Presidential candidate visits Fort Mill, talks about Trump, issues in America

Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bennett said almost six weeks ago he was on an operating table, having surgery for prostate cancer.

Three weeks later, he announced he’d seek his party’s nomination to run for president.

The U.S. Senator from Colorado spent part of his Saturday in Fort Mill, speaking with voters on issues that are important to him, including health care, education, and climate change.

“The list is so long of the things that are stacking up in the immobilization of Washington, and we’ve got to find a way to overcome those,” he said to several dozen people gathered at a house in York County.

“And I think the way to do it really, as I say, is to reach broadly out to the American people and in the end build a coalition of democrats, republicans and independents that cannot only overcome the broken politics in Washington, but begin to create a future that we all really want for this country.”

Bennett said he supports impeachment of President Trump.

“I believe the president has committed impeachable offenses,” he said. “I believe very strongly that we should start the hearings.”

Here’s what else Bennett told the crowd:

Climate change

Americans cannot afford another decade like the last decade, Bennett said.

“We don’t have another decade to get started dealing with the urgent problem of climate change, which the next generation of Americans knows is at our doorstep today. And unlike all of the other issues we are talking about, if we wait too long to deal with it, it may be beyond our control. And that scares me.”

Bennett said the more he travels around the country and sees the effects of climate change, the more urgent he feels about it.

“The evidence of all of this is around us and we need to act,” he said. “We have an inconvenient problem because we happen to have elected a person who is a climate denier and he should have lost the election, just on the basis of that.”

Bennett said President Trump scared the American people on climate change because he won an argument on jobs.

“He scared the American people that dealing with the climate was going to kill jobs in America, when the opposite is true,” he said.

Healthcare

Bennett said the medical bill for his surgery was $93,000 and he had to pay only $1,800 because he has good insurance. He said he thought about how it would be to go through cancer and not have insurance.

“This is the only industrialized country where millions and millions of people, through no fault of their own, are in that position,” he said. “It has nothing to do with healthcare, but everything to do with politics, and that’s the case for so much of what we face.”

Bennett said universal healthcare coverage is needed.

“I believe that you can get almost anybody to agree that we need universal healthcare coverage and that we ought to be spending a lot less on healthcare than we are today,” Bennett said. “Both as a country and as families, we’re spending twice as much as anybody else in the industrialized world is spending and we’ve got to maintain and preserve the quality.”

Giving Americans an option on healthcare — private healthcare or insurance like Medicare — is a priority, he said.

He said he believes the Trump administration is responsible for Americans losing healthcare coverage.

“The president has spent his entire administration trying to take insurance and he has successfully taken insurance away from millions of Americans, including trying to get it away from people that have preexisting conditions. And that’s a reason he should lose.”

Education

Bennett said the American education system is reinforcing income inequality.

“If your parents’ income is the predictor of your education, that’s a vicious relationship for people,” he said.

Bennett said in order to transform the education system, Americans need to provide high quality preschool and kindergarten through 12th grade education to children across the country.

For students who want to go to college, he said, they should be able to go “without bankrupting their family, and they ought to be able to graduate without debt.”

Gun Control

Bennett said he is a proponent of background checks for people who purchase guns.

He supports legislation that is waiting for a vote in the U.S. Senate that would require background checks, which he said is supported by 90% of Americans.

“Because it’s about background checks, it’s not taking anybody’s gun away,” Bennett said. “We have to make this an issue in the 2020 campaign and we have to make this an issue in every single senate campaign.”

Bennett said he would run as a “gun sense candidate” after members from a local Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America group invited him to join their campaign during his speech.