GOP politicians have faced boos, jeers and pointed questions about healthcare and their relationship to Trump’s policies in a series of town hall meetings

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

At town halls and district offices around the country this week, Republican members of Congress have heard the din of democracy, directed right at them: boos, jeers and angry questions about healthcare reform and fictional “death panels”, science denial and the ethical quagmire of the White House under Donald Trump.

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On Saturday, at his second town hall event in a week, Florida congressman Gus Bilirakis tried to reassure his constituents. About 250 people crowded into the meeting.

Many heckled and shouted down Bill Akins, the chairman of the county Republican party, when he claimed falsely that Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires “anyone over the age of 74 has to go before what is effectively a death panel”.

Called “wrong” and a “liar” by people in the crowd, Akins refused to back down. “You’re wrong,” he said. “OK, children, all right, children.”

Bilirakis tried to intervene, saying Akins was talking about a 15-member panel that advises Congress on reducing Medicare costs.

“We need popular provisions, OK?” he said, in defense of Republicans who want to repeal Barack Obama’s healthcare reform and replace it with an as yet undefined alternative. “It’s not sustainable the way it is now, all right?”

As a sheriff’s deputy moved to separate Akins from a shouting match, the chairman insisted “the congressman said the death panel does exist”, even though Bilirakis did not make that claim.

The fury provoked by the phrase recalled conservative anger against healthcare reform in 2009 – mirrored, eight years later, in fervent defense of the law.

Last Saturday Bilirakis faced another emotional scene in front of about 200 people, as partisans within the crowd turned on him and each other. An unaffiliated voter, who said he suffered from a congenital heart condition, pleaded with Bilirakis not to repeal the ACA, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

“Please don’t take my life away,” he said. “Please don’t let me die.”

On Friday, Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz suggested that dozens of angry voters he faced at a town hall on Thursday night were “more of a paid attempt to bully and intimidate” than actual constituents. More than 1,000 people tried to attend his event near Salt Lake City. In interviews, CNN found only one couple who were not from Utah.

Chaffetz’s claim of “paid” protest, made without evidence, echoed repeated baseless claims made by Donald Trump about the millions of people who have marched in protest against his policies. As with his false claim that three million people voted illegally, Trump has presented no evidence that anyone was paid to protest.

A deeply conservative electorate, Utahns were skeptical of Trump throughout the 2016 election. Though the Republican won the state, a third-party conservative, Evan McMullin, managed to carve out 21.3% of the vote.

Chaffetz withdrew an endorsement then re-endorsed Trump in the campaign, and this week Utahns showered him with boos over Trump’s boasts of sexual assault, his potential conflicts of interest and his denial of climate science, among other subjects.

One of the congressman’s critics included a young girl who asked bluntly: “Do you believe in science? Because I do.”

Chaffetz said he did, and alluded to the poor air quality of Salt Lake City as an example of why he cared. He struggled to answer questions about how, as the head of the House oversight committee and a congressman who made his name investigating Hillary Clinton, he would hold the new president in check.

One man said Trump’s carefree mix of his business interests with public service – on Saturday the president hosted Japan’s prime minister at his Florida resort, with the traveling press kept in a taped-up basement – was “despicable”. Much of the crowd rose to their feet to applaud him and berate Chaffetz, shouting: “Do your job!”

A teacher compared Trump to “a problem child” in her class, asking: “What is your line in the sand?”

“You’re really not going to like this part,” Chaffetz said. “The president, under the law, is exempt from the conflict of interest laws.”

Earlier on Thursday, Chaffetz and his Democratic counterpart on the ethics committee, Elijah Cummings of Maryland, rebuked a senior White House aide for her promotion of products sold by the president’s daughter, Ivanka.

But that night Chaffetz said he did not want to start “a fishing expedition” to find wrongdoing, because it would be “a very dangerous precedent to have somebody who [has] power to overuse that power”.

That same night in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Republican Diane Black faced her own barrage of angry questions about healthcare. A woman named Jessi Bohon told Black the ACA fitted with her faith.

“As a Christian, my whole philosophy in life is pull up the unfortunate,” she said. If Congress repeals the law, she said, it would be “effectively punishing our sickest people”.

“We can help both groups at the same time,” Black said, only to face another rebuke from Bohon, who said: “How many of those people were in states where they played a political game with people’s lives?”

“I’m going to pass this one,” Black said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Roseville police escorted Republican congressman Tom McClintock through an audience on 4 February. Photograph: Randall Benton/AP

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, Representative Justin Amash had more success facing angry constituents on Thursday, agreeing with their opposition to Trump’s travel ban and support for Congress’s right to investigate military operations such as a raid in Yemen that killed a Navy Seal and an American child.

As in Florida, though, many people wanted to know whether they would lose healthcare under a Republican plan.

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Last weekend, the Republican representative Tom McClintock faced a similarly angry crowd, which shouted “shame on you” at a town hall in northern California. Sometimes drowned out by boos, McClintock cast doubt on whether “manmade carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming” and defended Trump’s various travel bans.

He eventually left the theater venue escorted by police.

Republican lawmakers have tried to evade similarly tense moments. In Colorado, local news caught Representative Mike Coffman sneaking out of his own community event through a back door. In Virginia, Representative Dave Brat has refused a deluge of calls to hold a town hall – for at least three months.

“I fully intend to have plenty of town halls that are open and transparent,” he wrote on Facebook, “as soon as our first 100 days agenda is implemented and we come up for a breath of air.”