First couple paragraphs from an interesting article
BY ALEX ROGERS AUGUST 6, 2014
Maryland Democrat Elijah Cummings, a 63-year-old black Baptist congressman from Baltimore, spent Monday in Utah, looking through the soaring red rock Window Arches surrounded by desert. He was still digesting the “excellent” barbecue chicken from a Dutch-oven the night before, when he rode a flatbed boat on the Colorado river in Canyonlands National Park. And he still wanted to talk about his weekend trip in the King Air twin-propeller plane used by Utah Governor Gary Herbert and his chance to meet a state county commissioner whose wife had been recently treated for cancer. “That was so significant to me,” Cummings told TIME, who has called his vote for the Administration’s signature healthcare law the most important of his 18-year career. “Cancer is a big factor in my family and in my district.”
All along this voyage of discovery, Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a 47-year-old Mormon who opposed Obamacare, was by Cummings side, and neither would have had it any other way. The two-night Chaffetz-Cummings trip was designed to deepen a bond first forged in June, when Chaffetz went to Baltimore to better understand the seniors, former convicts and AIDS patients in Cummings’ district. Now Cummings, his black Under Armour t-shirt poking out underneath his polo, trekked west to learn about the consequences of putting the Gunnison Sage-Grouse on the endangered species list and economic impacts of designating 1.8 million acres around Canyonlands as a national park. Chaffetz, whose mother died from cancer, said their talk about the disease was “a reminder to [Cummings] that we have a lot in common.”
