Outsider in the White House (27 page)

The Democrats were in a tailspin. Early in the session they held their first caucus. Although I am welcome to attend these meetings, I usually go only when the president is speaking. But I went to this meeting, and the shock and confusion were palpable. There did not appear to be a clear analysis of why the Democrats were beaten so badly, nor agreement as to how they should go forward. They were angry and demoralized by their new status as the minor party, symbolically represented by their “banishment” to the House Ways and Means Committee room. From now on, Republicans would meet on the House floor.

Veteran Democrats who had chaired powerful committees, sometimes for years, were now consigned to the position of ranking members, that is, leaders of the opposition. Many of them had to lay off large numbers of loyal staff who had worked for them for years. It was not a happy time for Democrats.

While most Democrats responded with confusion and paralysis to the Republican victory, the members of the Progressive Caucus immediately mobilized to fight back—both in Congress and back home at the grassroots level. We were not confused or hesitant. We knew exactly what we had to do. Intellectually, we had to expose the Contract with America for exactly what it was: a vicious assault on working people and the poor, orchestrated at the behest of the most affluent and powerful people in America. Politically, we had to rally public opinion in opposition to the Gingrich agenda, and bring our constituent groups together into an effective counterforce.

Moreover, if the stated purpose of the Contract was balancing the budget in six years, we decided we would accept that challenge. While there was some disagreement among us as to how much emphasis we should give to the importance of a balanced budget in a specified time frame, most of us agreed that we could expose the bankrupt vision behind the Contract by demonstrating that the budget could be balanced in a way that was fair and did not wreak havoc on the lives of millions of low- and moderate-income Americans.

There was an enormous amount of work to be done, and Bill Goold, Elizabeth Mundinger, and Eric Olson in my office, along with the staff in other progressive offices, undertook the responsibility of providing the members with the information they needed. It was an example of the vital role that staff play in the United States Congress, where there are so many issues and so many functions that no congressperson can get a handle on them without back-up.

We launched our anti-Contract campaign with a press conference in the House Radio-Television Gallery. We notified the media and waited. That day, the room was so mobbed with reporters and TV cameras, we had to fight our way in. They had come to hear some of the first voices of opposition against the Republican agenda in the Capitol.

Yes. We had all heard that the Gingrich vision was supposed to be sweeping America, and that Americans were no longer concerned about the needs of the elderly, children, and the poor. Yes. We had been told for months that what we believed in was “old-fashioned,” “outdated,” “1930s-style” government, and that social justice and human dignity should no longer be issues of concern for Congress.

But we disagreed—strongly, and began the long, hard fight against the legislation that Gingrich and his corporate sponsors were beginning to introduce. We used every tool at our disposal to educate Americans on the content of the Contract, from press conferences to “special orders” at the end of each legislative day that enabled us to communicate with C-Span's growing audience. We introduced “one-minutes” before legislative business began in the morning and we vigorously debated the specific pieces of legislation as they came to the floor. Clearly, we didn't have the votes to defeat the Republicans, but we fought them tooth and nail and in the process helped to illuminate the dirty business behind the high-flying rhetoric.

What we soon realized was that most Americans didn't have a clue as to what was in the Contract. It
sounded
good, but the more they learned about it, the less they liked it.

Do you want to see Congress move the country toward a balanced budget? “Yes,” the American people responded overwhelmingly. Do you want to cut Medicare by $270 billion and increase Medicare premiums by $500 a year while providing lower quality service to senior citizens? “Hell, no,” the American people shouted back. And it turned out that the American people really did not want to cut health insurance for millions of low-income children or eliminate the guarantee that low-income senior citizens would have access to nursing homes. They didn't want to cut loans and grants for college students. They didn't want to eviscerate environmental legislation. They didn't want a constitutional amendment to ban abortions. They didn't want to cut back on school lunch programs and increase funding for B-2 bombers.

In the midst of all of this, the American people surely didn't want to give huge tax breaks to the rich and the largest corporations in America, while cutting back on the earned income tax credit—which would have resulted in higher taxes for the working poor. The more that people learned about the Contract with America, the stronger the opposition became.

Members of the Progressive Caucus were not the only people in Congress in opposition to the Contract. As the new session progressed, Dick Gephardt, Dave Bonior, John Lewis, and the other Democratic leaders became stronger, more focused, and more confident. After forty years in the majority, they were beginning to learn how to function effectively as the minority opposition. Gephardt's office did an excellent job in sending out clearly written, digestible information about various aspects of the Contract.

I was especially impressed by my friend Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who is not a member of the Progressive Caucus. Rosa never stopped. It seemed that every day, morning, noon, or late at night, she was on the floor talking about the devastating impact that the Republican cuts in Medicare would have on senior citizens. She was relentless.

Gradually, as people learned more about the Gingrich agenda, the fight against it spread all across America. Trade unionists began to respond as they learned about the impact of pending legislation on workers' rights; senior citizens were getting organized as they began to realize how devastating the cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and other senior programs would be; women were fighting back against the horrendous attacks on abortion rights; and students began organizing on college campuses against the cuts in student loans and grants.

And then Gingrich and the Republicans shut down the government in the winter of 1995. They showed the American people that not only were they prepared to make savage cuts in desperately needed programs, but they were unwilling to respect basic constitutional divisions of power. These right-wing extremists lacked the votes to override President Clinton's vetoes, so they just stopped appropriating money and brought government to a halt.

And support for Gingrich and the Contract with America eroded even further.

In early 1995, I decided that the major effort my office would make in Vermont over the next two years was to help lead the opposition to the Gingrich agenda. In that regard we held twenty-five town meetings throughout the state—in our larger cities and our smallest towns. Sometimes hundreds of people showed up and sometimes a few dozen. In general, the turnouts were excellent.

Meanwhile, grassroots organizations throughout the state organized a demonstration against the Contract, timed to coincide with the National Governor's Conference in July 1995 in Burlington. The turnout for the demonstration was huge. Progressives also distributed 50,000 copies of a well-produced newspaper that showed the Contract's impact on Vermonters.

During the 1995–96 session we held six major conferences in Vermont, involving thousands of people. Some of them dealt specifically with aspects of the Contract with America, and some did not. All of them were based, however, on the belief that in a democratic society the government has a major role to play in protecting the rights and economic well-being of ordinary people. It has long been my view that one of the important roles of a congressional office is citizen education—bringing in some of the most knowledgeable people in the country to discuss issues that they are concerned with. All of these conferences were free and open to the public, and almost all were held on Saturdays—when working people could attend. They were also videotaped and broadcast on public access television throughout the state.

In March 1995 we held a conference for senior citizens, and 400 seniors from all over the state turned out. Our keynote speakers were Eugene Lehrmann, national president of the American Association of Retired Persons, and Max Richtman, vice president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. In my helter-skelter life as a congressman, I sometimes forget how important education is as part of human life. At the senior citizen conference, which was held at Montpelier High School, I was very moved to see seniors, in workshop after workshop, taking careful notes and intelligently discussing issues of concern to them. They wanted to know not only about what was going on in Washington but also about health and nutrition and how they could play a more active role in their communities.

We held an excellent conference on economic and social justice in conjunction with many of the antipoverty groups in the state. Frances Fox Piven, one of the outstanding experts in the country on social welfare policy, explained the implications of right-wing “welfare reform” to a large audience.

Then there was the conference we held on veterans' affairs—an area of growing importance to my office. This event was organized with the help of the Veterans' Council, which advises my office on veterans' matters. I am an antiwar congressman, but I am strongly pro-veteran, as all antiwar activists should be.

The young working-class men and women who fight our wars, who lose their limbs in our wars, who come home sick or traumatized by our wars—
do not make the wars they fight in
. Wars are made by politicians. It is an outrage that these men and women, who put their lives on the line for their government, often find that this same government turns its back on them in their times of need. This conference brought to Vermont Jesse Brown, the former head of Disabled American Veterans (DAV) and Clinton's secretary of veterans' affairs. The many veterans who attended the conference were especially pleased to see Brown's staff sympathetically and immediately responding to their personal concerns.

Another conference that brought out a surprisingly large crowd, despite a snowy January day, was an all-day event on alternative health. Wow! Is there interest in that issue.

I am a fierce proponent of a national health care system that guarantees health care for all people. I am also a firm proponent of a much stronger approach toward disease prevention. We spend huge sums of money treating disease, and relatively little trying to prevent it. Further, in the midst of the explosion of modern medical technology, we too often ignore traditional, low-tech medical treatments that have cured diseases for thousands of years in different cultures throughout the world.

The conference, held in conjunction with alternative health care providers throughout the state, included fifteen workshops dealing with topics ranging from diet to acupuncture to massage. Dr. Wayne Jonas, director of the National Institute of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine, and Dr. Herbert Benson, of Harvard University's Mind/Body Medical Institute, contributed their expertise.

The last major conference was a labor conference, which featured Richard Trumka, the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO. It was organized by the Vermont AFL-CIO, the Vermont National Education Association, the Vermont State Employees Association, the United Electrical Workers, and other unions, and was the most successful labor meeting in the state in many years. Trumka, the former president of the United Mine Workers and now part of the AFL-CIO's progressive new leadership, is a very forceful speaker. When working people come together and stand up for their rights, it is amazing how politicians suddenly become interested in labor issues. The governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, and the junior senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords, both asked for time to address the conference.

In late spring of 1996 we held our last conference, on women's health. Dr. Susan J. Blumenthal, the deputy assistant secretary for women's health, outlined women's health care needs and her department's efforts to address this long-neglected area in a very effective speech. That conference was held in conjunction with many of the women's health organizations in the state, who provided a number of workshops.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, members of the Progressive Caucus were expending a great deal of energy focusing on corporate welfare—the massive government tax breaks and subsidies that are given to some of the largest corporations in the country. We focused on this issue for two reasons. First, it is absurd that working people should provide handouts to multinational corporations that are earning billions in profits and paying their CEOs astronomical salaries. Second, we were able to use the corporate welfare issue to contrast our priorities with those of the Gingrich agenda. Newt and his friends proposed to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and working class, slashing Medicare, Medicaid, education, environmental protection, veterans' benefits, school lunches, and other programs. Meanwhile, they were leaving untouched approximately $125 billion a year in corporate welfare. This exposed not only the vulgarity of the Gingrich agenda, but also its hypocrisy. If Gingrich's supporters were serious about balancing the budget, they could do it without savaging programs essential to the most vulnerable members of our society. Of course, this would require them to stand up to their corporate sponsors—something they were not likely to do.

But could we, the progressives in Congress, balance the budget in seven years in a way that was fair and would not hurt the kids, the elderly, the sick, or the poor? Damn right we could! In an article I wrote for the
Burlington Free Press
, I showed how we could save more than $800 billion over seven years by dealing with
some
of the giveaways in corporate welfare and tax breaks for the rich. This illustrative list gives some details: