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Crow, Bennet town hall in Aurora centers on concerns with Trump administration policies [1]
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Date: 2025-08-22
Two of Colorado’s Democratic members of Congress held a town hall at an Aurora high school Thursday, speaking to a crowd of about 500 people as the Colorado Legislature convened for special session to cope with a billion-dollar state budget gap.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and U.S. Rep. Jason Crow of Centennial answered constituent questions about concerns with artificial intelligence, environmental protection, bipartisanship and preserving democracy, among others at a town hall at Smoky Hill High School in Aurora in Crow’s district.
Crow said the Republican tax and spending cut bill Trump signed into law in July poses a “tremendous threat to the lives and the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people that we represent.” He called the measure — known as H.R. 1, or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — “the worst piece of legislation that we have ever voted on.”
The Colorado Legislature is currently in a special session to address a $1.2 billion hole in the state budget the federal legislation created, because Colorado’s income tax code automatically mirrors changes at the federal level.
All four Republican members of Colorado’s congressional delegation voted in favor of the bill. All four Democrats in the House and both of Colorado’s Democratic U.S. Senators voted against it.
Concern with actions from the Trump administration was a common theme among town hall attendees. Paul Stedman, a 72-year-old Aurora resident wearing a shirt with the American flag that read “pro-America, anti-Trump,” asked what can be done to “preserve this democracy that I’ve enjoyed and felt like it was safe for all these years, and now I don’t feel that it is.”
Crow said citizen oversight will help elected officials remain aware of ways the federal government is overstepping, as they can let their members of Congress know when they have problems with their federal benefits or agencies they interact.
“It’s getting harder to do oversight in the federal government because of the blockades, because of what this majority has allowed to have happen with this administration, so citizen oversight is becoming very important,” Crow said. “We must build a coalition of pro-democracy, patriotic Americans who are willing to stand up, even if we disagree on policy, and says, ‘No, not on my watch. We will defend this democracy, we will fight for the fundamentals of it.’”
Instead of asking a question for the Democrats to answer, one constituent asked both Crow and Bennet to do more to call out President Donald Trump’s lies, and said town halls are for communicating concerns to their elected officials, “not a rally for politicians.” She both should use their national platform to speak out more against the president’s actions and words.
Call for AI regulations
After a constituent asked what is being done to increase federal research spending on AI and to encourage safe and responsible deployment, Crow said “we’re not remotely ready for it as a society.”
Crow said AI can be an important tool, but the lack of regulation of AI is concerning. He also said it could lead to “one of the greatest workforce displacements in history,” estimating AI may replace up to 20% of the workforce.
“We haven’t seen anything like that since the Industrial Revolution,” Crow said. “It could cause major upheaval, and we have to get ready for that retraining, that re-skilling, that transition for a lot of folks.”
Both Bennet and Crow agreed that AI also presents national security concerns and would like to see the U.S. lead a convention or treaty to establish guardrails against AI with other major world leaders.
“We are at the cusp of a technological revolution on the scale of software or the internet, and we don’t know on the front end how all that is going to go,” said Bennet, who is running for Colorado governor in 2026.
Colorado passed a first-in-the-nation sweeping AI regulation in 2024 to set anti-discrimination guardrails for businesses that use the technology in decisions on consequential matters such as loans, employment, insurance policies and school admissions. Colorado state legislators are considering four bills to modify that law during the special session currently underway.
‘He’s lost my support’
A group of people stood outside of the high school holding a Palestinian flag and handing out flyers with information on funding the federal government has sent to Israel and campaign contributions both Bennet and Crow have accepted from pro-Israel lobbying groups. During the event, staff for Crow and Bennet escorted out a small group of people who interrupted to ask about their support for Israel, a scene that has recurred at Democratic town halls in Colorado and across the country.
Centennial resident Kimberly Roy and her son Adan, who is a senior at Smoky Hill, have campaigned on Crow’s behalf since he first ran for office, Kimberly said. But at the town hall Thursday, Kimberly came with a Jason Crow-branded t-shirt and Adan with a bunch of yard signs in hand that they wanted to return to him because “he’s lost my support.”
Bennet and Crow, she said, showed a “complete disregard to the people who brought up the genocide going on in Gaza, where babies are being shot and killed with our weapons.”
“They said, not only nothing, but they kicked them out and did not address the issue,” Kimberly said. “That is the moral litmus test of our time, and they failed.”
“I value these pieces of plastic far less than I value the lives of children,” Adan said while holding Crow’s campaign signs. “I’m hearing a lot of excuses or inaction against banal evil.”
Recent reports estimate about quarter of the population in Gaza is experiencing famine and more than 60,000 Palestinians — including almost 19,000 children — have been killed by Israeli military since Israel’s intense bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza began after Oct. 7, 2023, when a Hamas-led attack killed more than 1,200 people in Israel. Israeli leadership announced plans to completely seize Gaza and forcibly displace about a million residents in early August, which Bennet released a media statement condemning.
“I’m heartbrokenly disappointed. I thought he had courage, and what he is showing right now is cowardice,” Kimberly said of Crow. “There are babies and children dying today that if he said something, he can make a difference, and he is not addressing it because it’s politically hard.”
Crow in a late July statement called “the widespread suffering” in Gaza “unbearable” and said the U.S. and Israel must work with aid groups to get food to those in need. Citing his own experience as an Army combat veteran, he has been critical of the high rate of civilian casualties among Gazans in the Israel-Hamas war. Bennet in a statement called Israel’s plans to occupy Gaza “dangerous” and said it “risks catastrophic consequences” that will worsen the suffering of Palestinians.
Kimberly said she would have wanted to see Crow and Bennet speak less and listen more to the concerns constituents at the town hall wanted to share. She heard “a lot of self-congratulation” from the two Democrats touting their accomplishments in Congress, but that given the “perilous state” the country is in, “this is the time to be humble and listen to what they need to be doing better, not try to sell us on what they’ve done that’s good.”
Aurora resident Sandra Parker-Murray said she wished Crow and Bennet would have addressed the people who were escorted out after interrupting to ask why they continued to approve sending money to Israel.
“I felt like they should have given those people the opportunity to ask those questions,” Parker-Murray said. “Why are we sending so much to Israel for genocide, and then our children here are hungry? I wanted them to address that because it happens all the time at these town halls, but they never address the issue.”
Editor’s note: This post was updated at 2:49 p.m., Aug. 22, 2025 to include previous statements from Bennet and Crow on the Israel-Hamas war.
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https://coloradonewsline.com/2025/08/22/crow-bennet-town-hall-in-aurora-centers-on-concerns-with-trump-administration-policies/
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