The Butte County League of Women Voters hosted a Q&A forum that featured candidates running for the First Congressional District election primaries coming up this June. The candidates answered a few questions on a variety of issues and expressed their platform stance on various topics.
Six candidates attended and included one Green Party member, one Republican and four Democrats:
- Jessica Holcombe – Democrat
- Marty Walters – Democrat
- Gregory Cheadle – Republican
- David Peterson – Democrat
- Lewis Elbinger – Green Party
- Audrey Denney – Democrat
Debra Barger, the LWV’s president helped arrange the event to provide each candidate the opportunity to share views on issues facing Butte County voters.
“The LWV is held in high regard for its commitment to fair and unbiased forums,” Barger said.
The questions asked ranged from funding issues relating to the Oroville Dam to stances on gun control.
The candidates were given one minute to respond to questions presented from local media and citizens.
When asked about whether the president should authorize attacks on other countries without congressional approval, all of the candidates unanimously disagreed the president should not act on his own and needs congressional approval.
“It seems to me, what I would call a no-brainer,” Elbinger said. “War should be the last resort, not the first resort.”
The candidates’ agreement on many topics was a trend seen in many of the questions, except for issues like illegal immigration and gun control.
When asked about the future of undocumented individuals in California, Cheadle took a different stance on the issue, stating that, “we need to take care of home, first.”
“Blacks in this country have been given the back of the bus for too dog-gone long. Everyone who comes over here and kicks us further off the bus, and now things like this throw us under,” Cheadle said.
The other candidates on the panel all agreed to help out and push for policies that would improve the lives of undocumented immigrants.
When asked about gun control, Cheadle also took a different stance than his counterparts on the panel. The other five candidates all took pro-gun control stances.
“When there is a mass shooting with whites, there is uproar. More blacks are killed in a week, than all these whites who are killed in these mass shootings. Yet the emphasis goes to white,” Cheadle said. “We need to focus on the inner cities first and deal with that first.
The event lasted 90 minutes and LWV will hold its next forum with Butte County supervisor district candidates on May 9 at Marsh Junior High School in Chico.
The entire forum can be found on video on the LWV website.
Roberto Fonseca can be reached at [email protected] or @rjfonseca on Twitter.
