Early voting for the Nov. 5 general election starts Friday, and, in the 9th Congressional District, Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, and his Democratic challenger, Karen Baker, are kicking their campaigns into full gear — one candidate touts understanding of the course ahead while the other steers toward a change in direction.
In an interview following a Feeding Southwest Virginia event in Abingdon, Griffith removed his congressional badge to switch into campaign mode. Having represented the 9th District since 2011, and the Salem area in the Virginia House of Delegates for six years prior, Griffith said his experience in office gives him the knowledge and access to bring home economic development dollars and ferret out problems in government agencies.
“You want to know why I still do this and why I like doing this? It’s because I want to know why. I can find out why. I have the authority,” he said. “It’s not because Morgan Griffith is so great. It’s because I have this inquisitive mind and, with the title of congressman, I will get answers or I will find a door that’s closed and I’ll start kicking it down.”
Baker, whose background includes careers in both law and health care, said she was asked to run because the problems and aspirations of the 9th District have not been met during Griffith’s tenure.
While campaigning across the large district, Baker said she often speaks with voters who have never heard of Griffith.
“I’m at fairs and food banks and bingo nights and any kind of community gathering where there will be lots of people,” Baker said. “One at a time, talking to voters, giving them my card. I ask people, how do you feel about Morgan Griffith as your representative? And I have to tell you that most of the time what I get is ‘I don’t even know who he is.’ Or often I hear, ‘He doesn’t ever come here. He doesn’t do anything for us.’ And then I say, ‘I agree, and that’s why I’m running.’ Because I care about us, and he’s indifferent to us.”
The two candidates met for a WUTV radio debate at Virginia Tech in late August, and there are no plans to hold another debate. According to Baker’s campaign, Griffith has declined all requests for further debates. Griffith’s campaign confirmed that there will be no future debates.
Morgan Griffith
Griffith credits his Salem upbringing with instilling values such as “hard work, belief in God, and the importance of serving your neighbors.”
He earned his bachelor’s degree from Emory and Henry College. He holds a law degree from Washington and Lee University and practiced law in Salem before winning a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates.
Counting himself as a conservative voice in Congress, he “makes no apology for defending the second amendment or the right to life.”
He recently received another A+ endorsement from the National Rifle Association. In response to the recent deadly school shooting in Winder, Georgia, and another incident of a minor arrested for school threats in Wise County, Griffith was firm that legislation on gun control is not a part of solving the problem.
“I think taking care of mental health needs to be the number one priority. I think number two is that law enforcement needs to take these threats more seriously,” he said. “We’ve had several shootings recently where law enforcement goes out and makes a decision that there’s no threat when there actually is one. That’s the one place where we need to at least have a discussion. I want to maturely consider it. Now, the problem is, what happens generally on the left, is they so overreact. Suddenly they’re taking away the rights of citizens who don’t have any of these issues. And that is not fair.”
He said that, as a parent of three, if his child was diagnosed with mental health issues, he has a civil responsibility to keep guns out of their hands. Since his 15-year-old son likes to hunt, does not have mental health issues, and is law-abiding, he should not have his liberties impinged upon, Griffith said.
“And should there be a criminal responsibility if the person with the problem gets a gun and hurts people? They have arrested the father in the Apalachee High School case, and they’re going to test the law,” he said. “I think that there may very well already be criminal code that covers that. It’s like it’s only reckless driving if you’re doing 90 mph down the road. If you’re doing 90 mph and you’re weaving in and out of traffic and you’re running red lights, you’re disregarding human life — that changes the legal formulas a little bit. We’re going to have to wait and see what happens in that case.”
When asked about his stance on abortion in an August radio debate, Griffith said, “I’ve made no bones about it. I’m pro-life, and I want to protect the lives of the babies and the moms. Now that doesn’t mean we have no role after the birth of the baby. We must look to the benefits of the child as well.”
Griffith said he believes abortion and education funding are both issues that should be handled by the states with a minimal role from the federal government. As a conservative, he believes in smaller government in general and sees part of his role in Congress as oversight.
He is a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over public health and federal regulations. He serves as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. He is also a member of the Subcommittee on Health and the Subcommittee on Energy.
In these roles, Griffith said he can go from hearings on organ transplants to an energy committee meeting on electric rates to another meeting on election security in one afternoon. “It is an exhausting day. I’m proud of the work,” he said.
As a long-time Virginia legislator, Griffith said he understands the rules and regulations that can hold up projects or make them more expensive.
“It’s all about the games you have to play and the stuff you have to learn to play the game,” he said.
For example, Community Project Funding, also known as earmarks, allows members of Congress to submit 15 economic development projects from their districts to the House budget appropriations committee. Griffith said this year, 12 of the 15 projects he submitted made it through the committee and are now awaiting budget approval.
Because Virginia’s rural 9th District spans 28 counties and cities while urban districts might include just two municipalities, he said fair distribution of the projects can be challenging.
“I have to always leave good projects on the shelf. And sometimes I’ll leave them on the shelf because they got an earmark last year. It’s not that the project is bad, it’s that the community received money last year. It’s really hard to give two to a community when I have so many others,” Griffith said.
Community Project Funding requires state and local matching monies and the funds must be spent entirely in one year. “It gets complicated,” he said.
The Coalfields Expressway linking U.S. 23 in Virginia to major highways in surrounding states, is a large, bipartisan, ongoing project that has been broken into pieces for continued Community Project Funding. In the last few years, the Virginia Coalfields Expressway Authority has received more than $15 million in 9th District earmarks. Griffith pointed out that the federal funding for the project means matching state funds will also go to further the long-awaited highway’s development.
Griffith is perhaps proudest of the work he’s done to bring the Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization, or AMLER, program to Virginia. Started by Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers in 2016, AMLER has brought in funds to redevelop abandoned coal mine lands for economic development.
Griffith said he led efforts to bring in the second tier of states receiving the funding, with Virginia, Alabama and Ohio having smaller coal mining footprints than the original three states of Kentucky, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
AMLER serves the six coal-mining counties in the 9th district: Buchanan, Dickenson, Lee, Russell, Scott, Tazewell and Wise, plus the city of Norton.
He said AMLER brings in more than $10 million per year and there have been many projects since 2017, including small projects like improvements around Devil’s Bathtub and fixed horse trails made safe from old mine portals. Larger projects include smoothing out surface mines in Wise County to put in solar panels and making way for industrial parks.
Perhaps the most visible project is the Project Intersection industrial park, a multicounty collaboration located in Norton which welcomed its anchor tenant, a $10.4 million EarthLink call center, in August.
Named because the industrial park sits at the intersection of U.S. 58 and U.S. 23, Project Intersection totals about 200 acres of former coal mine land and was made feasible by the removal of a mining high wall feature using AMLER funds. Griffith said AMLER is also set to fund an access road to the site.
Griffith said AMLER was crucial in Russell County, where it funded a clean-up of a coal fines dumping ground near a stream. Through a public-private partnership, a 16-foot deep deposit of coal fines was removed and sold to Virginia Power.
“They filled in rock underneath and then soil on top so that right now it’s shovel-ready for industrial facilities,” Griffith said.
He said AMLER was the right way to handle this clean-up because the Office of Surface Mining would only be able to clean up the site. They would not be allowed to go into a public-private partnership.
“The folks at the Office of Surface Mining specifically said if we had relied on the other program, the existing program, it would have taken 20 years and would have cost $12 million. Instead, under AMLER, we spent about $4.5 million. And now that property is available for economic development,” Griffith said.
“I’m thrilled with the program. I’m thrilled I brought it to Virginia,” he said. “I thank Hal all the time for coming up with the concept because it has helped our region. And it’s one of those things I’m proud of but most people won’t know when the jobs come in that I had anything to do with it. And that’s okay because you don’t do this job just to get the credit. You do it so that when you’re old or gone that people are benefitting from what you did.”
Karen Baker
Baker said she believes the people of Virginia’s 9th District need to reach out to join others in the country who share their desires and challenges, not Republicans, not even her fellow Democrats, but those from both parties who live in rural areas.
“Everything I’m talking about is something that I want to do in the 9th District, but also with other rural districts across the country. Our issues are different than the rest of the U.S. So we need rural districts to work together, and that means Republicans and Democrats need to work together to raise a big voice for our needs, make our needs known and make them imperative,” Baker said.
She says her 45-year career as a lawyer and administrative law judge has prepared her well to work with people who disagree. “My whole life has been a negotiation with the other side, whatever that other side was, and I’m very good at it,” Baker said. “I’m good at it because I listen to people, I want to understand their position and I show them respect. People get that.”
Baker has taken those skills directly to the voters. Since she launched her candidacy in March, Baker has crisscrossed the district — meeting as many voters as she can and putting a thousand miles per week on her vehicle. “I have a whole pile of stickers from oil changes. I’m not home a lot,” she said. Baker, who lives in Floyd, said the 9th District’s land mass makes up at least a quarter of the entire state, while 10 other districts share the rest of Virginia. Because the district is predominantly Republican, Baker knows she can’t just hold rallies and expect more than fellow Democrats to attend. She needs Republicans and Independents to get elected.
“So that’s my campaign strategy. I go to the people, I don’t expect people to come to me,” she said.
Baker earned her bachelor’s degree from William Smith College and a law degree from Catholic University. Her law career includes representing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and serving as an administrative law judge for 17 years. She then transitioned from law to healthcare and became a registered nurse working in the intensive care unit of a small rural hospital.
Raised by a Quaker father, Baker comes from a “culture of service,” which means that, although how she serves her community might change, she will always serve her community in one way or another. Before she retired as an administrative law judge, she started getting her nursing license.
“I’m a lifelong learner. I loved going to nursing school. I loved learning more about medicine, and I loved being a nurse. It was a new way to use my mind and my commitment, and also, because of 17 years of being an administrative law judge for Social Security, I’d seen a few medical records, 10,000 to be exact,” she said.
Baker believes healthcare is the most crucial issue currently facing the 9th District. Because the patients are spread out, it is difficult for people to get consistent care. She described clinics where people are lining up at 4 a.m. for basic health care because they can’t find or afford a doctor.
“The most important thing for health is that your provider is a continuous provider, that you know your provider, and your provider sees you over time and looks at your records and knows what the issues are. You don’t get that when you have a different provider every time you go somewhere,” she said.
She proposes more decentralized health care. She said community health care clinics in various parts of the district are doing a good job but that there are not enough of them, and they aren’t able to cover all the medical needs such as mental health services or dental care.
“I want to decentralize further by having more community clinics along the model of the PACE [Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly] in Tazewell, Buchanan, Dickenson and Russell counties. The PACE program is for individuals 55 and over on Medicaid or Medicare. It’s complete care. It handles all their pharmacy, all their mental health, all of their visits. It has physical therapy. It does everything, home visits, nutrition,” she said. She expressed she would like to see this model expanded throughout the district and eventually include access for everyone by merging the community health clinics with the PACE program.
The theme of decentralization for rural areas is found throughout Baker’s policies. Farming, for example, could benefit from building more small abattoirs or slaughterhouses.
“We have small farms that grow beef because our grass and our water is great for beef and lamb and other things. When these animals go to slaughter, they need USDA inspections, but USDA slaughterhouses are not present in Southwest Virginia. Farmers have to travel to North Carolina, and it costs $180 to slaughter one lamb so there’s not a lot of profit,” Baker said.
“Big agribusiness gets all kinds of subsidies from the federal government. Beef prices are at an all-time height. Big operators are doing fine right now. It’s the little guy that needs help, and this is one way to preserve small farms by getting them to market with USDA inspections.”
Baker’s top priority for economic development growth is making sure high-speed internet, or broadband, is available throughout the rural, mountainous region.
“Large swaths of the 9th District don’t even have cell service, and even larger sections don’t have broadband. And these days, broadband is not a luxury. It’s a necessity for education, for health, for business. And we don’t have it,” she said. “There’s money appropriated, but it doesn’t happen. So when I go to Congress, I’m going to make a big noise and find out exactly what’s going on and what needs to be done because this is unacceptable for all of us. We can’t get more jobs, we can’t get better education, we can’t get any of our goals unless we get full broadband and cell service.”
In thinking about other barriers to work, Baker mentioned that she wants a national policy on childcare, providing low-income families with subsidies so that they can continue to work and their child will be well cared for.
“We also need paid maternity leave, we’re the only Western country in the world that doesn’t have paid maternity leave, and if we want to support families, we have to do that. So childcare is part and parcel of that,” she said.
Baker said the region needs the support of federal programs. “Because the fact of the matter is, when you’re in a very rural district, the profit motive is not going to bring you everything you want because there isn’t a lot of profit to be had. Looking in from the outside — too much space, not enough people. That means that there’s a limited opportunity for initial profit. And that means we have to have incentives for businesses to come, and we need to have creativity in developing businesses to come.”
She said one way to attract business is to play to workers’ strengths. Miners, for example, are trained machinists, heavy equipment operators, and electricians. She said economic development leaders should target industries needing the skills people already have coupled with offering job training for the workforce businesses need.
“We have wonderful professional schools in the 9th District. We have pharmacy, physical therapy; we have a law school and a veterinary school. We have all of this to attract business and industry,” she said. “There are so many things that can be done, but we have to start somewhere. You can choose not to start at all, which my opponent has done. Just don’t do anything and nobody can claim you were inadequate. We need somebody to be an advocate to get business in that will replace what was present in the heyday of coal, which is no longer present, with a robust job market. We need a cheerleader.”
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