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As Congress leaves the Capitol for its five-week August recess, freshman Rep. Eric Swalwell is headed home a little frustrated.

"The biggest problem for me is we're voting on extremes. You don't see compromise bills," he said Thursday evening on the east steps of the Capitol after a vote.

"When they're voting to just repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), I want to mend it, not end it. The bills are 'repeal it,' with no other solution."

As if to prove his point, in its last act before the recess, the Republican-controlled House on Friday passed a resolution to prevent the Internal Revenue Service from implementing Obamacare -- the 40th time it has voted to repeal, dismantle or defund the Affordable Care Act. With Democrats in control of the Senate, the measure has no chance of passing there.

"New energy, new ideas is what [my campaign] was about," he said. "Using social media to reach different people."

But seven months in, he finds the pace a bit sluggish.

"It's frustrating," he said. "I was a prosecutor before I came here, so I would get a case, I would review the evidence, put it in front of a jury, get a verdict. Move on. Here John Dingell put a health care bill in the hopper every year for 50 years before we got health care."

Swalwell has formed a bipartisan group of about 30 House freshmen called the United Solutions Caucus, which held a forum on Thursday in which both the liberal Center for American Progress and the conservative Heritage Foundation participated. Then his office threw a barbecue on the balcony.

"We've heard from groups on the left and the right, from business and labor about issues on the Affordable Care Act, but that's not what we're voting on. And so it's hard to go back home and say, 'All I've been able to vote on is something that wants to end it,'" he said. "That's frustrating. You get these false choices, and there's a lot more in the middle that I think we could work on."

"I don't think the American public realizes that. They think you vote on all this stuff, every bill introduced you get to vote on. But the truth is you're kind of set up with these false choices and that's frustrating."

"You just keep trying," he said. "It takes a snowball to create an avalanche. We came here to be problem-solvers; we didn't come here to throw bombs and divide us further. So we just need to keep trying."

"I'm not naïve," he continued. "It's not going to happen overnight, but I do think there is a spirit, especially among many in the freshman class, that we can get rid of these false choices, the extremes, and try and find real compromise. Excerpts from http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/03/politics/freshman-rep-recess/index.html?
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