If there was any doubt that changing Social Security will be easy, that notion was dispelled last week when Rep. Dan Lungren hosted a Town Hall meeting in Rancho Cordova.
Despite the competition for time and attention that always comes on a Friday night, constituents packed Rancho Cordova City Council Chambers to trade ideas with their new congressman.
And the exchange was lively.

Lungren, a Gold River Republican, was elected to fill the seat vacated by former Rep. Doug Ose last November. Since that time, Lungren has been busy settling into work on the Judiciary, Budget and Homeland Security committees of the House of Representatives.

He has introduced the "Defense of Marriage Amendment," a bill he said is designed to "thwart the efforts to undermine the sovereign right of the people of a state to defend the traditional definition of marriage."

With the bill, Lungren said he is fulfilling a promise he made during the campaign to introduce a constitutional amendment that would protect the sanctity of traditional marriage between a man and a woman.

Lungren told constituents the measure is needed to protect against judges who have engaged in "social engineering" as opposed to interpreting the law.
"I did not take this on because I wanted to," he said. "The courts of forced it on us."

But the most animated exchange of the night came when Lungren said it is time to tackle the projected insolvency of the Social Security system.
Lungren said that while there can be disagreement over how to resolve the problem, there can be no argument that the problem exists.

"To stick our heads in the sand is not my idea of leadership," he said.

Lungren, who said he supports partial privatization of Social Security for younger workers, warned that Congress must act quickly or the projected shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund will worsen.
"Every year we don't do something about this, we make the problem worse by $600 billion," he said.

Audience members, most who looked to be approaching retirement age, peppered Lungren with questions about the problem, but there was little consensus in the room about how to resolve it.
Some argued that money paid into the Social Security Trust Fund should be inviolate, and Congress should not be able to borrow from it to pay for other programs.

Lungren said one way of assuring the government will not spend the money is to return it to privately-held retirement accounts managed by individuals. "That makes sure Congress can't get its hands on it," he said.

Lungren's visit to Rancho Cordova included the Town Hall meeting on Friday, and a tour of the new Children's Services Center at the Mather Community Campus on Saturday.
The Mather visit was to demonstrate how the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, popular with local governments because it provides a flexible funding source to assist lower income people, is working at Mather.

President Bush's budget includes a proposal to eliminate the CDBG program by consolidating it along with 17 other federal programs. Opponents say the proposal allocates less funding than CDBG alone receives today.

Lungren, a fiscal conservative, is a target of a grassroots campaign under way to preserve the grant program. While he did not call for canceling the grant program during the Town Hall meeting, he did say there is a need to cut back on spending.
Lungren may be a newcomer to the Rancho Cordova political scene, but he is an old hand in Congress.

He previously served in the Congress from 1979 to 1989, representing the Long Beach area, and served as California's Attorney General from 1991 to 1999.

Rep. Dan Lungren (standing) fielded questions and exchanges ideas on Social Security and other issues during his first Rancho Cordova Town Hall meeting since his election in November.  Photo by Shelly Blanchard