New Dems on the Hill: ‘We Ran as Populist Democrats’

by Mike Hall, Nov 14, 2006

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney celebrates with the next speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (top), at the AFL-CIO reception for new members of Congress. New Sens. Jim Webb from Virginia (middle) and Sherrod Brown of Ohio (bottom) join AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka and AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson at Monday’s event.

Hollywood couldn’t have set the stage any better. The Capitol dome brightly spotlighted in the Washington night through the picture window. The first women ever set to serve as speaker of the House. A half-dozen newly elected senators whose victories shifted the Senate’s balance of power and many more new House members.

But it wasn’t make believe last night. It was part victory party, part welcome wagon for the new lawmakers and part promises of a new congressional direction at an AFL-CIO new members’ reception.

Several hundred people—including members of the AFL-CIO Executive Council, legislative specialists from national unions and Hill staffers—joined the new office holders and the AFL-CIO leaders.

Introducing Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who will take over the House speaker’s reins in January, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said:

The job ahead of us is just as important as the job that was just done. We have to work together to bring about real change and we will stay mobilized and organized to help that happen.

Pelosi praised the union movement’s mobilization, declaring that AFL-CIO troops “owned the ground” in the battleground states that swung congressional control away from the failed policies of the Bush administration and extremist Republican leaders.

She and other new members of Congress also pointed out that voters had a clear choice between the corporate-driven economic philosophy of most Republican candidates and the working family economic platform of Democrats.

The Bush administration and congressional Republicans’ policies became intolerable to voters. Voters were concerned that the wealth in America was going to the top 1 percent. That’s simply wrong.

In the first 100 hours of business in the 110th Congress, Pelosi said the new Democratic majority will pass a minimum wage increase and remove the incentives the Bush administration and Congress have given to Big Business to move jobs overseas.

After the first 100 hours, Pelosi promised:

We’re going to move on card-check [the Employee Free Choice Act] because now, we set the agenda and that will be part of it. We want to make sure that workers have the right to belong to a union if they want to belong to a union.

As a House member, Ohio Sen.-elect Sherrod Brown (D) was one of the strongest supporters of fair trade polices and staunchest opponents of Bush trade deals. He noted that all of the newly elected senators made fair trade and working family economics—such as raising the minimum wage, reducing family health care costs, creating good jobs— major parts of their campaigns:

We got to where we are because we didn’t run as Republican-lite—we ran as economic populist Democrats.

Sen.-elect Ben Cardin (D-Md.) praised Maryland union volunteers for their work and took a swing at the campaign trickery of his opponent.

As part of the failed dirty-tricks campaign the Republican party waged in several states, on Election Day, Maryland Republicans brought in six busloads of mostly out-of-work men and women from the Philadelphia area. For $100 and three meals, their job was to pass out phony “Democratic Sample Ballots” with boxes checked in red for Republican Senate candidate Michael Steele and Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich who was running for re-election. Both lost. (See The Washington Post exposé.)

Cardin told the crowd:

You were on the ground and made a big difference in my race in Maryland. They had people bused in from Philadelphia and we had people who worked and lived in Maryland on our side.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and newly elected Democratic Sens. Bob Casey Jr. (Pa.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Jim Webb (Va.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), also attended.

Print This Article | E-Mail This Article |Comments (0)