(Host intro) Jane Newton of the Liberty Union Party says she’s running for Congress to raise issues that she thinks the other major party candidates are ignoring.
Newton is calling for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq and she also wants to shut down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.
VPR’s Bob Kinzel reports.
(Kinzel) This isn’t Jane Newton’s first run for the U.S. House as a Liberty Union candidate. It’s actually her fourth. She was a candidate in 2002, 2004 and 2006.
She had her best showing in 2002 when she received just under 2% of the vote.
Speaking on VPR’s Vermont Edition, Newton says there’s a simple reason why she continues to run for office: It’s to shine a spotlight on a number of important issues.
(Newton) “Belonging to a very small party like the Liberty Union Party and knowing that I’m not going to care about getting votes enables me to speak outside of the, as they say, outside of the box, about things that it doesn’t seem that the candidates are speaking about at all. I mean things like the war and the numbers of people who are dying and the kind of world we’re leaving our children. Because I’m very worried about that."
(Kinzel) One of Newton’s top priorities is to shut down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. She says the state can meet its future energy needs by investing in renewable power projects.
She says she’s concerned that radioactive waste from the plant is currently being stored on site because federal officials haven’t been able to open a national waste repository in Nevada.
(Newton) “Those dry casks are probably going to be toxic for the next 250,000 years and they probably will crack every 100 years. And that means for generations people are going to have to be careful of them. It’s very dangerous on account that we all know an accident would make most of New England uninhabitable, to say nothing about all the people killed."
(Kinzel) Newton also criticized incumbent Congressman Peter Welch for voting for the most recent Defense Department budget. She says she would push for massive cuts in that budget if she’s elected to the House.
For VPR News, I’m Bob Kinzel in Montpelier