interviews
Labor and the White House
by Dave Weigel
March 31, 2021
This interview with Dave Weigel, national reporter covering politics for the Washington Post, was conducted and condensed by franknews and Payday Report.
DW | The White House's involvement in the Amazon union drive was a big surprise. I mean, we know where it could have originated, the union talked to the White House; they have kind of an open door with Biden that they didn't have with Trump. We know that Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ campaign chairman, and his group, Perfect Union, got involved. So, there was public pressure.
The fact that the White House and the president released that video was a big deal to people. And, he made this decision to get involved very early on in his presidency. It was within his first 50 days. He decided to do what hadn't been done before and give a message in support of the union. It was a very careful message. The new labor secretary, Marty Walsh, when asked specifically about Amazon, responded in more general tones.
But, no matter what happens, if you are in for a penny, you are in for a pound.
A lot of previous presidents, including Barack Obama, said a lot less about these union drives and, in doing so, limited their own exposure. If the drive didn't work, people didn't say that the president supported something that didn't work. The fact that Biden made a statement, early on, when it wasn't clear how this was going to go, is a real political statement of what they thought was important.
frank | How do you think his background plays a role in this?
He's always leaned in really hard and identified with workers in the same way he's tried to identify with different civil rights movements. Joe Biden has always wanted to be seen as the kind of person who is coming from Scranton, who has lived through the sixties, and who wants to jump to the front of the march if there is a struggle happening.
He frames everything in terms of fairness. He's not as natural as other members of the party in talking about this. When Bernie Sanders talks about this, for example, he talks about greed, he names CEOs, he says nobody deserves that much money, he talks about a maximum wage and how there should be no billionaires at all. Biden doesn't go that far. Biden has never gone after Jeff Bezos. He's never gone after individual heads of companies the way that Sanders does. He does this sort of a "Hey man, these guys are under assault, somebody needs to stick up for them."
That is something that he has always wanted to be part of his brand. Even when he was voting for trade deals like NAFTA as a Senator, he was never really comfortable. He had the same ideological mindset as a lot of the Democrats in the eighties and the nineties. He did it because he saw that that was the way things were moving and he voted strategically. But, the stuff that fired him up was when he could side with workers. It is the same thing with the projects he took on under Obama when he was Vice President.
During the Democratic primary, he didn't get the same amount of labor support that Hillary Clinton did, but, Sanders didn't get it either. There wasn't the same sort of a landslide of labor to get in early and say, this is our candidate. Instead, they were demanding more of the candidates.
I would cover presidential primary events with the Teamsters in Cedar Rapids or the Building Trades in DC and you would kind of look to the level of applause as an indicator. The interesting thing is that at those events Sanders would lay out the things he did and what he wanted to pass. Biden would go on at length about non-compete clauses and about wage theft and things like that. It was less, "I have studied all of the papers on this and I've decided this is my policy," and more of "this seems unfair and I'm against this thing."
I think the Democratic Party is increasingly understanding what labor can mean for them strategically.
Republicans have gotten kind of tangled up on labor. They have done better with union households, but they are basically the party of deregulation still. They've never really moved on the labor part of their messaging. That makes it easier for Biden to compete for these workers. When it comes down to it, Republicans want “right-to-work." Josh Hawley, who branded himself as a working-class candidate, for example, supports a national right-to-work.
Biden was very concerned with winning back more union households. Union workers were saying, “Democrats had the presidency for 16 years. What do they do for us?” Biden didn't have all the answers that labor wanted, but he was making a lot of specific promises about how he was going to act. He talked about infrastructure spending and about how he was going to run the NLRB and how he was going to approach employers. It was less than Sanders did, but that's way more than Democrats had done in the past.
I mean, the McCain/Romney era Republicans had no appeal to the sort of voters who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump. Biden only peeled back maybe 10% of them depending on where you're talking about, but it has made life easier for Democrats.
This fight has in large part been framed in the context of continuing a battle for civil rights. Do you see Biden lean into that messaging?
Biden did not really lean to the racial justice aspect or the civil rights legacy aspect of this labor fight. When the congressional delegation here came down a couple of weeks before the vote, they were much more explicit. Someone like Jamal Bowman or Cori Bush is much more comfortable saying that than Biden. That is the thing about Biden. He basically sets boundaries. He says what his position is and backs off and lets the action happen without his constant commentary. It's very different than Trump in that way too. And that's different than the Sanders position. And it's different than what Warren said her position would be as president.
Can you give us context on how or why you started covering this story?
I started covering the Amazon drive because of the president and members of Congress intervening. I mean, labor decided to get involved months before, but the fact that Democrats were getting involved was new. It has been interesting to monitor their investment in this over other Democratic Party causes.
There's a little bit of intervention from the Democrats, but not, I'd say equal to what Amazon is doing. They are not the advertisements on TV. We all know the Democratic party is kind of involved, but it is not the same political project that I've seen in other places.
There are two stories that kind of were happening at the same time; they have merged, but not completely. One is this labor drive, which is smaller than most drives that have succeeded. It is not overwhelming. You don't see labor signs everywhere you go. But, on the other hand, the level of national involvement is kind of new.
Had Biden said nothing, there would have been a story, but it wouldn't involve the White House, it wouldn't involve the Democratic Party, and it might not involve the PRO Act.
And I think that's going to change because of this.
New interview w/ @daveweigel @PaydayReport
— frank news (@FrankNewsUS) April 6, 2021
"The White House's involvement with the Amazon drive was a big surprise ... Previous presidents, Obama comes to mind, said a lot less. The fact that Biden did that early on is a political statement of what they thought was important." pic.twitter.com/MwYlmqE4xQ
That was a big decision Biden made to be a part of this.
Right. And that political story is interesting. The story here is much more independent. A lot of the people who've come in to help canvas are from smaller groups. You have Black Lives Matter and DSA groups from the area, but you don't have the Democratic Party getting involved in a huge way. I think that is something that people will revisit after the vote.
Should the Democratic Party, like most left parties in the world, be very involved with labor? Should they always take the side of labor?
Most social democratic parties are labor parties and they build up from there. Their coalition includes labor unions. In the British Labour Party, for example, labor has a role in electing the leadership. That is not the case here. That's the conversation I think they're going to start having when this votes over. For example, if there are, and the union says there are, hundreds of people around the country calling them saying, "Hey, I have some questions about what I can do at my fulfillment center in my town," that will be a question for Democrats.
And if Amazon wins, do you get spooked? Amazon has been very punchy in their PR. They might say that a bunch of elite Democrats stood with the union and the workers stood with Amazon. That is very comfortable turf for Amazon to be on, and that leaves a big question open for Democrats. If the union succeeds, throw all of that out the window. I think the lesson that everyone would take in that case would be that if it takes less than a three-minute video from the president to get momentum for something like this, then we should keep doing that. As we talk, I don't know the answer to that question. I think that is something that is going to be answered when the votes are in.
interviews
Insulated From the Ballot Box
by Dave Daley
December 30, 2020
This interview with Dave Daley, a senior fellow for FairVote and the author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy and most recently, Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy, was conducted and condensed by franknews. We first spoke to Dave in May 2020.
Dave Daley | Redistricting happens at the state level. If you want to try to understand the lay of the land as we head into the next cycle, we've got to look at it state by state. Democrats will be in a slightly stronger position in some of the states where they were wiped off the board during the last round of redistricting.
I think what's important to start with is that in 2010 Republicans ran a really sophisticated and tactically superior effort than the Democrats in an important redistricting year. They took control of all of the state legislatures in many states that were key: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida. Republicans never surrendered control in any of those state legislatures over the course of the entire decade, even in years when Democratic candidates won hundreds of thousands of more votes in statewide races.
There are similar stories in Michigan, similar stories in North Carolina, and similar stories in Wisconsin. The 2010 maps held. We have never seen gerrymandering the likes of which we had this last decade at the state legislative level. Ordinarily, gerrymandering fades over time: people die, new voters of age, people move, and political opinion shifts. Certainly, all of those things happened over this decade, but the results did not change in any of those states.
frank | Was there any successful efforts mounted against this reality? When we redistrict with results from the 2020 census, how will it affect the next decade?
Over the past decade, Democrats had to find other ways to gain a seat at the table for redistricting. In some of these states, the easiest way is to win a governor's race. Governors have veto power over proposed redistricting maps. Democrats won the governorship in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Those will be important positions. Democrats have also won important victories in Supreme Court races. In Ohio, Democrats will control the state Supreme court 4:3, in North Carolina those advantages eroded a little bit in 2020, but Democrats will still control the court, and in Pennsylvania, Democrats took back the court in 2018 and that court in 2018 and overturned a gerrymandered congressional map and replaced it with a fair one that immediately turned to a 13:5 Republican map into a representational 9:9.
Citizens have stepped up and won reforms.
Virginia just passed a bi-partisan citizen politician hybrid commission, meaning that citizens will have a seat at the table there. Colorado will have a commission that is drawing the lines. There's certainly some good news in all of that. When both parties have seats at the table, you usually end up with more representative maps. The bad news is that there are still too many places where one party is going to control the process completely on their own. There will be many states that are closely divided where Republicans will be given a huge advantage because they will have the power to redistrict.
What are some of those key states?
Democrats had hoped to flip the Texas House of Representatives. They needed to win nine seats, but they did not even come close in 2020. Republicans will have a free hand to draw those districts for the state congress. Texas is likely to get an additional three US house seats. Republicans will likely be able to draw state house districts that bolster the state being a red state, and push back the timeline for the Democrats who imagined the demographic changes might turn it blue.
In North Carolina, the governor does not have a seat at the table for redistricting. The state House and Senate controlled that process — and Republicans held onto both. In Florida, Republicans will run the entire show. In Georgia, Democrats won't have any influence over redistricting. In Kansas, there is a Democratic governor who would ordinarily have been able to veto an extreme map, but Democrats had to take one seat in the statehouse to have veto power over an extreme map. And they didn't. And as a result, Democrats will likely lose a congressional seat.
In Kentucky, Democrats have one seat right now in the Louisville area. I imagine it would be easy for Republicans to draw a map that cracks Louisville in half and gets rid of that seat. There is a Democratic governor in Kentucky, but you can override the governor's veto with a bare majority and Republicans have far more than that in both houses.
Democrats are only going to have probably a five or seven-seat advantage in House when it is sworn in January, and they could lose all of that off the bat in 2022, just with new redistricting in Texas, North Carolina, Kansas, and Kentucky. And that's before Republicans work their magic drawing new districts in Florida, Georgia. and Ohio.
We just conducted the census, what are the next steps?
First, the Department of Labor will release the new census data. We don't know when that is going to arrive. COVID has pushed back the timeline – potentially until April. Once the census data is available, we move to Reappointment. The number of U.S. House seats that each state gets is, of course, determined by the census, and states will draw new districts for that legislative body.
You're going to see a real panic, I think, in the states that have legislative elections in November of 2021. If the census data really does come out in April, they could probably get the new maps shaped by June, but that begins to really compress the calendar for the primaries. And, if that gets pushed much later, you might have some states that have to decide whether they want to continue on the current maps for another cycle.
Are there legal battles you expect to see during the redistricting process?
I think the most consequential fight that a lot of the states are going to have is over the citizen voting-age population. The long time standard for drawing state legislative districts has been the total population. The U.S. constitution mandates the use of total population for drawing congressional districts, but there is an open question over whether or not to do it for a state legislative district.
Republicans have been playing around with this notion of only counting citizens over the age of 18. In a state like Texas, for example, that would reduce the number of districts in South Texas, a Democratic stronghold, as well as the Houston, Dallas, and the Fort Worth area. When you deduct non-citizens and children from the population count, you are dramatically lowering the population of cities. Political power is shifted from cities to areas that tend to be older, whiter, more rural, more conservative. I imagine that's going to be something that Republicans attempt to do in the states where they have trifecta power, and then I think very quickly that will be challenged in court.
These decisions about new districts will happen at a state level, correct?
That's right. The U.S. Supreme Court got out of the partisan gerrymandering game. Activists and reformers then began filing these cases in state Supreme Courts, where oftentimes there are more robust protections of voting rights under free and fair election clauses.
I imagine you will be seeing more of those challenges in state courts over the course of the next decade. I think what is concerning to advocates right now, however, is some of the litigation that has emerged in the last month as far as the president's challenges in various states. You have seen at least four justices on the U.S. Supreme court advancing legal claims that state Supreme Courts do not have the authority to interpret state constitutions on election issues. And there appear to be at least four justices that are willing to sign on to this. We don't know where the newest, Justice Coney Barrett, comes down on this yet.
If the Supreme Court decided it wasn’t a federal issue in 2013, and might be willing to say, additionally, the state Supreme Courts cannot make redistricting calls, who is left?
Well, if they go that direction, they're saying that the federal courts can't do anything to fix a partisan gerrymander and a legislature that has entrenched itself in power, and the state supreme court can’t do it. That would leave no one else to do it.
That seems incredibly concerning.
To what extent do you see gerrymandering contributing to this political landscape and to this disconnect that people feel between themselves and who is governing them?
I think it's huge. I think gerrymandering has been the key step in perpetuating and enduring a Republican minority rule across the country. After the 2018 election, there were 59 million people who lived in a state in which one or both chambers of the state legislature was controlled by the party that won fewer votes in that year's election. It's tough to look at that and call yourself a democracy when power in the state legislature can't be shifted by a majority of citizens. When the maps are so unresponsive that the huge majority can't budge partisan control, politicians are insulated from the ballot box and are able to act in unaccountable ways.
Gerrymandered state legislatures create extreme policies that most Americans don't agree with, and policies that most the residents in these states don't agree with. Residents are powerless to stop the growth of personhood, abortion, reproductive rights bills in Ohio and Alabama and Georgia and Missouri. The transgender bathroom bills in North Carolina and the assaults on labor rights across the Midwest are, in large part, due to these gerrymandered legislatures.
Oftentimes it starts in state legislatures.
What role did the gerrymandered legislatures play in the 2020 election cycle?
The scheme that we have seen in this 2020 election, the president alleging all kinds of fraud and irregularities, was made possible by partisan gerrymandering. It's not a coincidence that this scheme was based around state legislators in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These are state legislators who first had to enable the president's narrative by refusing to allow mail-in ballots to be opened, processed, and tabulated before the election, like in 40 other states. That allowed Trump to be able to say, "Let me tell you what's going to happen. I'm going to have the lead on election day. And then all of these votes are going to be counted from Detroit and Philadelphia and Milwaukee, and they're going to steal it from me."
And beyond that, this ploy to have these state legislatures potentially overturn the popular vote in their states and cast electors for Trump, is also only made possible because Republicans control these states with fewer votes. It is wild to me that the Michigan house speaker goes to the White House to celebrate afterward with an $800 bottle of champagne at the Trump hotel. He's the Republican speaker of a house that Democrats always get more votes for statewide. Trump knew where to go when he was trying to hold onto power with fewer votes. The state legislatures in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, are the experts at it. They have been doing it all decade.
The crisis in this election would be if state legislators decided to send their own slate for electors to the electoral college. It is an interesting point that gerrymandering is not only creating an ideological gap between constituents and representatives, but it is also potentially creating the point where our democracy, one day, crumbles.
We were staggeringly lucky that this race wasn't just a little bit closer in a couple more states. They would have pushed that much harder and potentially run this entire experiment off the roads.
Where do we go from here? Are there reforms to push for?
A lot depends on what happens in these races in Georgia, and whether or not Democrats will have control of the Senate. And whether or not they'll be able to pass the electoral reform packages that they've proposed. If they're not able to do that, we're in for a complicated period.
We got lucky this time. We might not get lucky next time. We're already seeing some of these state legislatures are beginning to tighten up voting restrictions. There's already a bill in Texas that is attempting to make it illegal for counties to send out mail-in voting applications to citizens.
This period of minority rule and voting rights games didn't start with Donald Trump and it's not going to end with Donald Trump. Trump was not responsible for the gerrymandering of 2010, which set so much of this up. Trump was not on the Supreme court that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
There are lots of reforms that would help: ranked-choice voting, a national popular vote, independent redistricting commissions, campaign finance reform, the restoration of pre-clearance. But, it is a question of whether or not there is an appetite for addressing these sorts of topics in what is likely to be a divided Congress. While there is much to be hopeful about on the front of citizens organizing and working across party lines to try to fix these things, there's a little less to be optimistic about when it comes to politicians who rely on these divisions to win elections.