ARIZONA

At tense town hall, Rep. Martha McSally faces calls of 'Do your job!'

Hundreds of people packed a church here for a town-hall meeting with U.S. Rep. Martha McSally.

Ronald J. Hansen
The Republic | azcentral.com
U.S. Rep. Martha McSally listens to a question during a town-hall meeting at the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ in Sahuarita on Feb. 23, 2017.
  • U.S. Rep. Martha McSally is holding a town hall with constituents in her competitive district
  • Similar events across the country have seen protesters press Republicans to rein in President Trump
  • McSally says she has faced some of her critics already

SAHUARITA — In a sometimes-raucous replay of town halls across the country, U.S. Rep. Martha McSally faced shouts, pleas and cat calls from a noisy share of her constituents Thursday.

Many among the 250 people inside the afternoon event at the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ vented their simmering anger at President Donald Trump and called for her to rein in his agenda on issues such as health care, gun rights and immigration reform.

Dozens or more people chanted "Do your job!" and pressed signs hostile to the administration against the doors outside the church.

For about 90 occasionally tense minutes, there was little sign of the close partisan division within McSally's district. Instead, it was dominated by Democrats and liberals who called on her to serve as a check on the president.

Throughout, McSally tried to present herself taking measured views on tough issues.

"We have to have a smart immigration policy," she said at one point, drawing groans from a crowd that saw too many of her answers as deliberately vague.

One woman, a retired teacher, said, "You are not answering our questions." She asked McSally to answer directly "and not go on some tirade on something else."

MORE: Giffords: 'Have some courage,' meet voters

A high school student asked what McSally would do to ensure continued access to birth control for women if Planned Parenthood is defunded, as Trump has promised because it provides abortion services.

McSally said she would make sure women had access to care through community health centers.

"I'm concerned more on the outcome," she said, adding that Tucson has two Planned Parenthood offices while there are 28 health centers across her district. While some shouted their disapproval, McSally said she considered the centers as providing equivalent service.

At one point, McSally defended her vote disapproving of a rule by the Social Security Administration that would allow some people to have background checks without their knowledge. Critics saw this as overly friendly to gun-rights supporters.

"These are important issues, especially for this community," McSally said. "Oftentimes ... what you see happen is people get their partisan shirts on. They sit in a corner and yell at each other about what they want to do, and nothing changes. My mindset when I went to Washington, D.C., was trying to figure out, 'What can we get done?' "

The last question of the event captured the tone of the night and McSally's sometimes-elusive answers. Nine-year-old Mitchel Collins, asked why McSally thought Trump's Education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was qualified for her post.

McSally immediately asked the boy why he considered her unqualified.

"Because she wants guns at schools," he said, drawing cheers from some in the crowd.

McSally eventually explained that the Senate confirmed DeVos.

"I am not in the Senate. Thank God," she said.

RELATED: How to contact your member of Congress

Like others in the GOP, McSally faces organized complaints from groups like McSally Take a Stand and Indivisible, which has taken cues from Democrats on how to raise their complaints with the Trump administration and individual members of Congress.

More than a dozen people at the church wore pink shirts noting their support for Planned Parenthood, which has become a lightning rod for political controversy in recent years.

Three Democrats at the event said before it started that they have been active on social media in calling for McSally to be more independent of the GOP agenda. The Indivisible group, for example, calls for respectful protest, said Deslonde Lamb, but she's so upset about the 2016 election that she can't be sure she would be.

"I think it shows the intensity of the reaction that's going on in the country that people can't control shouting," the 69-year-old retired teacher said.

Others came to question McSally on more supportive terms.

Jack Wiemann, a retiree from Raytheon, came wearing a shirt noting that "Deplorable Lives Matter," a swipe at former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

He wanted to let McSally know he didn't want public funds used for a memorial to the victims and survivors of the 2011 shooting outside Tucson that killed six and wounded 13 others, including former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz. "Tucson's a poor enough town that we could use a lot more repair than that," Wiemann said.

Unlike others in Arizona's Republican delegation so far, McSally is holding a public town hall during the first full week of recess for the current Congress. Others, like U.S. Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., held a teleconference with constituents or met with small groups, sometimes at their place of work.

McSally, an Air Force veteran who represents the competitive southern Arizona district, has scoffed at suggestions that she is afraid to face voters, calling it "a bit insulting."

"Some of the feedback is like, 'McSally was courageous in combat but she's afraid to face her constituents.' Give me a break," McSally said in an interview with The Arizona Republic last week. "I put my life on the line for us to have the freedom and opportunity to have the kind of dialogues that are important to representative government. ... I'm not afraid of anything."

Still, Thursday's event carried some measure of political risk. Nationally, many Republicans have shunned town halls and limited other public appearances since Democratic-leaning protesters have been confronting conservative members of Congress with pointed questions and pleas for them to rein in the Trump administration.

MORE: AZ Republicans want to avoid rowdy town halls

Large and vocal crowds have berated representatives like Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House oversight committee, in Utah; Marsha Blackburn, a high-profile Trump supporter, in Tennessee; and Dave Brat of Virginia on Tuesday.

Brat had been scheduled to hold a public "conversation" Thursday in Gold Canyon with U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., but the event was changed to a tele-town hall "due to the overwhelming level of interest," according to Gosar's spokesman, Steven Smith.

"The problem was that we had hundreds of people who were not going to be able to attend Thursday's event if we didn't change it to a tele-town hall," Smith said. "The venue in Gold Canyon was simply too small. We are planning to hold future in-person town hall events throughout the year."

Protesters from Gold Canyon and Prescott were planning to assemble outside the original Gosar event, and still intended to do so after learning it was changed.

Several dozen people, many carrying signs and chanting, also demonstrated outside the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa in northeast Phoenix on Thursday evening, calling on Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., to hold a town hall with constituents.

The protest was held by Indivisible Phoenix, said Mike Johnson, an organizer who lives in Surprise. He said they assembled outside the hotel because Flake was being honored at the 2017 Arizona Tourism Unity Dinner held by the Arizona Tourism and Lodging Association.

Before last year, McSally seemed to have one of the more tenuous holds on her seat in Congress.

She lost her 2012 congressional bid by 2,454 votes and won in 2014 by just 161. In November, however, McSally won a second term by nearly 44,000 votes, or 14 percentage points.

These days, McSally is seen as a rising star in Republican politics. She is the chairwoman of the House Border and Maritime Security Subcommittee and vice chair of the House Readiness Subcommittee within the Armed Services Committee.

Last week, McSally held her own tele-town hall and fielded 17 civil calls from constituents on subjects ranging from her views on the Affordable Care Act to the loss of online records detailing the results of animal-welfare inspections at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Only one call played publicly criticized the telephone format, calling it "insufficient."

For her part, McSally said she had met personally with some of her more vocal critics.

McSally's district collectively voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton by nearly 5 percentage points last year. That has seemingly had little impact on McSally's early voting this year.

Entering this week's recess, McSally had voted with Trump's public positions every time in 14 House roll-call votes, as tracked by the website FiveThirtyEight. That was the same record as the other four GOP members of Arizona's delegation. The state's Democratic contingent has voted solidly against Trump's positions so far.