NatSec Daily has not been subtle about its feelings on the Chinese balloon: Yes, China spied on the United States in a brazen way, but it’s a far cry from the levels of surveillance, intelligence-gathering and counter-intelligence Beijing conducts with regularity.

And yet, the startling images and performative politics in Washington, D.C. inflated the threat, turning what might otherwise have been a one-day curiosity into an issue that will hang over President JOE BIDEN’s State of the Union address Tuesday evening.

If cooler heads prevailed in times like this, it might allow the conversation to turn to the nuances of the U.S.-China relationship. But is that even possible in such a polarized atmosphere, though both sides have no problem bashing Beijing?

To get a better sense, NatSec Daily called Rep. CHRISSY HOULAHAN (D-Penn.), who serves on the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees and represents a politically split district. The former Air Force officer said that constituents at her town halls now ask far more questions about foreign issues than in years past, in large part due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and growing tensions with China. That provides an opening for politicians to hold frank conversations with the people in their communities.

“I served in the Cold War. A lot of the work that I did had to do with satellite imagery. You can bet that these places in the northern parts of our country have been under surveillance for a really long time,” she told us. National security shouldn’t be partisan, Houlahan said, or at least be driven by events like this past week’s “hullaballoon,” as she called it.

There are also far more interesting conversations to have about the U.S.-China relationship that matter to constituents, she says. Houlahan, for example, is keeping her eyes on mushrooms. You read that right: Mushrooms.

“The Chinese are quite interested in mushrooms,” said the lawmaker. “Farming is as much a science as it is an art, and so at one point, the Chinese were very interested in joint ventures with our community. And I cautioned our community that these joint ventures weren't necessarily completely altruistic. So that's the kind of thing that is interesting, when you think about the impact of our national security and our industry, our core competencies. We don't want them to be exported without us really consciously thinking about that.”

Maybe it’ll take an inflatable mushroom balloon to get that conversation going in D.C., though.