MR. SANDERS GOES TO WASHINGTON
BERNIE WAS NOW OFF TO CONGRESS, and I was off to Washington with him. We had to deal with all the issues familiar to freshman congresspeople—first, securing a staff and an office. But Bernie had other challenges to face. And so did the Democratic Party leadership in the House.
The House of Representatives was and is organized along strictly partisan lines. The party in charge controls the speakership and all the committee chairs. It also controls the agenda on the floor. No bill gets to the floor without the consent of the majority party, which in most cases also decides whether individual members will even be able to offer amendments to those bills. The ratio of Democrats and Republicans on committees roughly corresponds to the ratio in the overall House, and each party picks which of its members serve on each committee.
When Bernie was running for Congress as an independent, he pledged to caucus with the Democrats. But that was no guarantee they would want to caucus with him. No “non-aligned” member had been elected to the U.S. House in recent memory. If they chose not to admit him to the caucus, there was a possibility that he would have no committee assignments at all.
Before he even arrived in Washington, there was an effort to bar him from the caucus. This effort was led by what were called Blue Dogs, conservative southern Democrats. (The Blue Dogs of that time are all but extinct in the U.S. House today, having been replaced by Republicans. The Democratic right is now dominated by corporatists rather than old-style southern and rural members. But in 1990 the Blue Dogs still held sway.)
The House Democratic leadership—Speaker Tom Foley, Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, and especially Minority Whip Dave Bonior—treated Bernie with respect and fairness. It was while having these discussions about Bernie’s status that he and I met for the first time a young staffer who was Dick Gephardt’s floor manager—George Stephanopoulos. We also met a Congressional Research Service analyst who would serve as a resource on seniority/party status issues for many years thereafter, Judy Schneider. We relied on her research and analysis when Bernie arrived in the House and during his transition to the U.S. Senate.
Ultimately, a compromise was reached. Bernie would count as a Democrat for purposes of House organization. He would be counted in the Democratic total in calculating committee ratios. He received Democratic committee appointments, and he would accrue seniority on the Democratic side of the aisle. He would start, however, as the least senior member of his entering class. Crisis averted.
Many of the staff were already in place when we arrived in Washington. Doug Boucher was tapped to be chief of staff, and John Franco came from Vermont to be the legislative director. Our team would also include Steffie Woolhandler, of Physicians for a National Health Program; and Carolyn Kazdan, who had helped on the campaign. Jane and I were tasked with rounding out the staff. After wading through three large brown paper grocery bags of résumés, we hired Katie Clark as our front desk person and Ruthan Wirman as scheduler/executive assistant. Ruthan had worked for now senator Bill Nelson when he was in the House. She knew how to navigate the ins and outs of the House bureaucracy and became a mentor to many of the young staffers who would join our office over the following years.
Being a freshman member meant there were few choices left when it was Bernie’s turn to pick office space. His office ended up being on the fifth floor of the Cannon Building, in a cramped suite that included space that had once housed Richard Nixon’s congressional office. Some of our interns worked out of the storage cage across the hall.
From his earliest days in Congress, Bernie liked to hold staff brainstorming sessions. These were and are very free-flowing discussions. He likes to hear different approaches to issues and likes staff covering different fields to offer views that those immersed in a topic may not have considered. It allows him to synthesize what initiatives or legislation he wants to advance. It is also a chance from a management perspective for him to make sure that certain staffers are not drowning in work when the issues they cover are under active consideration in the House (and later the Senate). And he gets to interact directly with junior staffers.
On the downside, these meetings always did seem to happen as the day was otherwise ending. Not for Bernie, though. He was often in the office until 11:00 p.m. or later, long past the time everyone else had left. No staffer, perhaps other than Michael Briggs on the presidential campaign, regularly worked longer hours than Bernie did.
One of Bernie’s concerns has been how he stays connected with the people who sent him to Washington—how to avoid becoming a creature of the Beltway. With very, very few exceptions, he went home to Vermont every weekend. He would hold meetings with Vermonters and spend time with his family, who remained in the Green Mountain State.
When he was first elected to the House, one of the other ways he wanted to stay in touch with the folks back home was to personally answer every letter that came in. I don’t think any of us anticipated the volume of mail he would receive. As he struggled to keep up with it in the evenings, the piles of mail on and around his desk grew and grew. This was not a satisfactory process. As it turns out, many people will write about the same topic. So we moved to a system where he would draft or approve a single letter that could be sent to all the senders on a particular topic. It has evolved further as his national profile has grown. But he still personally sees many letters that are sent from Vermonters.
Bernie’s agenda in his first term was as extensive and ambitious as it is now. And, as always, he was driven to move as much of it as quickly as possible. His list of agenda items included creating a single-payer health program that could be implemented on a state-by-state basis, reforming labor laws, ensuring middle- and working-class taxpayers didn’t foot the bill for the savings and loan crisis, saving family farms, and protecting veterans. In hindsight, of course, the House is not set up to allow freshman members to jam through anything, let alone the bold program that Bernie was advocating.
What little opportunity there was at the beginning of his first term to tackle domestic priorities evaporated when President George H. W. Bush decided to attack Iraq on January 17, 1991. Bernie strongly opposed the war. The vast majority of the rest of the Democratic caucus did as well: 68 percent of House Democrats and 82 percent of Senate Democrats (including then senator Joe Biden) voted no.
Bernie takes war seriously and personally. He has a deep emotional connection with people, especially the middle- and working-class people who are asked to fight and die in our military and the civilians whose lives are devastated by war going on around them. Having won a seat in the United States Congress against all the odds, Bernie was now coming to grips with the very real limitations of a single legislator’s power over issues of war and peace.
The war was over relatively quickly, with reportedly around six hundred Americans killed or wounded. When the Democratic House leadership cravenly put a resolution on the floor complimenting President George H. W. Bush on his “unerring judgment,” Bernie voted no. That resolution also had kind words for the troops—language Bernie did support—but there was no opportunity to vote separately on those provisions. It was an anguishing vote for him. Bernie got some negative reactions to that vote from people back in Vermont, and it hurt him deeply. But President Bush’s judgment had not been unerring. Every alternative to war had not been tried, and as result American service members and Iraqi civilians paid the price.
And the truth of the war Bernie opposed turned out to be much darker than the administration let on. Bernie first started hearing about the true level of casualties in the Gulf War at one of his many town hall meetings in Vermont. At those meetings, he started hearing from veterans about the multisymptom illness they were experiencing since their service in the Gulf. These reports started coming in through several sources, including the veterans’ community. The Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs were not anxious to acknowledge that there was some unrecognized illness or injury that affected far more people than the official casualty numbers. Spending defense dollars on the cost of the last war is not a popular position in the Pentagon.
Bernie threw himself into exposing the truth about what is now called Gulf War Syndrome and getting veterans the health care and benefits they deserved. His primary partner in this fight was Republican congressman Chris Shays. This was just one of the many bipartisan efforts Bernie would undertake in his congressional career. Other left/right efforts included protecting Americans’ reading habits from government surveillance, opposing the bailout of the Mexican peso (in reality the bailout of big financial investors whose money was at risk), and opposing taxpayer bailouts of the banking industry. For someone who is unfairly caricatured as an ideologue, Bernie worked with Republicans whenever common ground could be found.
On the issue of Gulf War Syndrome, Bernie spent countless hours in hearings, in meetings with Defense and Veterans Department bureaucrats, and in consultation with veterans’ groups and researchers around the country who were trying to understand and treat the increasingly large number of veterans that the federal government was abandoning.
A subsequent Department of Veterans Affairs report put the number of veterans of the Gulf War experiencing symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome at 250,000. If 250,000 out of some 600,000 Americans serving in the Gulf War were injured, it would represent the highest casualty rate in any American war and an enormous cost to the federal government to treat and compensate these veterans. That was a far cry from the administration’s claims of minimal casualties, and it was not information that they wanted the public to know.
In the face of all the stonewalling, Bernie would not take no for an answer. As he often described it, the federal government owed a “debt” to the women and men who came home injured. To him, that debt had to be repaid. No bureaucrat was going to dissuade him from believing what he was seeing with his own eyes. Beyond Congress, he worked with anyone who was willing to join the fight, including former presidential candidate Ross Perot. Bernie still displays on his office wall a replica of the Arthurian sword Excalibur sent to him by Ross Perot in recognition of Bernie’s fight for Gulf War veterans.
That fight for veterans ultimately paid off. Gulf War Syndrome is now recognized as a service-connected illness, and those suffering with it are entitled to the benefits they earned. This kind of year-in, year-out fight for ordinary people is tough to translate in the sound-bite world of a presidential campaign. There’s no bill number attached to it—no key vote that can be pointed to. This is just one example of the falsity of the narrative peddled during the presidential campaign that Bernie was not an effective member of Congress. For those of us who were there with him on Capitol Hill, it was galling.
Bernie also showed during his first term that he was willing to take on tough fights for vulnerable people far from Vermont. The first Bush administration put forward an onerous anticrime bill. Its central features were mass incarceration and increased use of the death penalty. Bernie was and is a staunch opponent of the death penalty and of mandatory minimums. The country was in a different place in 1991 in terms of its views on these issues—they were far more popular. Bernie voted at every opportunity to take out or weaken provisions in both these areas. In the end, he took to the floor of the House to denounce the bill. He called for investment in poor communities rather than locking people up. He called the bill “a punishment bill, a vengeance bill.” And he explicitly called out the disproportionate impact of the death penalty on African Americans. “Let’s not keep putting poor people into jail and disproportionately punishing blacks.”
Of course, Republican presidents are not the only ones who used bad crime bills to get votes, as we were to learn a few years later.
Bernie’s first term in office ended with a legislative victory. With the help of then congresswoman Mary Rose Oakar, he passed a cancer registry bill that would allow the collection of information about the prevalence of different cancers across the country. This information was important because it would alert public health officials to geographic clusters of cancers so that potential causes, like environmental factors, could be identified.
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Bernie faced far-right Republican Tim Philbin in his first reelection campaign, in 1992. In the primary, Philbin had beaten a more moderate Republican who was mayor of Vermont’s second-largest city. Philbin was the type of Gingrich Republican who, two years later, would win across the country and sweep the Democrats out of power in the House. But in 1992 in Vermont that type of politics was rejected by voters. A key part of Philbin’s attack was Bernie’s support of gun safety legislation. Bernie’s margin of victory was almost 28 points.
In that same election, Bill Clinton was elected president with 43 percent of the national vote in a three-way race. Bill Clinton’s election represented a major turn in the Democratic Party. After twelve years out of the White House following Reagan’s 1980 victory, a new corporate-friendly wing of the Democratic Party had come into power. Its agenda was pro–free trade and a coziness with big-money interests that was to characterize Bill Clinton’s presidency and the career of Hillary Clinton. The “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council (DLC, referred to by some as Democrats for the Leisure Class) hailed Clinton’s victory in the fight to have the party abandon the economic populism that had been central to the identity of the Democratic Party and its coalition of supporters throughout its modern existence. They called themselves New Democrats. In fact, for the working-class elements of the core Democratic base, they didn’t seem like Democrats at all.
Bill Clinton and the New Democrats relied on the votes of the traditional Democratic base. But because the economic policies of Clintonism were ultimately at odds with the interests of middle- and working-class families, it used a policy of triangulation against the most vulnerable members of that base, with thinly veiled attacks meant to play on race and homophobia. With his so-called welfare reform bill and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), Bill Clinton took dog-whistle politics to a new level in the Democratic Party. This should not have come as a surprise to anyone. It was foreshadowed in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary, when Clinton left New Hampshire so that he could personally oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man whose attempted suicide left him so mentally impaired that, as widely reported, he saved his dessert from his last meal so he could eat it later. A veteran reporter on the trail in 2016 would characterize to me Bill Clinton’s political use of Rector’s execution as “the most disgusting political act I had ever seen.”
Some readers may be wondering why I’m dredging up the 1990s Clinton administration. The reason is that its impact on American politics in general, and on the corporatist takeover of the Democratic Party, in particular, underlies much of the differences within the party that continue to this day and that spilled out into the 2016 Democratic primary.
Bill Clinton’s administration represented an aberration in the historical trajectory of the Democratic Party toward more inclusion, more economic equality, and broader and broader opportunity. Although they were sold as examples of economic moderation, Clintonism’s free-trade deals—the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and most-favored-nation status with China—accelerated the deindustrialization of the nation and the resulting long-term impoverishment of working people of all races. Hillary Clinton herself played an active role in promoting the passage of NAFTA, as reported by ABC News and other media sources.
Bill Clinton apologists will point to the short-term economic numbers of the 1990s to justify their policy choices, while ignoring the tech bubble that helped create the appearance of wealth creation, and the longer-term damage done to wages and jobs as factories continued to leave the country throughout the 2000s. As recent studies have shown, the percentage of the economic pie going to the bottom 50 percent of income earners continued to decline during Bill Clinton’s presidency as the percentage going to the top 1 percent rose. Looking at this historical data, there is no difference in the movement of income to the top earners from Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush.
President Obama inherited an economy in crisis when he came into office. The disastrous policies of his predecessor George W. Bush bear most of the blame for that debacle. But some of the seeds of the economic collapse were sown by the financial deregulation of the Clinton administration in the 1990s. This deregulation provided the fuel for the economic calamity of 2007 and 2008. Lit by the match of lax Bush administration oversight of the financial industry and, as Bernie calls it, “the greed and recklessness of Wall Street,” that fuel exploded in the faces of middle-income and working families.
Clintonism also tore at the fabric of the Democratic Party. Working-class voters ultimately understood the damage that had been done to them by the Clinton economic policies. People of color, particularly young people of color, became rightfully cynical about the Democratic Party’s sincerity as a vehicle for creating a more fair and inclusive society. All these chickens would come home to roost in 2016 for Hillary Clinton.
Bernie’s role in the House in the Clinton years was to fight the most onerous parts of the administration’s economic and triangulation agenda and look for opportunities to improve the more positive aspects of their proposals. He fought hard against Clinton trade pacts such as NAFTA, the welfare reform bill, and DOMA. At the same time, he actively supported the health care reform efforts that were spearheaded by Hillary Clinton. Bernie’s hope was that, in the event something passed, it might include his legislation allowing states to pursue a single-payer plan if they chose. Unfortunately, health care reform efforts were thwarted by the Republicans and their corporate health care allies.
Nineteen ninety-four would prove a pivotal political year during Bernie’s tenure that would have ramifications for the presidential campaign. The Clinton administration, in its effort to show how tough on crime (black people) it was, pushed a massive anticrime bill. The bill passed through various incarnations but included the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and ultimately a ban on several semiautomatic weapons. This vote was an extremely difficult one for Bernie. We had many discussions about how to deal with it, because it included a host of provisions he opposed, like mandatory minimums and the death penalty. I remember Bernie’s disgust that the Clinton administration was using the same politics as the previous Republican administration had.
But the inclusion of VAWA and the assault weapons ban put Bernie in a difficult position. He had been clear in both 1988 and 1990 that he supported a ban on assault weapons—a position Vermont politicians like Howard Dean wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.
To have voted against the final version of the 1994 Crime Bill would have been seen as an abandonment of his position against assault weapons. He had paid a high price politically in Vermont for support of the ban and likely lost the 1988 congressional race because of it. Now, with the opportunity to enact the ban, he felt he could not back away. He was also committed to the VAWA provisions.
He spoke on the floor about the need to support VAWA to help end the scourge of violence against women. “All six of the women slain in Vermont during 1993 died at the hands of an intimate partner or a family member,” he pointed out. “Nationally, three out of every ten women who are victims of homicide were murdered by a spouse or an intimate partner, and every fifteen seconds a woman is battered by her husband or a boyfriend.”
But he wanted the record to be clear that he opposed the bill’s increased use of incarceration and the death penalty. So he went to the floor. “All the jails in the world and all the executions in the world are not going to make that situation right [end crime]. We can either educate or electrocute. We can create meaningful jobs rebuilding our society or we can build more jails.”
Bernie voted for the Crime Bill despite its seriously flawed provisions, not because of them—unlike Bill Clinton.
Nineteen ninety-four also demonstrated the degree to which Clinton administration policies were shattering the Democratic brand. Republicans picked up a net gain of fifty-four seats in the House, giving Republicans under the leadership of Congressman Newt Gingrich control for the first time since the election of 1952. Republicans picked up eight U.S. Senate seats. Bernie was reelected by only 3 points in the face of the Republican wave in a race where he openly attacked the NRA. It was the closest he would ever come to being unseated in his congressional career. Two years later, Bernie would hire Tad Devine as his media consultant on the recommendation of his good friend, fellow Congressman Pete DeFazio.
The results of the 1994 elections might have made some presidents rethink their approach. In this case, perhaps triangulation did not compensate for economic centrist policies like NAFTA. Instead the Clinton administration doubled down. In the run-up to the 1996 presidential campaign, the Clinton administration pushed its welfare reform bill. Bernie strongly opposed this punitive legislation, triangulated against the poorest in this country and disproportionately impacting communities of color. But he was not alone. When it passed, Peter Edelman resigned his Clinton administration post in protest. Edelman was the husband of the Children’s Defense Fund’s Marian Wright Edelman. (Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign often tried to establish her progressive bona fides by pointing to her early work at the CDF under Marian Wright Edelman. The irony was lost on the media.)
In that same year, the Clinton administration supported passage of DOMA. This legislation barred federal recognition of same-sex couples (since declared unconstitutional) and permitted states to deny recognition of same-sex unions created in other states (arguably on its face a violation of the Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause). After it passed, Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign ran ads touting DOMA on Christian radio throughout the South. DOMA and the circumstances around its passage would become a big issue in the 2016 campaign and a big problem for Hillary Clinton.
In the fall of 2015 on the Rachel Maddow Show, Hillary Clinton defended the Clinton administration’s support of DOMA on the grounds that it was meant to prevent something even worse—a constitutional amendment. Voting for a bad piece of legislation can in some circumstances be justified to prevent an even worse law from being enacted. But voting for is different from publicly trumpeting the bad law. And in the case of DOMA, Hillary Clinton’s defense wasn’t even true. There was no constitutional amendment looming in 1996. The Washington Post gave her claim four Pinocchios. Even her friend and supporter Hilary Rosen spoke out against Hillary Clinton’s claim: “@BernieSanders is right. Note to my friends Bill and #Hillary: Pls stop saying DOMA was to prevent something worse. It wasn’t, I was there.”
Staff emails from the time show the extent to which the Clinton campaign scrambled to limit the damage that Hillary Clinton’s claim had caused.
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I left Bernie’s office in 1995 to finish law school and then to work at Crowell & Moring, a DC law firm, doing mostly government contracts–related work. Bernie wasn’t surprised that I was leaving, given that I was going to law school. Not knowing the future, it was personally difficult to leave having been through so much with Bernie.
The lawyers I practiced with at C&M were top-notch and great mentors. At Crowell I had my first introduction to the corporate world, as their client base included some of the country’s largest defense and health care contractors. Too many people on the left have no idea how that world works, and I’m certainly not an expert. But my understanding about how big companies think and operate increased greatly and has been invaluable to me since. A break from the day-to-day weeds of politics also gives you perspective about how most people take in information about it. When you are in it you know every detail, every nuance. But for the vast majority of people, Congress and politics are just one small part of life, and news about it competes with a million other professional, family, and personal priorities.
In 1998, I got a call from Jane Sanders. I was traveling for work at the time. She said that Bernie needed a new chief of staff and wanted to know if I would be interested in talking about it if Bernie were. She asked me to think about it. It’s never been clear to me if my possible return to the office was something that Bernie and Jane had already discussed, or if Jane knew Bernie needed a new chief of staff and wanted to talk with me before she suggested me to him. She and I had a couple more short conversations about it. The prospect of coming back in this new capacity started to grow on me. Ruthan Wirman called from the office to set up a meeting between Bernie and me.
Bernie and I sat on a park bench outside the Capitol. Even though we had a long history together, he wanted to be sure I was up to the new responsibilities. I call it his revetting process. He wants to be sure a choice is the right one for the moment and not one based on what’s easy or familiar. During my three-plus-year absence I had in fact had many professional experiences that made me a much better choice than I would have been when I left. He wanted someone who would be an assertive advocate for him. Legal practice is the perfect training ground for that skill. A few days later he offered me the job. Just as in 2015, I had a hard time saying no to Bernie. My wife and I discussed the move, including the pay cut. She was fully behind it and I put in my notice with the firm.
By this time, Bernie was more senior and had established professional relationships with his colleagues on both sides of the aisle. He had also become a master of using the looser floor rules around appropriations bills to push amendments to votes and in securing Republican votes for those amendments. In fact, from 1995 to 2007, Bernie successfully passed, by recorded vote, more amendments on the floor of the Republican-controlled U.S. House than any other member. None of these amendments would have passed in a chamber with a majority of Republicans without at least some Republican votes.
Even an amendment that doesn’t pass can have a big impact. During consideration of the farm bill, a coalition Bernie put together with Democratic congressman David Obey and Republican congressman David Vitter came within a few votes on the floor of passing a major overhaul of federal dairy policy. (For those not familiar with the “dairy wars,” dairy politics are as byzantine as the policies are themselves. They are characterized by bitter regional, ideological, and industry feuding.) To get a bipartisan, multiregion coalition to agree on a single dairy reform plan, let alone such a sweeping one, was a miracle unto itself.
The plan was opposed by the top Republican and the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee and the Republican leadership. Upper Midwest Republicans abandoned the coalition (and their farmers) in the end, even as Democrats from that region and members of both parties from the South and the mid-Atlantic/New England regions hung together. The leaders on the House Agriculture Committee were shocked by the strength of the vote, which they had expected to crush. Top Ag Committee staffers stood on the floor in obvious shocked disbelief as the votes came in.
As they publicly acknowledged, the strong showing substantially bolstered the hand of senators, including Vermont’s senators, who were pushing for dairy reform on their side of the Capitol. Before the vote, hard-pressed family dairy farmers were going to get almost nothing in the bill. Now their plight couldn’t be ignored. It wasn’t going to be the far-reaching plan Bernie and his coalition advocated, but it would be real and substantial help.
That victory, like so much Bernie accomplished in Congress, was made possible by pushing the envelope policy-wise and broadening the scope of the debate, even in coalition with Republicans, so that change gets made even if it’s not the “whole loaf.” That view was reflected in his agenda as a presidential candidate. He articulated an ambitious agenda of progressive change. His opponents and many in the media ridiculed it as pie-in-the-sky. But pragmatic Bernie understands that you achieve the maximum result not by putting forth tepid proposals that you’ve prenegotiated with yourself but by moving the goalposts in a bold, progressive way.