Eighteen
AS SOON AS THE 113th Congress got under way, in January 2013, the new women legislators we helped elect went to work. In the Senate, Elizabeth Warren took on the big banks. Tammy Baldwin joined the fight for pay equity. In the House, Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) introduced a bill to spur domestic production of energy technology. Cheri Bustos (D-IL) introduced legislation that would prevent student-loan interest rates from doubling. Likewise, Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Gwen Moore (D-WI) led the battle to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which included protections for Native Americans, undocumented immigrants, and LGBT people. Even local women who had been elected with the help of our POP program won national attention, as Texas state senator Wendy Davis did in June 2013, when she courageously donned her soon-to-become-famous pink sneakers and back brace, and staged an eleven-hour filibuster on the floor of the Texas Senate against extreme anti-choice legislation. Wendy had previously sponsored bills dealing with cancer prevention, protection for sexual-assault victims, and government transparency.
Yet the Republican Party continued moving further and further to the right. In its efforts to defund the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—better known as Obamacare—the Republicans resorted to Gingrich-era tactics and once again shut down the government, on October 1, 2013. For more than two weeks, roughly 800,000 government employees were furloughed, and another 1.3 million were required to work without knowing when they would be paid.
Then, on October 17, as the shutdown moved into its third week, came a series of events that showed tens of millions of people all over the country the merits of electing women—both Republican and Democratic—to higher offices. Americans saw that even in the midst of a period of horrid partisanship that left our government in gridlock, the collaborative power of women could put our country back on track.
The Washington social scene of this era reflected the partisan split that divided Congress. Gone were the days of bipartisan dinners and friendships that crossed party lines. Now, there was a social as well as a political gulf. The old boys’ network of the U.S. Senate was dead—that “fraternal paradise,” as Time magazine put it, that had “the worst vestiges of a private men’s club: unspoken rules, hidden alliances, off-hours socializing and an ethic based at least as much on personal relationships as merit to get things done”—all that was dead and gone.
Yet the women senators, both Republican and Democratic, were determined to develop strong working relationships, even friendships—and, most importantly, to get things done. So, they met regularly for dinner and, when it came to the government shutdown, their relationships led to compromise and the government’s reopening for business. As Time titled an article on the subject, “Women Are the Only Adults Left in Washington.”
It began when Susan Collins, a Republican senator from Maine, put together a three-point plan she thought both parties could agree on. A few days later, GOP senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire signed on. Murkowski had overcome a Tea Party challenge to win reelection, whereas Ayotte benefited from Tea Party support. “I think what our group did was pave the way, and I’m really happy about that,” said Senator Collins.
Soon, the GOP trio began working with Barbara Mikulski and Patty Murray on the Democratic side and put together a deal to avert a disastrous default. “In a Senate still dominated by men,” the New York Times reported, “women on both sides of the partisan divide proved to be the driving forces that shaped a negotiated settlement. The three Republican women put aside threats from the right to advance the interests of their shutdown-weary states and asserted their own political independence.” Six of the thirteen senators on the committee trying to work out the debt deal were women, and when the bipartisan deal was finally announced, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) conceded, “Leadership, I must fully admit, was provided primarily from women in the Senate.”
But that was just the beginning. Now that the Senate had put together a budget, it needed to reach an agreement with the House. This meant that Patty Murray, as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on the Budget, had to come to terms with Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee—no easy task in the context of a relentlessly partisan, crisis-driven Congress that had not agreed on a budget in years.
Like many compromises, this was a deal in which neither side got everything it wanted. Republicans didn’t get the cuts to Medicare and Social Security they sought, and Democrats didn’t get the tax hikes on the rich they wanted. Instead of trying for “a grand bargain,” Patty and Ryan focused on common ground, and the result was an extraordinarily rare example of bipartisanship during a bitterly dysfunctional period that led to Congress’s passing a budget resolution for the first time since 2009. “If we didn’t get a deal,” Patty said, “we would have faced another continuing resolution that would have locked in the automatic cuts—or worse, a potential government shutdown in just a few short weeks . . . It’s a compromise—and that means neither side got everything they wanted, and both sides had to give a bit.” As to why women were able to do what men couldn’t, Barbara Mikulski put it succinctly: “We did it because we listened to each other and functioned with maximum respect.”
Yet another example of women breaking through congressional gridlock took place in 2014 when Debbie Stabenow, then chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, managed to steer an innovative farm bill through Congress that provided crop insurance to fruit and vegetable farmers and allowed food-stamp recipients to spend more on healthy foods. In short, it was far more amenable to the organic, farm-to-table, and fruit-and-vegetable ethos than the agribusiness-friendly bills of yore had been.
Debbie accomplished this by using an approach similar to Patty Murray and Barbara Mikulski’s. “We look for ways to try to find common ground or win-win situations instead of trying to put somebody in their corner and creating a win-lose,” Debbie told me. “And I think that’s a difference in style between women and men.
“It’s not that we’re not strong or we’re unwilling to fight. I made sure that there was not a nickel cut out of the regular food-assistance programs—that was the bottom line for me. But I also knew I was negotiating with people who had different priorities. So, I approached it from the standpoint of saying, ‘Look, this is important for me. That’s important to you. Let’s cut a deal that does both.’ I was looking for ways for people to feel they got a win. That’s how you put together a coalition. I think you see women on both sides of the aisle being more practical in these kinds of negotiations.”
The farm-bill negotiations also showed that women often have a broader view of what a bill can really mean. Who would have thought a farm bill was really about women and families? But Debbie realized that, in addition to food stamps, which ensured that poor families were fed, it was important to have policies that encouraged good nutrition and health. And to make sure those policies were in the bill, Debbie spent two and a half years wooing Republicans with entirely different interests. She visited Sen. Pat Roberts, who was on the Senate Agriculture Committee, in his home state of Kansas, and then invited Roberts to her state of Michigan. Similarly, Debbie went to Mississippi to woo Sen. Thad Cochran, also on the Agriculture Committee. “It takes time to build those relationships,” said Debbie. “It’s not my way or the highway, or who’s got the biggest muscles. It’s about trying to find a way to build trust in a relationship.”
Which is precisely what Debbie did. As a result, in February 2014, President Obama signed the farm bill that Debbie spent two and a half years shepherding through Congress, heralding a new era in our national agricultural policy, which now reflected the changing eating habits of American consumers. Organic farmers, fruit growers, and producers of other healthy foods finally began to share in taxpayer dollars that had once gone entirely to gigantic agribusiness corporations. Subsidies to traditional commodities were cut by more than 30 percent over the next ten years, whereas funding for fruits, vegetables, and organic produce increased by more than 50 percent.
MEANWHILE, EVEN THOUGH the 2014 midterms had yet to take place, everyone was already speculating whether Hillary would run in 2016. No one in either party, man or woman, had better credentials. Gallup polls showed her to be the most admired woman in the world year after year. As in 2008, Hillary was already the prohibitive favorite to be the Democratic nominee—and this time there was no Barack Obama in the wings to challenge her. In polls matching her with the vast array of potential GOP nominees, Hillary was the clear winner again and again.
Even though Hillary had yet to declare, the Republicans began to attack—more than two full years before the next presidential elections. As a former secretary of state, Hillary had far better foreign-policy credentials than any Republican candidate on the horizon, so, following the tried-and-true GOP strategy, the Republicans went after those strengths.
More specifically, they criticized Hillary with regard to the 2012 attack by Islamic militants on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, which killed U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. For months, the Republicans accused Hillary of failing to launch a rescue attempt that might have saved lives and of creating a politically motivated campaign after the attack to deceive the American people about what really happened.
By early 2014, however, a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that there was no merit to such allegations. “The Committee has reviewed the allegations that U.S. personnel . . . prevented the mounting of any military relief effort during the attacks, but the Committee has not found any of these allegations to be substantiated,” the report said. Nevertheless, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) charged that Hillary’s failure to send reinforcements to Benghazi “should limit Hillary Clinton from ever holding high office.”
(Like the Senate, on July 31, 2014, the House Intelligence Committee also debunked all the allegations against Hillary, concluding, among other things, that “there was no intelligence failure” surrounding the Benghazi attacks, that there was no “stand down order” given to American personnel attempting to offer assistance, and that intelligence assessments were not politically motivated in any way.)
In a more rational world, that might have been the end of it—but it wasn’t. By May 2014, after there had already been thirteen public hearings on Benghazi, no fewer than 206 Republicans out of 234 in the House vied for the seven Republican seats on the newly formed House Benghazi Select Subcommittee. It was as if marching orders had gone out to all the Republicans in Congress: we’re going after Hillary on Benghazi, and if you want to score points, this is where to do it. On Fox News, it was all Benghazi all the time.
AT THE SAME TIME, the 2014 midterm election cycle was under way. In November, we experienced another period of creeping rather than leaping. In fact, “creeping” is a more-than-generous characterization of the Democrats’ progress: in 2014, they lost thirteen seats in the House and nine in the Senate, leaving both houses of Congress in Republican hands.
On the bright side, EMILY’s List helped elect nine new women, five of whom were women of color. We also helped Gina Raimondo become governor of Rhode Island and reelected Jeanne Shaheen to the Senate from New Hampshire over Scott Brown, who had moved there from neighboring Massachusetts after his 2012 loss to Elizabeth Warren. On the flip side, two Democratic women lost their Senate seats: Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Kay’s loss was terribly disappointing, as she had been a terrific senator for North Carolina. As for Mary, we had disagreed with her support of the Santorum legislation on late-term abortion in 1999, but I had known her so long and I was sorry to see her go.
Another of EMILY’s List’s major undertakings was our Madam President project for 2016. Just in case Hillary didn’t run, we wanted to make sure that there was a woman on the ticket, and by this time, there were plenty of Democratic women with extraordinarily impressive credentials—senators such as Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar; governors such as Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Gina Raimondo (D-RI); and former officials such as Janet Napolitano, who had been secretary of homeland security, attorney general, and governor of Arizona, and who is currently president of the University of California, and Kathleen Sebelius, the former governor of Kansas, who has served as secretary of health and human services from 2009 to 2014.
For male Democrats, it has long been the case that if you were the governor of a red state and a cabinet secretary, you generally made the Democratic short list by default. Our bench was strong enough that we felt women should be getting the same treatment. And our campaign succeeded in that regard, with major national figures Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Kirsten Gillibrand at the head of the pack.
IN APRIL 2015, JUST a month after EMILY’s List’s thirtieth-anniversary gala, Hillary announced her candidacy at a stirring event on New York’s Roosevelt Island. Her speech was not about running to be the first woman president, but it could have been given only by a woman. That’s because it was about advocating for American families—listening to them, putting their needs first, and with absolute determination getting things done for them and their futures. That’s what women do.
Throughout the summer, Hillary remained a prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic nomination, and polls still showed her with comfortable leads over various leading contenders for the Republican nomination. At last, we were finally in a position to break through the highest last glass ceiling of all!
But I’ve been around politics too long to take anything for granted. In June 2015, the House Select Committee on Benghazi—the tenth congressional committee to investigate the events surrounding the attacks—subpoenaed Sidney Blumenthal, a former journalist, Clinton White House adviser, and friend of Hillary Clinton’s. At this point, Republicans in Congress had spent more time investigating the assault in Libya than previous governments had inquired into Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, or the Iran-Contra scandal.
In more than nine hours of closed-door testimony, the Republican-led committee asked Blumenthal only 4 questions about security in Benghazi but more than 160 questions about his relationship and communications with the Clintons. As Adam Smith (D-WA), a member of the Benghazi committee, put it, “It’s pretty clear at this point that this is a political investigation focused on Hillary.” If the past is any guide, it was equally clear that this was not going to be the end of what promises to be a very, very tough campaign.
If Hillary wins in November 2016, it will be, of course, a huge step for women. But we must remember that if we achieve this once-unimaginable goal—her presidency—it is still just one step on a much bigger journey. Far from marking the end of our accomplishments, it should mark a new beginning. If anything, it should be a call to arms, a powerful reminder of how much we can accomplish and how much more work we have to do. Just ask the women of Israel, as I did when I went there in 1993, after the Year of the Woman. Those women were told again and again, “Hey, you had Golda Meir,” who was prime minister from 1969 to 1974. As if that were the answer to everything.
It’s not, of course.
To be sure, whether it’s Hillary Clinton today or Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan in the sixties and seventies, it is important to have leaders who will go first, articulate a vision, and chart a path for millions of people to follow. It took a leader like Rosa Parks, “the First Lady of Civil Rights,” to refuse to give up her seat in the front section of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. But it also took hundreds of people to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, for voting rights. It takes hundreds of lawyers to fight for these rights, and members of Congress to change the laws, and judges to enforce them, and people to send money to activist organizations, and hundreds of thousands more people to act. It takes millions of members of EMILY’s List and tens of millions of voters. Without all this, any movement is doomed.
And, it is essential to realize, as I learned over and over again, that in each of these movements social change was never permanent. Progress ebbs and flows. And in doing so, it creates both challenges and opportunities for those who want to see women progress. The ebb and flow also serves as a constant reminder warning us that we should never take the progress we have made for granted. In other words, we can make enormous gains, but they can always slip away.
Always.
We see it in the electoral realm more and more often. As much as we’ve made progress, women still make up less than 20 percent of Congress. Many of the women we elected in the eighties and nineties are reaching retirement age. Some women, like Tammy Baldwin and Mazie Hirono, leave safe congressional seats to run for higher office. Not all of them win. So, EMILY’s List constantly struggles to keep adding new women, sometimes just to protect the gains we’ve already made.
Which is precisely why it is so important that EMILY’s List continue to be a vehicle to give men and women a way to act on their values, for people who think our government should have real diversity, who think that it’s wrong that only 19.4 percent of the people in Congress are women, who think our policies would be richer and more effective if Congress represented the female half of our populace. It’s why it is so important to build a community of people who believe in social change and progressive values, who fight to elect progressive women to city councils and state legislatures, and who support women to take back the Senate and the House.
Yet women will never have parity until the Republicans open their doors to women. Though women make up more than a third of the Democrats in the House, Republican women represent less than 10 percent of the Republicans in that chamber. That’s right: for every Republican woman in the House, there are nine Republican men. In this day and age, that’s a national embarrassment, and it impacts the policies Republicans come up with.
Those numbers go a long way toward explaining why the Republicans have such extreme right-wing, antiwoman policies. If they had more women in their caucus, it’s hard to imagine that they would be so ham-fisted as to hold a panel on family planning and not allow women to testify. It’s hard to imagine they would feel so comfortable espousing their ignorant claims about women’s sexuality and issues like gender discrimination in pay and health care. Surely Republicans could learn a great deal if they allowed more women’s voices in their deliberations. And that would be good for the country.
I’m certain of this because I can look back on the past thirty years with a profound sense of accomplishment and see exactly how far women have come in politics and how dramatically effective EMILY’s List has been. As this chart illustrates, the progress of both parties from 1969 right up until the mid-eighties, when the Republicans took a slight lead over the Democrats in electing women, was minimal.
But then, in 1985, came EMILY’s List—and with it, the beginning of that wonderfully steep hockey-stick curve of the type that venture capitalists love so much. Today, 14 out of 44 Democrats in the United States Senate are women. That’s over 30 percent—up from zero when EMILY’s List began. Similarly, there are now 62 Democratic women in the House—up from 12 when we began. In all, during those thirty years, we helped elect 110 Democratic women to the House and 19 to the Senate. We elected the first openly gay U.S. senator and the first woman to represent Wisconsin in the Senate, Tammy Baldwin; the first woman senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren; and the first Asian American woman to serve in the Senate, Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono. More than a third of the women we helped elect to Congress are women of color. In New Hampshire, EMILY’s List candidates swept the state, giving it the first-ever all-woman congressional delegation. In all, we have changed the percentage of women in the Democratic caucus from the low single digits to 32 percent.
Virtually all the progress of electing women to top political offices has come on the Democratic side. The Republican progress has flatlined for thirty years. It’s a scandal. Perhaps even more important, once these women were elected, they made an astounding difference. During our thirtieth-anniversary gala, Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) summed it up succinctly. In the past seven years, she said, the average woman senator introduced ninety-six bills, the average man seventy. The average woman senator had more than nine co-sponsors for her legislation; the average man had fewer than six. Even though there were twenty women in the Senate, when the Democrats were in control nine out of twenty committees in the Senate were chaired by women.
And look at what they have accomplished! I’ve said that no senator has been more effective in promoting women’s health issues than Barbara Mikulski, the first EMILY’s List candidate to break the senatorial glass ceiling. Amazing as it may seem, prior to Mikulski’s election, the National Institutes of Health had all but ignored women’s health in their research. The health needs of the female half of the population were not considered important enough to be worthy of research—because Congress was almost entirely male. But, thanks largely to Senator Mikulski’s efforts, in 1990 the National Institutes of Health established the Office of Research on Women’s Health to strengthen and enhance research related to diseases such as breast cancer, cervical cancer, and other conditions that affect women. As a result, millions of lives have been saved.
As I’ve noted, Agriculture Committee chair Debbie Stabenow made sure that the farm bill protected food stamps for families living in poverty. Sen. Patty Murray chaired the budget effort and protected critical programs like Head Start. And, in the spring of 2015, as I watched Senators Claire McCaskill and Kirsten Gillibrand grill four-star generals about what constitutes a serious sexual offense and saw the support coming from the five additional women on the Senate Armed Services Committee, I could not help but think back to the days in 1991 when the Senate Judiciary Committee, with no women at all, shamefully swept the issue of Clarence Thomas’s alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill under the rug, with all of America watching.
Fortunately, the McCaskill-Gillibrand hearing was not a replay of the Thomas-Hill debacle. For decades, thousands of women who were sexually assaulted in the military were belittled and mistreated. For decades, their claims were dismissed out of hand, and the perpetrators got away with rape. For decades, the military pledged reforms. Thanks to the leadership of the women, the military leaders were now given no choice: they had to institute new policies to protect victims and to prosecute perpetrators.
Likewise, on the House side, in 2010 then Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the other Democratic women in the House made certain that the Affordable Care Act—aka Obamacare—not only ended gender discrimination in health insurance but also provided coverage of preventive medical procedures such as mammograms and cervical cancer screenings, and that it included contraception. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), with the aid of her sisters in Congress, was finally able to strengthen laws against domestic violence after a long and divisive fight. Rosa DeLauro continues to lead House Democrats on workplace equality issues and on creating policies that help working families, like paid sick leave and family leave.
The obvious conclusion is that creating equal representation for women is as much an imperative today as it was when EMILY’s List began. Yet today, many progressives are willing to step away from our mission, as if the job were finished. Every time primary season rolls around, a handful of progressives will examine the field of candidates and ask me, “Well, isn’t this guy a better candidate than this woman?”
My answer inevitably is “Probably not.” Close examination of the records actually shows that most Democratic-primary candidates agree on virtually every issue. There may be nuanced differences on positions or different issues a candidate has led on, but essentially their similarity is what makes it so difficult for Democratic voters to decide whom to vote for. But electing women candidates brings us one step closer to reaching true diversity in government. If you believe in diversity and equal representation, my advice is simple: all things being equal, vote for the women.
Ultimately, EMILY’s List’s mission is about much more than implementing a noble but abstract ideal. At a time when tens of millions of women have been entering the workforce, when incomes are stagnating, when families need two paychecks more than ever, it’s essential that the rules and regulations of the workplace reflect these changing conditions. As of 2013, in four out of ten households, mothers are the primary breadwinners—either because they are single parents or because they earn as much as or more than their spouses. For tens of millions of children, economic survival depends on the equal and fair treatment of women in the workplace.
And if we look at Congress—bitterly polarized, deliberately gridlocked, willing to shut down the government, determined to obstruct Obamacare, and doing all manner of things that sink its approval rating to as low as 9 percent—one of the reasons it doesn’t work well can be explained in four simple words: there aren’t enough women. At the end of the day, if half the representatives in Congress were women, it is hard to believe that public education would be disintegrating before our eyes, that women would still be making less money than men, and that the sacred halls of Congress would resemble an acrimonious, highly partisan shouting match that has earned the contempt of the American people.
Women make it work.
We have proved again and again that when women have power, they can make things happen, and when our passions are harnessed, we can change the world. And then we all win.