Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold says the time for health care reform is now.

Feingold told a crowd in Waterloo last (Wednesday) night that the Clinton health care plan was too complicated to understand or to pass. He said special interest groups hammered away at potential problems and the country simply wasn’t ready to move ahead. “At this point, it’s a whole different ball game. It’s not just businesses, it’s the top health care people, it’s the high-income doctors, it’s the people that run the hospitals. They’re all crying for major change because they’ve just had it,” Feingold said. “It’s time to complete the mission President Clinton sought which is to try to get health care for all Americans.”

Feingold was first elected to the Senate in 1992, with a new Democrat president in Clinton and Democrats had held the House for 40 years. Two years later, Democrats suffered a political tsunami according to Feingold. He said Republicans put together their “Contract With America” and showed what they believed in. “Some of it was pretty scary, but they weren’t trying to be cute. They were speaking to their base, their constituents. They were standing on principle,” Feingold said. “Well, we need to do the same thing.”

It’s Feingold’s third trip to Iowa this year. He spoke before the non-partisan, non-profit organization “Working Families Win.” The group is trying to get candidates to focus on “pocketbook” issues.

Also at the event, first district congressional candidate Bruce Braley, a Democrat, who says he’s a strong supporter of the Employee Free Choice Act. Supporters of the act say existing laws stack the deck against people forming unions for collective bargaining. Braley says the act would by-pass some of those restrictive laws. “To make sure that employees bargaining with their employers, whether it’s for a first contract negotiation or to protect themselves during negotiations, and sure that good faith bargaining is the rule and not the exception, add greater protection to ensure that their rights are being enforced under the law,” Braley says.

Braley is running against Republican Mike Whalen. The seat is currently held by Congressman Jim Nussle, a Republican who’s running for governor.

A handful of members from the U.S. House Judiciary Committee will gather in Dubuque Friday morning to convene a hearing on immigration reform. Congressman Steve King, a Republican from western Iowa sits on the House Judiciary Committee and he’ll be there. “Every time we have an immigration hearing, and I’ve by now been to I think well over 50 of them — and I actually sit in on them two, three, sometimes four times a week — but it all adds to the knowledge base that I have,” King says.

King is an advocate of raising the penalties on businesses that hire illegal immigrations and he believes it’s time to build a fence along the southern border of the United States to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the country. President Bush and a number of U.S. Senators back a plan they say would create a path to citizenship for the illegal immigrants who are already living and working here because it’s impractical round up millions of illegal immigrants and sent them home. “But what we’re looking at today is a Senate that wants to establish ‘guest worker’ that really is amnesty and they want to build it upon the foundation of just a promise of enforcement, not on any demonstration of enforcement,” King says. “That’s the debate that’s in front of us in America.”

While the public’s welcome to attend Friday’s immigration hearing in Dubuque, they won’t be able to testify. The list of witnesses is already determined. “The public is welcome to attend but they won’t be allowed to speak into the record,” King says. “They will have an opportunity before the hearing to meet some of the members of the committee and have those conversations or afterwards, and if they have a statement that they’d like to get into the hands of the committee members, I would suggest that they bring it with enough copies that they could hand one to each of the committee members.”

The hearing is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. Friday in the Grand River Center in Dubuque.

Today at noon, a group of Iowa religious leaders will hold a rally and march in Dubuque to call for policies that “welcome immigrants.” Reverend Gregory Palmer, the Iowa bishop for the United Methodist Church, and the head of the Catholic Archdiocese of Dubuque’s Hispanic ministries will be among those participating.