position.

In regards to a concern about the elimination of the EPA, he stated that he doesn’t support eliminating that organization but he feels like they have too many regulations that we should be able to be gotten rid of.

He spoke a lot about health care and the repeal of the ACA. He seemed surprised when he asked how many folks were in favor of a single payer health care system and a large number of hands shot up. He then went on to say that we are headed to a health care tax credit system, which was met with dissatisfaction by the majority of the folks at the meeting.

I was able to ask him; “Do you support an independent investigation into the Trump administration’s ties to Russia.” He replied that there was currently a bipartisan investigation and that we need to wait and let them do their job and see what develops. We did keep insisting that it should be an independent investigation....

There may be other things that I think of in the morning to add. I hope that my other friends who attended will add what I might have missed…"