Opinion | The New York Times’s Interview With Sean Maloney – The New York Times

But look, when you represent a district that voted for Donald Trump, as I do, you take seriously trying to listen to people’s priorities. And a lot of those are pretty nonpartisan, when you’re talking about infrastructure, or agriculture issues, or veterans’ issues, clean drinking water, PFAS contamination, the kinds of things I’ve spent a long time working on.

I mean, if you look at one of my proudest achievements in Congress, which is banning oil barge anchorages between Kingston and Yonkers, which I wrote into the Coast Guard reauthorization bill as chairman of the subcommittee, that was fully bipartisan. I mean, that was something that on a local level was hugely important to Republican county executives, to Republican state senators, to Republican town supervisors.

So there’s always work to do, certainly at the constituent level. We’ve helped 11,000 people, as we do 1,100 and more people, one at a time, out at the district office every year — that’s not going to stop because Kevin McCarthy has got the gavel. So yeah, I’ll keep working.

But I don’t want our country to go through that. Because I asked that of Kevin McCarthy, literally — what are you guys going to do? If you get control, what can you do? Remember, they’ll need a big majority to do anything, because they can’t do what Nancy Pelosi’s done, which is pass 700 bills with three votes to spare. They’ll need 30, 40 votes to spare, because of the nature of their caucus.

And he looked at me and I said, what substantive thing are you guys going to pass? And he said, oversight — and he smiled, it’s going to be two years of Hunter Biden — that’s what we’re going to do.

Mara Gay: Congressman, inflation is obviously hitting Americans very hard, especially in New York, where the cost of housing is extraordinarily high and rising. What would you do, if re-elected, to this district, to ease that burden for New York residents?