♪ - From NJ PBS Studios, this is NJ Spotlight News with Brianna Vanozzi.

- Hello, and thanks for joining us tonight.

I'm Brianna Vanozzi.

Coming up, as concerns over AI grow, we take a look at what New Jersey lawmakers are doing to regulate the industry as it expands here at home.

Plus, we get the latest from our Washington, D.C.

correspondent as several news outlets are banned from the White House.

But first, we talk with Joe Hathaway, the Republican looking to unseat Democratic Congresswoman Annalilia Mejia in District 11.

That's next.

Major funding for NJ Spotlight News is provided in part by NJM Insurance Group, serving the insurance needs of residents and businesses for more than 100 years.

Well, we are heading into the home stretch with six weeks to go until the midterm election and the rematch for the 11th congressional district race is on.

Republican Joe Hathaway, the former mayor of Randolph, is trying once again after losing the April special election to Democrat Annalilia Mejia, this time though with a full general election electorate and the national political environment hanging over the race.

Hathaway is making his case as the candidate who wants to focus on local problems with practical solutions.

He joins me now.

Joe, great to get a chance to speak with you.

I want to ask you first about what you have in a series of town halls coming up.

The first is this Wednesday in Madison, which comes at a time when candidates, generally both sides of the aisle have gotten very selective in their face-to-face encounters with the public.

It's become the topic of conversation in your colleague Tom Kane Jr.

's race over in CD7.

Why decide to have these town halls, which used to be a mainstay, I'll say, of campaigns, but happen much more infrequently now?

- Well, Brianna, it's great to be with you.

And look, for our campaign, it's important to get in front of as many voters as possible because what's at stake this November 3rd, both for our district and for our country, is an opportunity to really return to sanity.

I mean, since our special election back in April, under Ms.

Mejia's term in Congress, we have just seen her move away from the issues we both campaigned on, whether it was affordability or improving quality of life here in District 11, and move more towards a radical agenda, in her own words, to capture governing power.

And there's something inherently wrong with that, in my opinion.

Instead of focusing on things like lowering energy costs, she's focusing on dismantling the Supreme Court.

Instead of fixing our infrastructure problems here in New Jersey, she wants to shape narratives and create villains.

These are her own words.

You know, instead of finding ways to support families in our district, she won't even agree to deporting hardened criminals in this country illegally.

We have to send someone to Washington who is focused on the issues that are impacting families here in NJ 11, bring common sense, practical solutions back, save our country, and really restore sanity to our district.

The president is not on the ballot, but his approval rating is.

It's been a tough season right now because of the economy for the party.

Recent poll in New Jersey, StimSight Insider NJ poll put the president's approval rating at 41%.

I believe an NBC News poll out this weekend had it at the same.

What do you say to voters either at the town halls coming up or as you meet with potential constituents on the campaign trail who say, "Joe, we like you, but we're really unhappy with the president and his policies.

How do you get them on board and are you willing to publicly disagree if need be with the president?"

Well, Brianna, to be honest with you, publicly disagreeing with the president is something I've done quite a bit on the campaign trail already.

But look, it's not simply about disagreement.

What it's really about at the end of the day to me is getting back to the idea that our representatives are supposed to go to Washington to represent the people of their district first and foremost and to put the district first.

Put it ahead of the party, ahead of a president and always bring back resources and get things done for people.

Now look, so I've been very clear, if there are areas where I can work with the president and work with the Republican party, by the way, there's been a lot of those when it comes to border security, areas of the working families tax cut, like the salt deduction increase, right?

Those areas, I'm incredibly supportive.

But if there's things that the President's going to do that are bad for our district, whether it's the gateway tunnel funding, whether it's the ACA subsidy extension issue, whether it's tariffs, his tariff policy, these are things I think are inherently bad for our district, and I'll stand up against it.

I think at the end of the day, if voters really want to change in Washington, in our district, I'm really the only choice they can go for because Ms.

Mejia is continuing to push an extremism on the other side of the aisle.

And the things she attacks Donald Trump for, she does herself.

She says Donald Trump wants to shape a narrative and control the media.

She says the left needs to do the same thing.

So if we really want change, if we really want a return to sanity, to government that works for the people, I'm the only choice in this race for people.

You talk about affordability, you've just put out a policy proposal, a bill that would give some federal relief to towns facing affordable housing mandates.

New Jersey, though, already has a mechanism of state funding to help towns offset that cost.

Why should the federal government kick in another layer of funding?

And couldn't it just help towns circumvent what is their mandated requirement to build these homes?

Well, no, Brianna, it wouldn't.

Trust me, I have lived through two rounds of New Jersey's affordable housing mandates.

It is a completely broken system.

But I'm not one to take the approach of, hey, if I'm going to federal office, then I can't try to solve problems at the local level.

Quite frankly, I think we should be doing more of the opposite.

And, you know, look, the affordable housing mandates here in New Jersey leave a lot of municipalities, especially in this district, on the hook for things more than just the housing development that goes on, right?

When you look at things like school capacity, when you look at the burden that's placed on our first responders, our police and our firefighters, when you look at the strain that goes on to our infrastructure, like our roads and our waters and our sewers, you know, these are things that at the end of the day are being forced by Trenton, but will fall on local taxpayers.

And so I believe we have an opportunity here to bring federal grants and federal funding into place to solve those problems, not address the underlying issue of should we be mass producing more development in our communities, but how can we solve things given the mechanisms that exist at the federal level.

This is an area where you're only going to find someone in my position who served at the local level, seen how we can make it work and what doesn't work, you're only going to find a solution from someone like me.

Ms.

Mejia has attacked my position on affordable housing mandates in New Jersey.

It just shows she has no idea how this system works.

Because you can talk to Republican mayors, you can talk to Democrat mayors, all of them know this system is broken.

She is not tapped in on what's going on on the ground, and in the end, she's an ineffective congresswoman because of that.

You talk about your time at the local level.

You've said in the past that you're going to bring that mayor's mindset to Washington as you're referencing here.

What does that look like on the campaign trail for these next several weeks as we head into the home stretch?

Well sure.

Well to me it looks like talking to people about issues that matter here in NJ 11 and ways we can solve them.

And by the way those don't need to be just Republican ideas or Democrat ideas.

Right.

We need people willing to go down to Washington who stick by their values.

Yes.

But are willing to come to the table when it means getting things done.

Right.

Miss Mehe has already said she's she's any old blue won't do.

If you're not a radical DSA member she doesn't want to For me, I want to work with anyone and everyone I can to tackle things like homeownership costs to tackle things like our energy crisis here in New Jersey and open up American energy to bring costs down.

We can do a much better job about getting people into careers and education that doesn't leave them in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt by focusing on investments in vocational training.

So, that's what I mean by bringing that mayor's mindset down.

Focused on results, putting the political nonsense aside, and getting to work for the people that are counting on you.

That's the difference between me and Ms.

Mejia.

And we should note Congresswoman Mejia will be joining us on the program this week.

Joe Hathaway is the Republican nominee for the CD11 race.

Joe, thanks so much for your time.

Brianna, it's great to be on.

Thanks so much.

Washington is making some consequential decisions right now.

What gets funded, what gets prioritized, and even who gets access to the White House.

Congress moved on Russia sanctions as lawmakers head out in preparation of the midterms, while the Trump administration is fighting with major news organizations over press access.

And here at home, federal decisions could shape how communities deal with flooding for years to come.

Our Washington, D.C.

correspondent Ben Hulak joins us now with all the latest.

Ben, always good to talk to you.

Let's start with this fight over the press in DC.

The president banned CNN, MSNOW, Politico from the White House in a pretty major move.

Some of the biggest networks have now sued the administration over that.

They've also sort of are standing in solidarity with those original three networks saying, "We're not going to send cameras "or be part of the press poll."

What's the impact here, and what is it like for you being on the Hill amidst all of this?

Well, I think covering the White House and covering Congress, which is typically my reporting ground, they're very different worlds.

The press pool in the White House is a shared sort of ecosystem of reporters who follow the daily movements of the president, of White House officials, and of the vice president, for that matter.

The impact is, to an extent, unclear.

There's a lawsuit that's been filed in federal court in Washington already.

And I would hasten to add this fits a broader pattern of the Trump administration's both one and two.

In the first administration, Trump went after CNN anchor Jim Acosta and took his press credentials for the White House.

There are other independent reporters who have been banned from White House coverage.

And then recently in this term at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth instituted a new policy to make it far more difficult for defense reporters to cover the U.S.

military, and a lot of reporters walked out in solidarity and did not sign a new oath, essentially, that Hegseth had mandated to abide by different Pentagon guidance.

This is a broad strategy.

Also, the Associated Press should get mentioned here.

They were banned from the White House this term when they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America because as they pointed out they're a global news organization and they can't simply follow the whims of this president.

At the same time after months of delay Congress finally pushed through a sanctions bill on Russia and then headed out the door until after the midterms.

Where does that go from here?

It's a pretty teethy bill, but of course it passed the House.

It still has a bit of a path to go.

It's cleared both chambers at this point, so it's up for the president's signature.

This is a man who has this long history as a businessman before he was even in politics with Russia.

If we again harken back to the first generation, the presidential campaign that year in 2016, the Trump campaign, I should say, did not turn down offers from the Russian government to help in their efforts to win the White House in 2016.

And then Trump also wanted to build a Trump Tower in Moscow at one point.

He has long been friendly with autocratic leaders like Vladimir Putin of Russia and welcomed him last year at a summit in Alaska.

I think the legislation sort of comes at an interesting moment.

It splintered the Democrats on the Hill, and it splintered the New Jersey delegation within the House.

Some said it voted against the bill, saying it would give Trump too much tariff power, tariff authority.

And by the way, they argued that Trump could simply issue sanctions under his own aegis as is.

And those who did vote for it, Republicans and Josh Gottheimer and Rob Menendez, two Democrats, really effectively said, that camp said, we don't mess around with sanctioning Russia and Iran, which this bill also does.

So it's up for the president's signature.

And it's created this sort of interesting inter-party squabble within the Democrats.

Yeah, there's been concern that I've heard about what that could mean for overarching changes and power when it comes to those tariffs beyond this.

Let me ask you about a piece that you wrote for us this week, this interesting contradiction, I'll call it, where Congress, just before heading out, heading out the door to close out the session, approved a huge slate of water projects for New Jersey, obviously for around the country, and at the same time, the Army Corps is moving to cancel eight projects, more than that, but eight projects here in New Jersey that have been authorized, but don't have the funding.

What does this mean?

Obviously it's hard once you get these projects approved, sometimes they go through several administrations before the the money is there.

What does it mean effectively?

It's sort of an interesting juxtaposition between the two.

This is the bill the House passed is comparable to something the Senate is also writing.

This is a bill Congress writes every two years to authorize and set the guidelines for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of projects, water studies, dredging efforts across the country.

About 70, 75, 80 of those this time around are in New Jersey.

And I should really add, it's a popular bill.

People like delivering water projects to their home districts, their home states.

But yeah, as you point out, meanwhile-- - Not to mention, we just had a huge deluge of rain and flooding in North Jersey, where several of the members who have projects put in for that authorization, go on.

- Right, and this is the sort of thing that would guard against that sort of flooding.

These are really important projects.

And often they're popular with construction firms, local businesses, environmental groups who want to protect certain fragile ecosystems.

But this is sort of Congress 101.

To get a project actually and have shovels in the ground, you need two things.

You need authorization and you need appropriation.

And these eight projects that may be canceled, it's not final yet, but that may be canceled, they got authorization in the 80s, the 90s, they never got funding.

So Congresses for years on end did not fund these.

And because of that, the Army Corps has moved to cancel them.

It's sort of a simple message and good lesson of doing the basic blocking and tackling, to use a football analogy, of government.

To get these things done, you need both.

That didn't happen here.

The secret ingredient is always money.

Ben Hulak for us in Washington, D.C.

Ben, great to talk with you.

You too.

AI technology is changing the way many of us live our lives, largely by making information faster and more accessible.

But recently, a researcher working with OpenAI and Anthropic resigned from his position, warning that AI researchers are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

Some see a future where AI machines could kill all humans.

Federal lawmakers haven't yet agreed on a response, but here at home, state lawmakers are taking up the issue.

Assemblyman Andrew McCurdy has a package of bills that would create a number of guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence.

He spoke with our Joanna Gagis about that as part of our Under the Dome series.

Assemblyman thank you so much for being with us today.

AI really offers so much to us in terms of access and speed of information, but we're already seeing some of the darker sides of how it can be used.

You've introduced a package of bills recently aiming to address what you call generative AI.

Can you explain what generative AI is?

Well, thanks for having me.

Generative AI is the idea of technology that can learn and can ultimately potentially act autonomously.

And so there are significant risks with that technological development and the package of bills tries to get a common sense guardrails on that evolution.

Okay, talk me through what some of those guardrails would look like.

So I think that we're at a inflection point when it comes to artificial intelligence.

We have reports of AI agents going rogue and hacking into other companies and communicating with each other, whistleblowers talking about inappropriate risks being taken, and the companies themselves suggesting that there should be more regulation.

I have a bill that we put out back in May, which is called the AI Accountability Act.

And what it says is that if these AI companies create technology that goes out and does bad stuff, does harm to people, that the companies themselves could be held accountable for significant financial penalties.

It would be enforced by the attorney general.

And when there's a vacuum of leadership on this issue federally, I believe that the states need to step in.

Let me jump in here, because I want to bring to life what you just talked about.

We've heard reports of AI being used to mimic someone's voice and being used to, you know, trap people into scams where they lose money.

We're also hearing new reports of video circulating, unfortunately on Meta, Facebook and Instagram of children whose faces have been taken from posts, probably posted by parents.

And then artificially, you know, artificial intelligence is putting them into these sexually explicit videos.

Just really dangerous and harmful behavior that we're seeing.

You have a bill that would create specific penalties for children or any harms done to children.

Talk us through that.

So there's a there are a couple of different bills in the package.

I've described one.

There's also another one that would allow individuals to bring lawsuits if their likeness was used in AI-generated content, videos, images that was indistinguishable from reality, which I think is going to be an only increasing problem as the technology develops.

But the AI Accountability Act would also say if the AI company creates a product that goes and is used to create child pornography or something like that in your example, that the company itself could be held accountable.

And I think if they have that liability hanging over their head and the incentives are aligned, that they will move more carefully in developing their products and ensuring that there are proper guardrails and that the technology can't be used to do harm.

Yeah, and when you talk about differentiating regular video or real video from AI, I agree it is getting harder and harder, although my kids still seem to be better at identifying it than I am.

I don't know if that's good or bad, but you would like to see these disclosures.

What should that look like?

So that's a third bill.

We have the AI image disclosure act, which would explicitly require both an explicit disclosure, something that says like made in AI on the image or the video, made, sorry, made with AI.

So people know, as well as inputs in the metadata that let people run it through systems to check, is this an AI generated video or image?

And so that's based on something that other states have done.

We've taken it a little bit further.

And I think it's a common sense thing that people would want.

We've all had the experience, and it sounds like you have, Joanna, of going through our newsfeed, our social media feed, and not being able to tell what's real and what's not.

And I think that that's a real problem for public discourse and it's only going to get worse.

Yeah, you said that there's a vacuum of federal leadership.

We've seen members of the House are now out until the midterm elections.

This has to do, of course, not with AI, but Speaker Johnson looks like was trying to avoid an impeachment vote on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

But in the meantime, that leaves a number of pieces of legislation that actually seem to have bipartisan support, or at least there's bipartisan support to get something done.

It leaves those in that vacuum.

What do you believe we need to see from our federal lawmakers when it comes to regulation?

Well, what I can really speak to, Joanna, is what I can control in the state government, or in terms of my own actions and policymaking.

And so what I'm focused on is putting good ideas forward, common sense, regulation, guardrails, because this is the moment of our time.

This is the challenge of our time.

I ran for office last year because I want people in government at all levels to be thinking about protecting the next generation, our kids and our grandkids.

And we're facing a moment like that right now.

So I think if the states step up and put forward good ideas, good first steps, hopefully it will increase the pressure on the federal government to act sensibly here.

- Stepping away from AI and what that regulation looks like, I wanna look at data centers, right?

And how we create this AI.

Governor Sherrill recently said that she does not support a statewide moratorium on AI data centers but that she'd rather leave it up to towns.

We've seen that debate play out in municipalities and cities across the state of New Jersey.

Although the governor has put in some rules for those data centers if and when they do come in, do you agree with that position that it should be left up to the municipalities?

I'll give you three three thoughts on data centers.

The first is that we certainly should not be subsidizing large AI data centers in 2026 in the state of New Jersey.

So that's why I did a bill that was just signed into law by the governor that repealed $250 million worth of tax breaks for large AI data centers in the state of New Jersey.

I think they're profitable companies, they're driving up energy prices, and there's just no real need to subsidize them in the state of New Jersey.

The second thing is that communities absolutely should have a say in what's being built there, and I think a lot of the backlash, or at least part of the backlash, is coming from a lack of transparency that people perceive and projects happening without a lot of public conversation about it.

And so if the way to address that is a pause, or it's as the governor suggests, those are conversations I'm certainly open to and will be having with my colleagues certainly in the coming weeks.

But at the... Oh, sorry, did you want to jump in?

I think we have to leave it there.

We are out of time, but I want to thank you for coming on and being with us.

Assemblyman Andrew McCurdy in the 21st Legislative District.

Thanks for your time.

Thanks, Joanna.

Under the Dome is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

>> That's going to do it for us tonight.

I'm Brianna for the entire spotlight news team.

Thanks for being with us.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow.

>> RWJBarnabas health.

Learn more at RWJBH.org.

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