A Drug Company Heir in the Crosshairs
A Drug Company Heir in the Crosshairs
Time to oust Kurt Schrader
Welcome to the big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
I’m excited for you to read tonight’s newsletter — our big story is an interview with a progressive Democrat running a serious campaign against one of the worst sell-outs in Congress, and then we’ll touch on some (mostly) good news coming out of state courts and legislatures.
Even better, this newsletter is a 100% Joe Rogan-free zone.
But first, thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: Ruth, Meg, and Matthew!
Throughout the eight years that Jamie McLeod-Skinner served as an elected member of the Santa Clara City Council, she spent countless Sundays at a local coffee shop, making herself available for questions, concerns, or just general conversation with her constituents. There was only one rule during that time, which stretched between 2004 and 2012: McLeod-Skinner wouldn’t allow anybody to pay for her coffee.
“I consciously wanted the CEO of a high tech company to have the same access to me as any other person,” she recalls now. “I wasn't gonna go to fancy lunches. I was going to keep things simple and be accessible.”
It’s a principle that has guided McLeod-Skinner throughout her time in public service, which has stretched from that stint in the Bay Area up through more recent years in her native Oregon. Now, in the midst of a heated Congressional race, the coffee shop anecdote offers a stark contrast to the modus operandi of her opponent, one of the most notorious recipients of special interest money in Washington.
Though embarrassing and infuriating, Democrats’ legislative failures over the past year have also offered some important clarity. With ultra-slim majorities in both Congress and the Senate, passing any legislation this term requires total unanimity among Democrats, a precarious position that both empowers and puts the spotlight on any lawmaker that opposes keeping the promises that won them the 2020 election.
(Yes, Republicans are the true menace and now an existential threat to American democracy, but too many Democrats are ostensibly helping them by blocking the ambitious reforms that would help stave off the GOP’s advanced this fall.)
Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have earned themselves the most enmity among Democrats, but they’re hardly the only members to thwart the party’s agenda. In the House, a handful of conservative Democrats spent 2021 working in concert to chip away at different aspects of the Build Back Better Act, including prescription drug price reform, the single-most popular provision of the social infrastructure bill. Leading the assault was Oregon Rep. Kurt Schrader, who McLeod-Skinner is challenging in a newly redrawn fifth Congressional district that offers little incumbent advantage.
“When fears come up, there's often a sense of like, ‘Oh, let's slow this down and pump the brakes on that and water this down.’ I do appreciate that politics is the art of compromise, but I think there's also a lack of appreciation for the crises that people are in, that our planet is in,” McLeod says, pushing back at the Problem Solvers Caucus approach to incremental lawmaking. “Working families are in crisis right now, people are exhausted. They're at the breaking point. You can't keep pushing people, pushing our democracy.”
Schrader isn’t exactly in touch with the rage simmering in communities across the country. He inherited a fortune from his Pfizer executive grandfather shortly before the 2008 election cycle, which helped him clear the primary field ahead of a historic Democratic wave year. He’s been in office ever since, consistently scoring as one of the most conservative and corporate-friendly Democrats in DC, compiling a voting record that reflects the gobs of special interest money he gladly accepts. McLeod, meanwhile, refuses all corporate PAC donations.
As the caucus’s center shifts to the progressive left, Schrader’s neoliberal politics have not only become a relic, they’ve done serious damage to urgent attempts to address the myriad crises facing the country.
This term alone, Schrader has led the charge that killed the BBB provision that would have substantially lowered drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies (and was richly rewarded for doing so), was one of two Democrats that voted against the American Rescue Plan, and likened the impeachment of Donald Trump for his role in stoking the January 6th insurrection to a lynching.
Schrader couches his decisions in the language of sensible moderation, which is still seen by many in party leadership as the way to win over swing voters. That’s a dubious argument, given Democrats’ ongoing failures in rural and de-industrialized parts of the country, and one that McLeod is eager to dispel.
“We’ve seen in this urban-rural divide this attempt to pit us against each other,” she says, “but my wife and I live in a rural area and rural folks want relief and results just as much as urban folks. They don’t things watered down, as we're seeing the centrist politicians do, but to really just have [lawmakers] get things done and to take care of each other.”
McLeod grew up in rural Oregon and moved back there nearly a decade ago after an adulthood spent serving communities around the world. As an openly gay woman, she was barred from serving in the military in the ‘90s, so she went to work for the International Rescue Committee to coordinate reconstruction and humanitarian aid in Bosnia, which led to a job managing a refugee program in the Bay Area. She spent a little over a decade in California, serving on the city council in Santa Clara and working as a city and environmental planner.
After earning her law degree at the University of Oregon and completing all the associated clerkships and other legal training, she worked as a city manager for two different municipalities. Her stint as the city manager in the southwest Oregon town of Talent coincided with the devastating wildfires that engulfed much of the Pacific Northwest, turning McLeod-Skinner into a crisis manager.
That experience helped inform her approach to politics in a newly reconstituted district that now contains wide swaths of rural Oregon. A strong supporter of progressive priorities such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal — she’s been endorsed by the state and national Working Families Party, Sunrise, and Indivisible — McLeod-Skinner calibrates the way she discusses policy depending on her audience.
“When I'm in urban areas I talk about climate change, and I'm in rural areas, we'll talk about drought and wildfires and flooding,” she explains. “It’s about getting people to lean into recognizing the challenges, and then most importantly, how we address them. I often stay away from buzzwords, and when I’m talking about making sure we all have access to the full range of healthcare, you’ll have heads nodding all around.”
This is McLeod-Skinner’s third run for elective office in Oregon, but by far the one she is best-positioned to win. In 2018, she took on powerhouse Rep. Greg Walden in Oregon’s deep-red second congressional district and exceeded expectations, winning her home county and outperforming the rest of the Democratic ticket.
In 2020, she finished third in a statewide primary for Secretary of State, but she again over-performed in rural areas. Now, in a district where half of the voters have never seen Schrader on the ballot, McLeod-Skinner is making the case to Democrats in a solid blue district that they can — and must — do better than a corporate sellout.
“I'm a lifelong Democrat, and I'm sometimes really frustrated with my own party, but the reason that I identify as a Democrat is because I believe we care about people and care about our planet,” she says. “We've got a lot of people who wear the uniform of the team that they think is going to be most beneficial to promoting themselves but then find ways to undermine the very vision and values that are laid out by a party.”
By replacing Kurt Schrader with a grassroots progressive, voters can prove that ambitious policies appeal to working families everywhere.
Here are some quick updates on important stories playing out across the country. Want more regular, detailed updates on these stories and more throughout the week? Want to help us report out more original stories? Become a premium subscriber!
And now on to the news…
Voting Rights and Redistricting
Pennsylvania: A bipartisan redistricting panel on Friday voted 4-1 to approve new legislative maps that represent significant improvements on the gerrymanders that gave Republicans a full decade of power. The state Senate may remain in GOP hands for now, but the House map offers Democrats an even chance of winning a majority. Republicans plan on challenging the maps in court.
Any legal pursuit is unlikely to produce a satisfying remedy. The State Supreme Court is controlled by Democrats and has shown little patience for GOP gerrymandering. In 2018, the court tossed a Congressional map that had been rigged by Republicans during the last round of redistricting, and last week, it agreed to take a more proactive approach and dictate the new House map from the outset.
North Carolina: We sure love state supreme courts, don’t we, folks? On Friday, the highest court in North Carolina also decided to insert itself in the redistricting process. The court tossed out an egregiously gerrymandered Congressional map that Republicans had passed over the protests of Gov. Roy Cooper, who had zero veto power over redistricting.
Democrats held a 6-1 advantage on the Supreme Court until the 2020 election, when Republicans flipped two seats. Chief Justice Cheri Beasley lost her re-election bid by just 430 votes and is now the presumptive Democratic nominee for this year’s open Senate election. Republicans have a chance to flip the court this fall, an election that we’ll be looking at in the coming months.
Michigan: Another State Supreme Court story here, though this one isn’t a cut-and-dry victory. The Michigan high court ruled Friday that the maps produced by the new citizen’s redistricting commission did not violate the Voting Rights Act, turning away concerns from civil rights activists over a dearth of minority-majority districts.
Bruce Adelson, the commission’s Voting Rights Act attorney, advised the commission that the Voting Rights Act does not require states to have majority-minority districts to comply, so long as the maps protect minority voters’ opportunity to elect their candidates of choice. Commissioners and legal counsel stood by that interpretation amidst criticism and legal challenges.
The majority decision to dismiss the challenge found that without concrete evidence to back it up, the argument that the reduced number of majority-minority political districts in the new maps violates the Voting Rights Act wasn’t sufficient to throw out the commission’s interpretation and reopen the mapping process.
The complicating factor here is that the maps were designed to rectify a decade’s worth of Republican gerrymanders and give Democrats more winnable districts. Doing so required splitting up parts of Detroit, which added Black voters to several districts that litigants claim did not represent communities of common interest. They also suggest that those districts are less likely to elect Black representatives, which could reduce the number of minority legislators in the state.
Policy Updates
New Mexico: After years of underfunding schools helped create a massive teacher shortage in the state, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Democratic legislative leaders are working to make up for lost time. The State Senate on Saturday passed a bill that would raise minimum teacher pay by $10k, a 20% increase that would be more jaw-dropping if it weren’t so long overdue.
There are three levels of teacher pay in New Mexico, each based on experience and educational attainment. Level one teachers would make a minimum of $50,000 per year, level two educators would begin at $60,000, and level three teachers would earn at least — you got it — $70,000 per year. The bill cleared the chamber unanimously and its passage through the State House is essentially a formality.
New Mexico Democrats will weigh several other major education reform bills, including one that would raise the state employee minimum wage to $15-an-hour. Another would set minimum annual pay for teachers’ assistants at $20,000 per year, which is still pitifully low.
California: A bunch of wealthy NIMBYs are pushing a new ballot initiative that would effectively invalidate several major new laws intended to create more affordable housing in a state desperate for every unit it can get.
Proponents are targeting laws such as Senate Bill 9, signed by Newsom in September and which took effect Jan. 1, which allows for a property zoned single-family to be split for a duplex without a public hearing, if it meets various requirements.
Senate Bill 10, which also took effect Jan. 1, allows any parcel to be zoned for up to 10 residential units if it is located in “transit-rich” areas or is considered an urban infill.
Single-family zoning began as a ploy to discourage people of color from moving to the suburbs after white people fled cities during the post-war period. It’s largely used in the same way now, though proponents don’t always have such pernicious intentions. Concerns about pollution, traffic, and overdevelopment can also lead to fights to preserve single-family zoning.
Iowa: Missouri’s ban on allowing local police to help federal law enforcement agencies with gun crime cases in the state has been an absolute disaster… so of course some GOP members and hardcore right-wing kooks are trying to enact the same sort of law in Iowa.
By the way, when I say that the gun freak law has been an absolute disaster in Missouri, I am in no way being hyperbolic.
In a brief filed by the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, the organization criticized a portion of SAPA the group said hinders law enforcement’s protection of domestic violence survivors.
Before SAPA, federal law barred domestic abusers from owning guns. But Muenz said Missouri’s law doesn’t allow police to use the federal laws that allowed police to disarm domestic abusers in the past.
Blue Springs Police Chief Bob Muenz, president of the Missouri Police Chiefs Association, said departments have stopped confiscating weapons in domestic violence situations due to SAPA. He said it's another example where law enforcements’ fears of lawsuits from SAPA are preventing police from doing their work.
“I don’t want criminals to go free because we’re having to reduce what we do or maybe we’re not doing what we do for fear of being sued for violating this statute,” Muenz said.
You won’t find me often making common cause with the president of a state’s police chief association, but kudos to Chief Bob Muenz for speaking out against the Republicans who otherwise sniff that thin blue line.
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