In the meantime, Donald Trump had happened. However one felt about candidates winning without majorities, ranked choice voting’s potential to reduce extremism and encourage broad-based appeals suddenly made it feel much more urgent. And Minnesota had run out of new cities to enroll. In 2020 Massey approached her board with an audacious plan to identify state legislators and candidates of either party who would embrace ranked choice voting and do everything possible to put them over the top in the coming election.
Maureen Reed, a retired physician who chairs the board, recognized the logic. “I was not an emergency room physician,” she told me over lunch in the Rathskeller, the vaulted basement restaurant of Minnesota’s stately Capitol. “I did internal medicine and geriatric care. I was trying to keep people healthy.” In her own search for root causes, Reed had migrated from medicine to public health to public policy. Her own work on health care had convinced her that “the rhetoric of hyper-partisanship has led to gridlock.” The board authorized Massey’s plan. The organization received large gifts for its lobbying and education program from local, regional and national foundations; by far the biggest, $1,755,000 over three years plus $150,000 for More Voices Minnesota, FairVote’s PAC, came from John Arnold, a Houston hedge fund manager and philanthropist. Arnold is indeed located out-of-state, but the funds were publicly disclosed. He does not appear to have any connection to George Soros.
The Covid-era election of 2020 proved to be a warm-up exercise. In the 2022 election, FairVote dispensed $140,000 in political donations to Democratic candidates, a significant sum for statewide races, while also conducting its energetic door-knocking campaign. Ranked choice voting was hardly the chief issue that year; abortion and criminal justice issues in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death mattered far more. But FairVote’s money and energy helped flip the state Senate and produced a “trifecta” — a Democratic House, Senate and governor. Many of those Democrats have reason to feel grateful to FairVote. While I was trailing Massey across the State Capitol, I asked why state Sen. Heather Gustafson had agreed to speak at the rally the next day. “She’s a big supporter,” Massey explained. “We targeted swing districts” — including hers. (Gustafson did not, in fact, show up for the rally.)
The trifecta made ranked choice voting legislation possible — but just barely. Though prominent moderate Republicans in the state, including former U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger and ex-Gov. Arne Carlson, endorsed the idea, the Minnesota GOP, like the party almost everywhere, has become both more conservative and more truculent. Today’s Republicans treat almost all facially neutral political reforms, whether eliminating gerrymandering, reducing the influence of money or instituting nonpartisan primaries, as a plot to elect Democrats. It’s no surprise, then, that not a single Republican legislator in the state has publicly supported ranked choice voting.
When I asked Mark Koran, a Republican member of the state House and leading critic, why he opposed the bill, he first told me about the out-of-state dark money, though without repeating the Soros canard. Koran disputed the ranked choice voting talking points. “There’s a claim that we can create a kinder, gentler electoral system,” he said. But in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he said, progressive candidates had run inflammatory campaigns. Minnesota already had high turnout and a wide diversity of candidates, he added. Why fix what isn’t broke? If there was a problem, he said, it was “transparency.” Outside dark money, he claimed, had been deployed to defeat county prosecutors prepared to investigate vote fraud. Koran told me about the 2008 U.S. Senate race in which Democrat Al Franken had defeated Republican Norm Coleman thanks, he said, to “11,000 fraudulent votes,” including 340 ineligible felons. That was the real electoral issue — and no one was looking at it.
Jeanne Massey had lined up a star witness for the House Elections Committee hearing — Mary Peltola, the Alaska Democrat who had defeated Palin for Congress last year. Peltola had won only 10 percent of the votes in the state’s open primary, but that had been enough to vault her into the general election, where she defeated Palin largely because 15,000 people who had voted for more moderate Republican Nick Begich had listed Peltola rather than Palin as their second choice. At the same time, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who had voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, finished in a virtual dead heat with Trumpist Kelly Tshibaka and then retained her seat thanks to votes she received after a Democrat was eliminated. Alaska was providing proof of concept — and vindication of the fears on the right.
The room in which the committee met had tables, chairs and microphones in the center with seats rising up on either side. As if by an unspoken prior design, the blue shirts filled one set of seats and the oranges the other. The hearing thus bore an odd resemblance to a college football game, though refs do not typically have to silence fans as the presiding member did to the blues during testimony from an ranked choice voting opponent. Democratic state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, the sponsor of the bill in the House, spoke first. Frazier, who is Black, argued that ranked choice voting encourages ethnic and racial minorities, as well as other outsiders, to run for office since they might win in later rounds.
Then Peltola took a seat beside him. A native Yup’ik, Peltola has a warm smile and an air of gentle dignity. She spoke of the lawn-placard dynamics of ranked choice voting. “I could not afford to alienate my opponents’ supporters,” she said, “because second- and third-choice voters were critical in determining who would win. I could not take any vote for granted or write any voter off.” In testimony later that morning before a state Senate Committee, Peltola made a striking point about nonpartisan primaries. “I would not have made it out of a primary,” she said, “because I’m not liberal enough.” With partisan primaries, she complained, “We go farther to the right and farther to the left.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Tamil Nadu Governor and Chief Minister have been at loggerheads.
Chennai: The Tamil Nadu assembly on Monday adopted a resolution urging the Union government and the President to ‘fix a time frame’ for the Governors to give assent to bills that were passed by the House.
The resolution was moved after suspending certain provisions of rule 92(7) and 287 of the Tamil Nadu legislative assembly. The special resolution which needs 3/4th of the votes to be moved in the House was allowed by the Speaker with 144 of the 146 members in the house voting for it.
The AIADMK walked out of the House while BJP MLAs, C. Saraswathi and M.R. Gandhi voted against the resolution.
Chief Minister M.K. Stalin while moving the resolution lashed out against the Tamil Nadu Governor R.N. Ravi and said that the Governor was making it a habit to speak against the state government whenever the Prime Minister was in the state or when he (Stalin) was in New Delhi.
Stalin, while speaking in the House, said, “I don’t want to give a point-by-point rebuttal to the Governor and make the House a political forum. But we can’t remain mute spectators, if the Governor attempts to disturb the House with political intent.”
He also said, “Two resolutions had to be moved against the Governor in a single budget session. Governor has created the compulsion by acting with political intent. Those who must realise it must realise it. This will be the day for realisation. Governor is not ready to be a friend of the people of Tamil Nadu.”
The Tamil Nadu Chief Minister said, “I will not say that the Governor does not know the Constitution. But his political loyalty has superseded his loyalty to the Constitution. Hence he is publicly criticising the policies of the government in violation of the Supreme Court orders.”
Second, he knew what it took to deal with a banking crisis, and, specifically, how to restore public confidence in the banking system. At the worst moment of the Great Depression, he faced a much more daunting challenge than the problems of the present — and he succeeded in turning things around almost immediately. In contrast, policymakers and regulators today dither, hoping that empty words and weak measures can restore confidence. The FDR mirror is very revealing of the inadequacies of the current policy response.
Many people are surprised when I tell them that FDR explicitly opposed federal deposit insurance during the 1932 presidential campaign. In the heart of the banking upheaval, with many bank failures producing depositor losses in 1931-1932, his 1932 letter to the New York Sun stated that federal deposit insurance “would lead to laxity in bank management and carelessness on the part of both banker and depositor. I believe that it would be an impossible drain on the Federal Treasury.”
FDR here makes an important, and empirically correct, point: Good bank risk management depends on depositors’ discipline, which depends on their having skin in the game.
Later, Roosevelt reluctantly agreed to create FDIC insurance, at the insistence of Rep. Henry Steagall, as part of a larger political deal, but he kept the agency’s coverage limited to small deposit balances. Furthermore, he had closed all banks in March 1933, and they were permitted to reopen and have access to insurance coverage only after they had undergone a thorough examination to establish that they were in sound financial condition.
FDR did not handle the banking panic by throwing deposit insurance at the problem, or by waiting for more banks to be shut down by worried depositors. He first put an end to runs by closing banks and established a credible process for them to reopen upon demonstrating their strength. Because regulators’ examinations were demonstrably credible to independent observers, and often accompanied by increased capital, confidence in the system was restored and many banks were able to reopen quickly. Runs did not return — not because of the small coverage of the new deposit insurance system, but because FDR had actually addressed the problem of bank weakness that was driving the runs.
What would a similarly effective policy response for the current crisis look like? The problem today is much less severe, making the solution easier.
There are only about 200 U.S. banks that are clearly vulnerable because of securities losses similar to those of Silicon Valley Bank. Regulators should have met with those banks individually last weekend, required them either to immediately come up with credible recapitalization commitments, or put them into conservatorship (beginning Monday morning). In conservatorship, they would have had limits placed on their activities until it was determined whether they could offer adequate recapitalization, or, if not, be placed in receivership. In the meantime, they could have been allowed to pay out all insured deposits, but only to pay out a fraction of uninsured deposits (based on the potential losses of uninsured depositors at each bank). This would have put pressure on those banks to resolve the problem quickly, and would have limited the illiquidity problem to a portion of the uninsured deposits at a small number of banks.
If that had been done, industry and academic experts would have been able to immediately reassure relatively uninformed depositors that the government policy response had been effective and that there was no cause for further alarm. I believe some uninsured depositors would still have wanted to move their funds, as a long-term precaution, but the short-term urgency of these disruptions would have been substantially reduced.
Instead, the Biden administration has done nothing about the 200 vulnerable banks, thereby encouraging continuing panic. The two measures they did undertake last Sunday have clearly failed to calm the market. First, the bailout of uninsured depositors at Signature and SVB has no clear implication for the risk of loss to uninsured depositors at other banks, especially given how much criticism those bailouts have received for being politically motivated and unfair. No uninsured depositor worried about their own potential losses will think that their money is necessarily safe now.
The second policy announcement was also ineffectual. The Federal Reserve created a new special lending facility for banks, allowing them to borrow for up to one year against qualifying Treasury and Agency securities. Banks can borrow an amount equal to the face value of those securities, which exceeds their market value. This implies a partially noncollateralized loan (the opposite of the typical “haircut” applied to collateral in central bank lending).
These loans provide no reason for worried uninsured depositors to rest easy. The decline in the value of securities at vulnerable banks is not temporary but is fundamentally the result of the Fed’s interest rate hikes, which are not only going to persist but will be increased going forward. Securities used as collateral are not going to increase in value as the result of the Fed stepping in here. Second, the loan is only for a year, so after the end of that year, a bank that is insolvent today because its securities have fallen in value will still be insolvent. For these reasons, the Fed lending program will not cause uninsured depositors at an insolvent or deeply weakened bank to decide not to withdraw their funds immediately, if they were already predisposed to do so.
It is time to take FDR’s example to heart, address the banking problem immediately and directly, and give U.S. depositors a real reason to believe that “there is nothing to fear but fear itself.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
San Francisco: Twitter CEO Elon Musk has said that the company’s “current top priority” is to fix the recommendation algorithm.
In a tweet on Tuesday, Musk asked: “What are your top requests for Twitter features & bug fixes?”
“We will prioritise by number of likes times ease of implementation,” he added.
To this post, a user commented, “Feed refreshes for ‘For You’ tab is weird. So is the font and paragraph spacing.”
Replying to the user’s concern, Musk said, “Fixing the recommendation algorithm is our current top priority. Twitter engineering has been working super hard on this. Proud of the team.”
Later, he posted: “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh.a ‘algorithm’.
Twitter CEO on Sunday said that the engineers resolved two significant problems on the micro-blogging platform during a “long day at Twitter HQ” with him.
Musk also said that oversized fonts and undersized paragraph spacing will be fixed this week.
Meanwhile, on Monday, he had said that the Twitter team “completed” several works “over night”, including improving the reach of retweets and “removed filter causing false negatives”.
Hyderabad: Metro commuters yet again faced a technical glitch this time on the Blue Line on Tuesday afternoon leaving the passengers helpless for 30 minutes.
The frequency of the metro trains on the corridor was affected. Ameerpet metro station, a major terminal was jam-packed during the period.
A similar snag was witnessed on Monday during peak office hours when a train faced technical issues and passengers were deboarded at Irrum Manzil.
While efforts were made by the Hyderabad metro to solve the issue trains were delayed and a heavy rush was witnessed during the period.
Twitter users have in the past on occasions complained of similar issues however they were likewise resolved in a short span of time.
The Hyderabad metro has been dealing with technical snags and difficulties in accommodating increasing metro users amid complaints of heavy rush during peak hours pouring in.
Taking the job in a newly divided Washington, Zients will inherit a series of trials:
– Fallout from the discovery of mishandled classified documents at Biden’s residence and former office, which has led to the appointment of a Department of Justice special counsel;
– A slim House Republican majority eager to use the power of the subpoena to launch a series of investigations into the president’s policies, conduct and the lives of those closest to him;
– The likelihood that the newly empowered hard right within the GOP will follow through on threats to play politics with the debt ceiling, endangering the nation’s fiscal health;
– Continued concerns that the economy, which has showed remarkable resilience to this point, could slide into a slowdown or recession;
– Fear that the war in Ukraine, which shows no signs of abating, will turn into a years-long conflict that could further strain U.S. resources and alliances.
All of those challenges will come against the backdrop of Biden’s expected announcement in the coming weeks that he will seek a second term, launching a campaign at the age of 80 that could set him up on a collision course, once more, with Donald Trump.
Zients, who was Biden’s first Covid coordinator, is expected within the White House to largely leave the politics to other senior aides. Though outgoing chief of staff Ron Klain had his hands in the legislative outreach as well, Zients will likely defer to top Biden aides Anita Dunn, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Steve Ricchetti and others to handle that while he focuses on the West Wing’s operations and processes.
“He may not be the expert on every one of the 10 or 15 things that work its way into the Oval Office. But I guarantee you that, from what I’ve seen, there’s nobody better than Jeff to manage that,” said Anthony Fauci, Biden’s former top medical adviser who worked closely with Zients. “He knows who to call, who to trust, who to get involved with to see that it gets done.”
Zients’ first task will be to respond to GOP investigations into the classified documents and other matters. The slim Republican majority has previewed a robust slate of probes, including into the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal and border policies as well as the business dealings of the president’s son, Hunter.
The White House has expressed a quiet confidence about the tests that lie ahead, comforted by the knowledge, aides said, that they have been there before.
Last week, the West Wing celebrated the president’s second anniversary in office and, in a series of social media posts, reflected on what the White House faced in January 2021. When Klain entered the building as Biden’s first chief of staff, the nation was only two weeks removed from the Jan. 6 insurrection and still at the height of the pandemic.
Biden aides think their strategy of ignoring Beltway chatter and focusing on governing led to a sweeping legislative track record, plaudits for Biden’s leadership in defending Ukraine and a surprisingly strong showing for Democrats in the midterms. The administration entered 2023 with real momentum, aides felt, and they don’t believe the document imbroglio will change that.
Still the task facing Zients won’t be easy, or familiar.
The last two times a president has brought him on board to handle a job it was to solve massive problems: Barack Obama enlisted him to solve the troubled healthcare.gov website and then Biden tapped him to run the pandemic response. This time, Zients has been given the task of keeping the White House out of trouble, not rescuing it from it.
Aides believe the strategy of staying the course will work again, even in the face of steady, potentially damaging revelations about classified documents. The steady drip, drip, drip of information led to the appointment of a special counsel and the matter has already become a political problem if not a legal one.
House Republicans have also begun rattling sabers over what will soon be Zients’ priorities. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in order to obtain enough votes to secure the gavel, has empowered a number of Republicans — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — who have demanded that the United States cease or curtail aid to Ukraine, even as Kyiv has been warning about another major Russian offensive.
Moreover, those same extremist forces in the GOP have suggested not voting to raise the debt ceiling if the administration does not enact severe spending cuts. Economists have warned that even approaching a calamity — the debt limit will likely be reached in June — would severely wound the nation’s economy.
Though the House GOP seems certain to be a thorn in Zients’ side, the two years of Democratic control of Washington left Biden with a legislative record that has evoked comparisons to those put forth by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. And White House aides believe that for many voters, the year ahead will be defined not by Republican probes, but by the implementation of Biden’s accomplishments, including the infrastructure bill and the health care and climate change provisions that were part of 2022’s reconciliation package. Polls suggest that while voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the documents, his overall approval rating has changed little.
“President Biden is on the side of working families in standing against House Republicans’ unprecedented middle class tax increase, inflation-worsening tax giveaways for the rich, and legislation to raise gas prices,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates.
Looming over all of the challenges in Zients’ new inbox will be Biden’s announcement about 2024. Though some people close to the president say he has not fully made up his mind to run again, most in the White House expect Biden will announce his candidacy soon, potentially even next month, giving Zients the task of running a White House while coordinating a sprawling re-election campaign.
“Klain faced this unbelievably daunting menu of challenges during the first two years but now comes the hard part,” said Chris Whipple, who wrote the book “The Gatekeepers” about White House chiefs of staff. “Zients has got to manage the current classified documents furor but also put the right time in place and make sure the president is ready for the marathon to come.”
Adam Cancryn contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez was a stunning winner in the 2022 midterms. The millennial auto shop owner flipped a Washington district that both the state and national Democratic parties considered unwinnable.But then incumbent Jamie Herrera Beutler, who had voted to impeach Donald Trump, came in third in the state’s open primary. Suddenly, Gluesenkamp Perez, 34, was facing off against a Donald Trump-backed Republican in the solidly red district. Despite the long odds that national pundits and pollsters gave her throughout the campaign, she beat Joe Kent, an election-denier and regular guest on Tucker Carlson, by less than one point.Her district stretches more than 230 miles across (about the distance from D.C. to New York) — from remote beach communities on the Pacific Coast to timber towns in the Cascade mountains, and south past dairy and berry farms to the rapidly growing city of Vancouver. It’s a middle-class district where about a quarter of residents are college graduates, and the median income is just under the national median household income of $70,784.
I met up with Gluesenkamp Perez for lunch at Charlie Palmer Steakhouse in D.C. — its white tablecloths and suit-clad patrons casting a stark contrast with the antler-forward decor and outdoor gear of the other Washington’s eateries. I wanted to learn more about how she plans to represent her largely middle-class district (where I had grown up) and what Democrats could learn from her unexpected win. Over a steak salad — rare — Gluesenkamp Perez gave a bracing critique of her party’s deeply out-of-touch approach to the middle class, why the party’s leaders seem to be making that problem worse, not better, and how closing the widening gap between the party’s brain trust and its blue-collar roots can be accomplished by reconnecting Americans with our lost ability to “fix your own shit.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Natalie Fertig: You’re part of a 200-plus person Democratic caucus. How do you see yourself creating an understanding of the middle class in that caucus and getting middle-class laws passed?
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: It feels like the Democratic Party, especially wealthy leadership in the Democratic Party, has taken it upon themselves to be champions of the poorest of the poor. And I think that’s great, but I think that it has left a lot of people in the middle class feeling like people don’t understand the issues we’re facing. I think it’s left unaddressed a lot of really critical things that are not glamorous, lionized issues, but that beat the hell out of people’s will to persist. The indignity of supply chain problems. Catalytic converter theft. Bad infrastructure. Shit roads.
Fertig: I’m laughing at the catalytic converter theft, because I feel like that’s like all my dad was talking about when I was home over the summer.
Gluesenkamp Perez: Oh, yeah. I replaced hundreds of catalytic converters last year. It’s like $40 worth of platinum, and it’s a $1,300 repair. That just eviscerated so many people’s emergency funds all across the district.
Fertig: Crime was something that so many people [in District 3] talked about, and is something that you talked about. Why do you think that was an important issue in this election?
Gluesenkamp Perez: It’s relevant to our lives. I had my [shop] windows broken four times last year. So yeah, I’m pissed off. I’m going to talk about it, you know? It’s a grind, and it gets expensive and demoralizing. I think that for a lot of people that sort of live in these silos, they are not as cognizant of it. And I think maybe that’s why it was not more of a campaign issue for more people.
Fertig: What do you mean by people living in silos?
Gluesenkamp Perez: A lot of candidates are self-funded people with trust funds.
Fertig: I see that, too. Like, what is it like to pay student loans? Even amongst my colleagues here in D.C. — not everyone has the same experiences.
Gluesenkamp Perez: Yeah. Like, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw&ab_channel=heyitsadriann" target="_blank" link-data="{"linkText":"It‘s a banana, Michael","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw&ab_channel=heyitsadriann","_id":"00000185-d1ed-d674-abbd-d9ff40d20000","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"00000185-d1ed-d674-abbd-d9ff40d20001","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>It’s a banana, Michael, what could it cost? $20?”
Fertig: So, we talk a lot about the great relocation of Democrats to cities and Republicans to rural areas, but you just flipped a district that is majority rural. Carolyn Long tried this twice [in 2018 and 2020] and failed. What was different this time around?
Gluesenkamp Perez: I think I look more like the district. I live like the district. [And] obviously not running against Jamie [Herrera Beutler] was a huge part of it, you know?
I don’t think that your traditional pedigreed Democrats are the solution to Trump extremism. I think that a lot of these traditional Democrats, the m.o. is to go into a community and start explaining shit. Nobody likes that. I’ve heard that so often: I’ll go to an urban community, and people will be like, “Oh, like this candidate was amazing. They are so smart.” And then I’ll go to a rural community and talk to them about the same candidate. And they’ll say: “Yeah, they’re pedantic and they don’t understand. They didn’t listen to us.”
Fertig: Do you feel like the things that made success in your district are very specific to you and your district, or do you think there’s a model there that Democrats could use in other rural districts?
Gluesenkamp Perez: We need more and more normal people to run for Congress. We need more people that work in the trades.
When I was thinking about running, I interviewed some jackass, fancy consultant. I told him about myself, and he was like, “Well, I’ve worked with worse.” When I said I had a son, he chortled, and was like, “Hope you don’t want to see your kid again.”
He told me to talk to the governor and see if I could get appointed to some committee on aging and disability, or something like that, and build up a resume that would allow me to run successfully later on.
I’m just like, “How many other women has that happened to, you know these jackass men telling them not to run?” And I’m like, “Well, I guess you’re the expert, you’re wearing the suit.”
Fertig: I know that the DCCC didn’t give you any money. I know that the state party basically didn’t notice [you] until after the primary. What are they missing — besides normal candidates — what are they missing about those voters who are in those districts?
Gluesenkamp Perez: Frankly, I think there’s a lot of lip service to wanting people in the trades, rural Democrats. They say it because it sounds good, but I’m not sure that there is an actual commitment to it.
Fertig: What would that look like? Would that be going out and recruiting candidates like that?
Gluesenkamp Perez: Recruitment is certainly part of it, but the things that would get you on the radar are not the same things that make you relevant to voters.
Fertig: What do you think are the things that get someone on the radar?
Gluesenkamp Perez: Being a good fundraiser. Being from the right family. Living in the right city. I think self-recruitment is important.
Fertig: Why did you decide to run?
Gluesenkamp Perez: I saw Jamie not making it through. When I thought I was gonna have to run against Jamie for a few days after the primary, I was moping around the house. I got in this race to stop a fascist. And because I believe in public service. It’s not that I think I’m God’s gift to politics. I just think I had the community resources to run. I think I have a compelling narrative, a good perspective.
I just want more tradespeople in Congress. I run into people here, I’m like, “Oh, your bio says you’re a small business owner. What’s your business?” They’re like “Oh, we have a family real estate brokerage firm.” Oh, okay. Sure. Yeah, technically, you have less than 500 employees. So you are a small business.
Fertig: You mentioned that you really were not excited about the premise of running against [Herrera Beutler]. Why?
Gluesenkamp Perez: Because I was not going to win that race, and it would be a huge investment of time and energy pointed at someone that I don’t think was the problem.
Fertig: Obviously, you and [Herrera Beutler] have different perspectives on things like abortion. Even despite that, why do you not think she was the problem?
Gluesenkamp Perez: Well, because Jamie and I share a basic reality of facts. Which increasingly is hard to find.
Fertig: Which facts?
Gluesenkamp Perez: Who our elected president is. What it means to be a traitor.
Fertig: What are those issues that you see being the key ones that people are responding to that Congress can do?
Gluesenkamp Perez: We have to start rebuilding the American workforce. We’re all part of the generation where the best trade schools got turned into computer programming schools. Now we’re all on waitlists to see an electrician, plumber or carpenter. Those are the jobs that can’t get offshored — that’s the long-term economic health of our country. So, support for career and technical education programs is key. Ensuring that you can use Pell Grants not just for two- and four-year colleges, but also for apprenticeship programs.
That is one of the key elements of “right to repair” [laws]. You have to have stuff to fix. I think this is actually one of the most critical things you can do right now. Because you nip this in the bud, and you can prevent decades of work [erosion].
Fertig: Tell me a little bit more about “right to repair” laws and how they affect District 3 specifically.
Gluesenkamp Perez: Auto manufacturers have started installing, almost like governor chips on their tractors. So if you don’t have the digital key to unlock it, and you mess with the engine, they can lock you out. And there was a specific model of tractor that all had this, and it was a relatively new technology at the time, and all these tractors broke down at the same time. And the problem, specifically in agriculture, is that you only have a couple of days to cut hay when it’s maximally nutritive. Then the seed head starts falling off of it and the hay is worthless at that point. So these tractors all break down, there are not enough dealerships to service these tractors, and millions of dollars in hay are lost. And understandably, these farmers come out with pitchforks.
Fertig: Literally and metaphorically.
Gluesenkamp Perez: Correct. And so that’s kind of the genesis of “right to repair.” But it’s not just ag equipment. It’s also like your iPhone. You should be able to replace the battery in your phone without breaking the whole thing. I think it’s a much broader cultural issue of like, “Are Americans gonna be disempowered from understanding the technology they rely on?” We’re more and more surrounded by these black boxes that we have no influence over.
I think it’s the American ethos that we know how to fix shit. DIY is part of our DNA.
[We’re] becoming increasingly disenfranchised from the technology we rely on, being pointed more and more towards a permanent class of renters and not ownership. And it’s really terrible for the middle class. I’ve never bought a new car in my life. I rely on people having maintained their cars. And the new BMWs, for instance, don’t even have a dipstick. It’s like “Don’t worry about it, just buy a new one,” and it’s terrible for the planet. It’s terrible for the middle class. And I think it’s bad for our identity.
Fertig: Energy is obviously a big issue [with the] Columbia River, hydro-power and climate change. But how does that boil down for the district and middle-class people?
Gluesenkamp Perez: We’ve turned environmentalism into another brand of consumerism. Go buy a Tesla, you’re an environmentalist. I think being an environmentalist is being able to fix your own shit, like stopping an oil leak from going in the river, getting 500,000 miles out of your Honda Civic. The middle class has kind of been made to feel like [environmentalism is] a luxury good. That if you’re wealthy, you can have good air quality, and you can afford to breastfeed your baby instead of using formula.
One of the things that I’m really concerned about, that I think is relevant to my district, is microplastics. They’re everywhere. Literally, they’re finding them in placentas. And I believe that the solution to microplastics in many cases is cardboard and paper. We have to start replacing plastic products with cardboard, paper, wood — especially with packaging. We happen to make a lot of paper and cardboard in southwest Washington. The woods are a hot mess, we need to thin out the woods. That is not lumber, that is what you make paper out of.
Fertig: Right. My parents were in the evacuation zone [for the Nakia Creek fire] for a hot second in October, and that was really freaky.
Gluesenkamp Perez: I was over in Pacific County, which is as far as I can get from my house and still be in the district. I gave a speech, and I get an emergency alert on my phone: “It’s time to leave.” So I was like, “Oh, fuck!” and everyone just looks at me.
Fertig: Did you end up evacuating?
Gluesenkamp Perez: We packed up, but we didn’t end up leaving. You could see the glow. My husband — who’s very chill — was like, “It’s a ridge away, we don’t need to evacuate.” I’m like, “I don’t want to evacuate the baby at two o’clock in the morning.”
Fertig: I enjoyed your campaign ads when you were putting firewood [in the stove]. That was very relatable.
Gluesenkamp Perez: For our district. But for so many people — it’s like, you feel like a spectacle all the time. “Look at this rural woman with her baby, chopping.”
Fertig: I know you are surprised that people are focusing on your district. Do you think there’s a big takeaway for the Democratic Party?
Gluesenkamp Perez: Support normal people. People are hungry for a Congress that looks like America. It’s not rocket science. It’s about listening to your district. It’s a rebuke of facile allegiance to statistics. Numbers on their own represent nothing without an understanding of the landscape.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
