New York's giant slayer sets her sights on DC
"You have to be relentless. You cannot take no for an answer."
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Today we’re taking a break from the grim and outrageous developments coming out of Republican-controlled state capitols and turning our attention to an important Congressional primary that could help shape how Democrats confront corporate avarice and the growing wave of GOP cruelty and extremism.
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She’s obligated to raise money just like anyone else running for higher office, but it may be that the best way to contribute to Alessandra Biaggi’s campaign for Congress is by telling her that she can’t do something.
New York politics have experienced several tectonic shifts over the past four years, which have together almost entirely upended what had been decades and decades of corruption and failure. There are few people that have played as central a role in the monumental changes in Albany than Biaggi, a 35-year-old state senator who has become the Empire State’s giant slayer.
“There are a lot of people who put their own power over loyalty to the people that they represent,” Biaggi says, a charge equally applicable to politicians at both the state and federal levels. “In order to take on these very big issues, you have to be relentless, you cannot take no for an answer. If we took no for an answer every time we [initially] got a no in Albany, nothing would have gotten done.”
The challenge now is not unsubstantial: Biaggi is running to represent New York’s newly redrawn third Congressional district, which encompasses parts of her Bronx and Westchester legislative district as well as a chunk of Long Island. To emerge from the crowded primary, which includes local conservatives and a well-liked liberal activist, she’ll have to meet and win over a fair number of new voters in a condensed period of time, while contending with hostility from both right-wing media and a more conservative political establishment on Long Island.
They have reason to oppose her ascent: Most of Biaggi’s signature accomplishments during her two terms in the State Senate have come at the expense of entrenched interests. After her first state budget process, she criticized colleagues who “talked a big game” and then did not deliver in the state budget, then went about delivering on her own promises.
Remaking Albany
Biaggi has worked with progressive colleagues to activists to expand health care, deliver billions in relief for low-income immigrants, protect sexual assault survivors, and clean up a state rife with corruption. Each legislative victory required a deft inside-outside game, harnessing power and public opinion to outmaneuver the money and institutional influence of powerful corporate lobbies as well as navigate a defanged ethics commission and several other bureaucratic institutions averse to change.
In 2018, Biaggi launched a primary challenge against the powerful State Sen. Jeff Klein, who ran the turncoat Independent Democratic Conference, a group of “Democrats” whose alliance with Republicans gave the GOP an unearned majority in the upper chamber.
Biaggi ran a relentless campaign across a district that encompasses parts of the Bronx and Westchester County, and then shocked the political establishment when she ousted Klein that fall. It helped pave the way for further gains in the area, including Rep. Jamal Bowman’s 2020 primary triumph. Bowman has endorsed her campaign to join him in Washington.
The IDC collapsed after five other progressive challengers also won their state senate primaries in 2018, giving Democrats a trifecta for the first time in years. The victories hardly led to a progressive panacea, though, as they still had to contend with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who had given his blessing to the IDC and then assumed its mantle as the biggest roadblock to change.
Having worked for a time as a lawyer in Cuomo’s office, Biaggi had no great affection for the governor, and her primary defeat of a close ally didn’t do much to endear her to the famously vindictive Cuomo, either. Their approaches to both politics and policy put them on a collision course from the start.
Biaggi was at the forefront of the successful effort in 2019 to pass new legal protections against sexual harassment, and helped arrange a blockbuster hearing for a group of former legislative staffers who were harassed by lawmakers and state officials; it was the first such hearing in nearly 30 years (we spoke with one of the most outspoken staffers a few years ago). Biaggi also pushed for New York to pass Erin’s Law, which requires schools to teach child sexual assault and exploitation prevention classes in K-8.
“I'm a child sexual abuse survivor and if I had had this information and had this knowledge, I wouldn't have suffered as long as I did,” Biaggi says. “So it’s about recognizing that you can turn your trauma into healing for other people.”
Once the Covid-19 pandemic began tearing through New York, regular business was paused as all focus shifted to mitigation, relief, and recovery. Biaggi lists the successful battle to pass the Healthy Terminals Act, which guaranteed health care to the more than 10,000 frontline workers at New York City’s airports, as one of her proudest achievements.
“We were up against airline lobbyists and they were so adamant that they were going to go under, that we were going to bankrupt them by causing them to pay a little bit more so people could have healthcare,” Biaggi recalls. “And I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard, especially because they had just gotten a bailout of billions of dollars.”
The bill was signed by Cuomo in March 2021, by which point Biaggi had joined State Assemblyman Ron Kim in publicly blasting the governor for his role in the Covid-related deaths of thousands of nursing home residents, granting immunity to the private equity companies that own those nursing homes, and covering up the extent of the damage. The first accusations of sexual misconduct against Cuomo had begun to emerge, but at that point, the governor was still riding high on the public adoration he’d accrued during his daily PowerPoint presentations about the pandemic.
Still, as more details began to emerge about the extent of the immunity provision, which had been buried in the massive annual budget bill, it became clear just how much Cuomo had given away to one of his biggest political patrons.
Even with Attorney General Tish James’ damning investigation into Cuomo’s cover-up, it was still a lonely battle. Few in the legislature were willing to risk incurring the wrath that Kim and Biaggi were receiving from the governor on a regular basis. It should not come as a surprise that they did not back down.
“People said, ‘Oh, you can't take on the governor, he’s gonna destroy your life,’” Biaggi recalls. “But he was destroying millions of people's lives every day by us not talking, so who cares if he destroys my life? Like, okay, my job is taken away, but at least people know the harm he's causing.”
The immunity was repealed by the legislature in April.
Today Cuomo is an ex-governor running angry ads on cable news, desperately trying to rebuild a political career left in smoldering ruins after his implosion last August. Biaggi, meanwhile, will be airing ads to support her campaign for Congress.
Read our interview with Sen. Biaggi last year about passing the historic Excluded Workers Fund:
Going National
Congressional Democrats spent this weekend on a retreat in Philadelphia, brainstorming ways to avoid an electoral blowout this coming fall. A few senators are most culpable for the party’s inability to keep the many promises it made in 2020, but the House is also littered with lawmakers more concerned with fundraising than creating the urgency and noise that might push some vital legislation over the line.
That lack of urgency amid a confluence of existential crises helped convince Biaggi to run for Congress, even after she was shocked by the way the legislature drew her new home district. There’s just too much at stake.
Take abortion rights, which are potentially on the verge of being blown apart by the Supreme Court. Biaggi was a leader in the fight to codify Roe v. Wade in New York, having worked on the legislation during her time as a government lawyer and then championing it when she got to the State Senate. The filibuster blocked national Democrats’ attempts to guarantee abortion rights, but there’s been hardly any noise made it since, even as state after state enacts draconian, inhumane bans on women’s health care.
The same principle applies to voting rights, a topic she returns to again and again. Biaggi shepherded the bill that expanded universal mail-in voting in New York for the duration of the Covid-19 emergency, and the ongoing attacks on our democracy bring out an exasperation she rarely ever displays.
Her approach to politics contrasts in almost every way with the center-left conservatism of the district’s current representative, Tom Suozzi, who is retiring to run a doomed campaign for governor. Suozzi is open about his distaste at the prospect of Biaggi succeeding him, and local conservative columnists are championing a conservative Democratic candidate.
It should come as no surprise at this point that Biaggi isn’t particularly interested in Suozzi’s opinion of her politics or viability as a candidate.
“Some of the statements that [Suozzi] has made just kind of prove that he hasn't really been paying attention to what I've been doing because we've been legislating for the past four years and a lot of the wins that we've had at the state level have actually impacted his district in ways that he hasn't even been able to deliver for,” she says. “Take the full funding of schools across the state — that wasn’t just for schools in my district in the Bronx and Westchester, but for every place in New York, including on Long Island.”
That universality is a message that Biaggi hits on again and again as she makes the case that her current constituency isn’t all that different from the one she’s running to represent. Westchester is almost as suburban as Long Island, which means she’s already attuned to the needs of homeowners (read: property taxes) and the threat that climate change poses to beachfront communities.
Ultimately, she’s still running in a Democratic primary during a time of great economic inequality, astronomical housing prices, unsettling national instability, and relentless attacks on human rights within our own borders.
“The politics [in Long Island] are certainly different, but the things that people want, at least from what I have heard, are the same,” Biaggi reasons. “People want to send their kids to an excellent school, they want access to affordable and high-quality health care, they want good-paying jobs, they want to be able to afford the home that they live in or have access to housing that actually is affordable, whether that's in a suburb or in New York City.”
There are some institutional challenges that come with running for Congress as a progressive, especially in a vast district like NY-3. Alessandra Biaggi wouldn’t have it any other way.
Voting Rights
Michigan: There’s a weird wrinkle in Michigan state law that allows legislators to skip the whole the democracy part of “direct democracy” and adopt the language of a ballot initiative that receives the requisite number of signatures straight into law. Republicans have used misleading tactics to weaponize the loophole in 2018 to screw workers on paid sick leave and are trying to do so again in order to severely limit voting rights, a story I covered late last year.
Democrats in the legislature are proposing a change to the state constitution that would make it much harder to take advantage of that legal quirk… but since Republicans control the legislature right now, it doesn’t have much of a chance of passing. New maps will make the state’s legislative elections much more competitive come this fall, so expect to see this revisited if a chamber flips blue.
Missouri: Republicans are moving to enact a strict voter ID law several years after the State Supreme Court tossed out a different version passed in 2016. Hispanic lawmakers and activists in the state are appealing to Gov. Mike Parson’s better angels and political instincts in asking him to not sign the new ID bill should it pass.
Currently, voters can present a variety of different forms of identification at the polls, including some that don’t include a photo, like a utility bill or voting card. Requiring a photo ID would have a disproportionate and harmful impact on the state’s Hispanic population, Valadez said, particularly for seniors like his mother.
“There are members in our Latino community and other communities who can vote, but they don’t drive,” he said.
About 137,700 registered voters in Missouri did not have a state-issued identification in 2017, according to an analysis from the Secretary of State’s Office.
Another 140,000 voters had expired IDs and 2,000 more voters had forfeited their driver’s licenses.
Valadez urged Parson to consider how few voter fraud cases have occurred in Missouri versus the tremendous impact such photo ID requirements would have on Hispanics’ ability to vote when looking at these measures.
As we detailed in last weekend’s newsletter, getting a photo ID is often a very complicated and very expensive process that disproportionately disenfranchises low-income Americans and people of color.
Arizona: State Supreme Court cases sometimes make for strange bedfellows.
Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich is a sworn proponent of the Big Lie and has his name on a recent Supreme Court decision that further gutted the Voting Rights Act. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has been very vocal in her defense of democracy in a state where it has been constantly undermined by the GOP legislature.
Naturally, then, you’d expect them to be on opposing sides of a voting rights case, but instead, they both last week delivered briefs urging the Arizona high court to ignore a lawsuit filed by the state GOP and not toss out the state’s universal vote by mail law. Over 90% of voters in Arizona cast their ballot through the mail, and no number of slapdash “forensic audits” could find any voter fraud, so it’d be an absolute clusterfuck if the system was upended just months before a primary.
Health Care
It was something of a miserable week in the realm of abortion rights, with dystopian proposals coming out of states like Missouri (I told you that legislature was batty). But there’s also one very positive story to report…
Colorado: Republicans spent a full 24 hours filibustering a bill that would guarantee access to abortion and contraception in Colorado. They made their point and then dropped from exhaustion — exactly how a filibuster should work! — and then Democrats were able to move the bill along to a final floor vote in the House.
It may take a minute (or more), but Colorado will codify Roe v. Wade this spring. It’s already one of the states with the fewest hurdles to terminating a pregnancy, but as advocates note in the Colorado Sun, getting this down in writing will prevent local governments from enacting limitations. Not all of Colorado is so progressive, so this is an essential law to get done.
Kansas: Expanding Medicaid may be the most popular policy in the country. Just look at these numbers:
Last week the Docking Institute of Public Affairs at Fort Hays State University published the results from the 2021 Kansas Speaks survey.
According to the survey, nearly 73% of respondents support expanding KanCare — our state’s Medicaid program. This is a considerable increase in support. In 2015, the first year Kansas Speaks measured attitudes about Medicaid expansion, only 62% of respondents supported growing the program.
62% of survey respondents indicated that the issue of Medicaid expansion is important in deciding who to vote for come November.
Kansas is one of a dozen GOP states that still refuse to provide their low-income residents with health care out of sheer spite, while national Democrats’ attempt to open the program up to an expanded pool of those states’ residents died with the Build Back Better bill in December. Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, who is up for re-election this year, ran on expanding Medicaid in 2018 but has been blocked by her legislature. Feels like something Democrats might want to get done this year?
Media
West Virginia: I’d just like to point out that local WV media is far more skeptical of and harsh on Joe Manchin than anything coming out of the Beltway press. Maybe it’s because they actually care about the people they’re both supposed to serve.
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I am sure Allesandra Biaggi has done great things but I wonder about her running against Melanie D'Arrigo. Melanie is equally progressive so I hope the 2 don't split the progressve vote allowing some moderate shithead to win the primary.