It was standing room only Tuesday at Spooky’s, a pizza place in The Dalles, where members of the local rotary club and their guests questioned Oregon Republican Rep. Cliff Bentz about his record on Medicaid, food stamps and foreign purchases of Oregon farmland.

The attendees to the event, held in a private room that fits 60 people maximum, might be one of the larger crowds Bentz speaks to during his two weeks touring his district while Congress is out of session.

Earlier this year, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee told members of the U.S. House of Representatives to stop holding in-person town halls to avoid situations that could hurt them in the midterm elections.

Bentz, the sole Republican in Oregon’s congressional delegation, is following the party’s guidance. In late February, he held four in-person town halls in Pendleton, La Grande, Boardman and Baker City.

Bentz has not scheduled an in-person town hall since then. He doesn’t have any on the books, according to his events calendar. Bentz held a telephone town hall in May and has another scheduled in September.

As the congressman delivered prepared remarks about the Republican tax and spending cut bill, protesters gathered outside. One held a sign that read “Bentz takes $ from Oregonians and gives it to billionaires,” Another, “Where’s the town hall meeting Cliff?” “Face your voters!”

“He voted to cut Medicaid, which many of my loved ones and friends in this community rely on,” said Stacey Holeman, 68, a resident of The Dalles, noting Bentz hadn’t held a town hall in the area in three years. “We’re wanting him to represent us and hold a town hall.”

Asked about the telephone town halls, protesters dismissed those events as overly scripted, with curated questions and little chance for constituents to participate.

Inside the pizzeria, Bentz told the gathering of rotarians he’s planning to visit 10 counties on his current trip and will meet with as many people as possible, going from small group to small group. He also said he’d be meeting privately with representatives of hospitals in his district to discuss the impact cuts to Medicaid funding will have on rural health care.

The congressman said that it was critical to extend President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, particularly the pass-through business income deduction, and encouraged the crowd to look into the tax provisions in the reconciliation bill themselves.

“We could have put ourselves into a recession, so there was every reason to try to extend those tax cuts,” Bentz said.

Recent polling from the Pew Research Center has found that significantly more Americans disapprove of the Republicans’ signature tax and spending bill than approve of it, albeit with wide partisan divides.

He also defended a provision in the reconciliation bill that has left Oregon counties without a share in the receipts from new long-term logging contracts on federal forests within their borders, a source of revenue that historically helped offset the inability of those counties to tax federal land.

Bentz said the rules of reconciliation prevented Republicans in Congress from allocating any money to counties from the new timber contracts in the bill, and required it all to go to the federal treasury.

Using the reconciliation process was a maneuver Republicans used to pass their bill with a simple majority and avoid a filibuster in the U.S. Senate. That decision also limited the bill to subjects related to the federal budget.

“It’s a good deal because, but for this, we would have been stuck with no additional harvest out of our forests, and that’s bad news when it comes to trying to reduce the fire risk and try to increase jobs,” Bentz said.

Bentz left plenty of time for questions. The audience, who’d listened attentively, did not pull their punches.

The Dalles resident Debi Ferrer pressed Bentz about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency canceling a $20 million grant for a new early learning center in the area, which would have provided care for 200 children, while complaining about the cost of President Trump’s golf trips.

“Often people, I don’t know exactly why, confuse me with the president. I’m not Donald Trump,” Bentz said. “When we hear that the executive branch has taken these actions, we try to discern as best we can why and so we’re still in that process.”

Linda Kentro of The Dalles pressed Bentz on cuts in the bill to the provider tax, a key source of funding for rural hospitals.

“Already 45% of rural health care services operate with negative margins, and we fear that this will push [them] more over the edge,” Kentro said.

The provider tax, Bentz responded, was a shell game “designed to milk the federal government of more money.”

Still, he acknowledged that many hospitals depend on the funding, and he’s been in discussions with the 11 in his district to understand their baseline financial position so he can do a better job of advocating for them. Bentz said the $50 billion Republicans set aside in the bill to help hospitals is inadequate.

“I don’t think that’s enough to fix the problem and so we are working on this,” he said, saying he’d been in conversation with Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid.

The audience booed just once, when Bentz was asked about his vote for recission, a move that clawed back funding that Congress had already approved for public broadcasting.

When asked if he supports vote-by-mail after Trump pledged to end the practice earlier this week, Bentz equivocated. He noted Oregon’s system had the support of former Secretary of State Dennis Richardson, a Republican and one of Bentz’s close friends.

“But you know what the most important thing about voting is?” he said. “That people believe in the result. It’s not the nature of what you’re doing, it’s the fact that when you’re done, everybody believes it.”

Bentz said he’d be asking constituents their opinion of vote-by-mail during his time in Oregon. Then he put the question to the room. All but two people raised their hands in favor of keeping it.

After the event concluded, Davina Craig, a labor and delivery nurse who lives in Mosier, Oregon, said she came because it’s powerful to have a chance to meet people directly.

“I really find that there’s value in a two-way street. Him hearing people directly, unfiltered,” she said. “Likewise, as a constituent, it’s super valuable for me to hear it directly from his mouth, as prepared as he might be.”

Bentz told OPB he values the chance to meet face-to-face with constituents to talk about issues, including recipients of SNAP and Medicaid, so long as they remain civil.

“Is it important that I spend time with them? If it’s productive for making the situation better, yes. If it’s for people to engage in shouting matches, then no,” he said.

Bentz added that constituents can request to meet with him at his offices in Medford and Ontario. “My door is always open.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/08/22/cliff-bentz-the-dalles-oregon/