Before becoming a Congressman in 1997, Rep. Brad Sherman was stuffing envelopes before elections. 

“I got hooked on politics at a very young age,” he tells Inside the Issues. 

His mother, who recently passed away at the age of 91, was a political activist before he was born, and Rep. Sherman has been interested in politics ever since. 

“By age seven, she had me stuffing envelopes, long ago before machines were so good at it. I worked for Congressman George Brown again and again. When I was eight, 10 and 12, and then I got to serve with George when I got elected to Congress and I began my service 1997. George was the first member of Congress to vote against staying in the Vietnam War,” he said.

Known for his self-deprecating humor and as an ode to his baldness, Rep. Sherman’s trademark is to hand out combs with his name on them, something he got from his mother, as well.

“My mother, she would hand out combs, not just in a campaign year, but all the time. She handed out over 100,000 combs,” he remembered. “She made a hundred thousand friends.”

One of the issues Rep. Sherman has worked on throughout his time in Congress has been fighting for housing rights.

“I remember the first campaign I was involved in. The issue was, believe it or not, open housing. There was actually a question on the ballot as to whether it would be legal to refuse to rent or sell a home to someone based on their ethnicity. Thank God we've come a long way since then,” he said.

This year, the congressman is up for re-election against Republican Mark Reed, a small businessman and rancher, for the congressional seat in California’s 30th District.

Rep. Sherman said he would like to see a solution to the homelessness crisis that his constituents are facing and said steps need to be taken to provide buyers with more options to purchase a home. 

“That means a higher conforming loan limit so that even if your home sells for more than half a million dollars, you can still get a loan through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. That keeps interest rates lower and is critical to home values in the San Fernando Valley because if, when you sell your home, the buyer to get a Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac conforming loan, they can afford to pay the the prices that people are asking for and if not then, even if the housing price goes down, the payments would go up. So, we want to keep housing payments down, we want to keep home values solid,” he said.

He supported the Heroes Act, as well as its revised version of the legislation, that he said would provide “tens of billions of dollars” to help those who are affected by COVID, especially when it comes to housing.

“The problem we have here is not Democrats who aren't responsive to the incredible needs that people have during this crisis,” said Rep. Sherman. “Instead we've got a Republican party that refuses to seriously discuss. We’ve got President Trump who has pulled out of the negotiations, then tries to rejoin, then pulls out again, one tweet after another. If we had passed the Heroes Act we would be much, much further toward being able to deal with the housing needs of both of those who were homeless before this crisis and those who face homelessness, or economic difficulty because of it."

Rep. Sherman is also concerned about past and potential foreign interference in elections.

“I think everybody needs to be advised: Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet. If you don’t know where it comes from, it may be coming from St Petersburg. Second, if you don’t sanction Russia for what they did to us in 2016, they’re going to do more,” he said. “And we have not had any sanctions on the Russian government. We’ve sanctioned a few individuals, we’ve told a few hackers that never leave their basements in St. Petersburg, that they won't be able to visit Disneyland. They don't care. I've got the bill to put sanctions on the Russian government by preventing Americans from investing in Russian sovereign debt. That will raise their borrowing costs by probably three-quarters of a percentage point.”

“Our failure to do that, and Republicans have opposed it, means that you don't sanction Russia for what they do to our elections, then they provide weapons to the Taliban to kill our forces, and secretary Pompeo admits they did that, and then they put bounties on the heads of our soldiers and there’s some conjecture as to whether they did it quite that way but they certainly provided the weapons to the Taliban who want to kill American soldiers, anyway,” he continued. “If you let Russia interfere in our elections, and you oppose sanctions for that, you get dead American soldiers and you get further interference in our election. We still need to respond to what Russia did to us in 2016.”

Read about Rep. Sherman's opponent, Mark Reed, here.

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