During a telephone town hall meeting Thursday, U.S. Rep. Sean Casten, D-Downers Grove, called on residents of his 6th District to be benevolent to food pantries in the wake of federal funding cuts.

A suburban congressman says states and counties will be facing difficult decisions because of pending federal budget cuts.

“Our states and our counties are going to be facing a terrible set of choices in the next year because food assistance programs, Medicaid programs, these are generally administered by the state, but funded in substantial part by the federal government,” U.S. Rep. Sean Casten, D-Downers Grove, said during a Thursday telephone town hall with constituents.

Fielding a variety of questions about the impact of the pending cuts in spending for safety net programs, the 6th District congressman said the results will be harsh.

“These cuts are going to go through, they’re going to be implemented,” he said. “It’s going to be horrible.”

He urged the residents of Cook and DuPage counties who he represents to be benevolent in the face of the federal spending cuts.

“I think what we collectively could do is be charitable both with our wallet and with our spirit,” Casten said. “With our spirit, keep in mind that the vast majority of people who need food pantries, these are temporary situations — this is somebody who suddenly had an unforeseen health event, an unforeseen death of a primary bread winner in their family, a loss of a job.

“When you go and you volunteer at these places, you meet people who are just like us. Show some kindness, show some charitability to those folks, and look out for them.”

Tax cuts

He said it is also worth noting the total size of the tax cuts in the recently passed budget bill are almost three times as big as the total size of the cuts in social services.

“If you suddenly find yourself richer because of this bill, if you gave away 30 cents on every dollar you got in, we’d be break even,” Casten said. “I don’t think we should have a world that depends exclusively on the charity of the wealthy, but that matters.”

He noted that because of the federal cuts, the DuPage County Board has put a line item in its budget specifically for food assistance.

“That’s great. They didn’t have that before, but that also means that budgets are finite. What category did that come from?” Casten said. “We’re going to have really hard conversations, I suspect. This is not my jurisdiction, but I suspect that in Springfield we’re going to have people saying ‘OK. Given these cuts to health care, given these cuts to food assistance, how can we shore up some of that pain in Illinois for the residents of Illinois?’

“Will we have to cut things that are unpleasant? What do we do for disabled kids who need housing that’s running out of Medicaid? What do we do for long-term care that’s running out of Medicaid? What do we do for the food assistance programs?”

Need to fight

The four-term congressman said what he views as Republican attacks on the U.S. Constitution will only be curtailed by residents’ continued fight.

“The inspiration we can take from our history is that when we passed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments in the wake of Reconstruction that gave African-Americans full right to citizenship and equal protection under the law and full right to vote, it took almost a hundred years before the government actually began to obey those laws through all of the Jim Crow era and everything else,” Casten said. “I don’t want it to take another hundred years, but we got to that point because people who were adversely affected by those laws didn’t give up on America.

“They fought to make America more inclusive and better as a country than we tell ourselves we are and we don’t always live up to that. I think the onus is on all of us to live up to those examples of the people we’re proud of in our history. Be more like (politician and civil rights leader) John Lewis and less like Bull Connor (commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, who strongly opposed civil rights).”

Casten said regardless of where 6th District residents are politically and who they voted for, they should read what President Ronald Reagan had to say about immigration.

“Ronald Reagan said that he’s always seen America as the great shining city on the hill and if this city must have walls, make sure it has doors and windows so that everybody with the passion and the desire can come inside,” the congressman stated. “He said that the day America stops welcoming immigrants to our shores is the day America cedes its position of leadership in the world.

“Whatever you think of Reagan’s policies, no one’s ever won an election by a bigger landslide than he did. That optimism and that view of an America that is a city on a hill is a beacon. There has always been huge majorities of the American people of all political persuasions who have subscribed to that dream and I’m not saying we always live up to it.”

‘Not as bad a country’

The congressman said he does not believe America’s current “very xenophobic, hostile, Steven Miller (White House deputy chief of staff for policy credited with shaping President Donald Trump’s immigrant polices) view of the world.”

“We’re maybe not as good a country as we thought we were when we elected Barrack Obama, but we’re also not as bad a country as you might think we are right now,” Casten said.

He urged people upset with the Trump administration to take action, even though it might not seem to have an impact.

“Just demonstrate. Demonstrate by your actions in the street that we’re there and we’re going to be disappointed for a while because the government is going to continue to do some horrible things,” Casten said. “There are provisions in this (budget) bill that add funding to (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) that will make ICE bigger than the FBI and that’s really, really scary.” He said he still has faith in the people in America.

“There’s still a lot more good people in the country than bad people, and as long as those good people stand up, love wins,” Casten said.

kbeese@chronicleilllinois.com