Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks during a rail union workers rally outside of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, December 13, 2022.
Bernie Sanders gained a national profile by barnstorming the country during his two campaigns for president, highlighting the working-class, kitchen-table issues he found most important. He’s going to run the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee the same way.
Sanders has ascended to run the HELP Committee in the new Congress, after Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) vacated the chair to replace his retired Vermont colleague Patrick Leahy as head of the Appropriations Committee. In an interview with the Prospect, Sanders highlighted the role of field hearings and town halls, to “take the case to workers and young people” throughout the country, and bring in the kind of witnesses Washington seldom hears from.
“The great political crisis in our country today is not only the objective reality, the great economic stresses,” Sanders said, “but that ordinary people, working-class people do not even believe that the government understands their problems. The best thing we can do is to say, ‘We understand your pain.’”
Two events that prefigure the direction in which Sanders will take the committee are happening in the next several days. First, Sanders and a Republican, Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN), are holding a joint event tomorrow with rail workers, to call on the railroads to issue at least seven sick days to employees, something Sanders has said previously would cost the industry $321 million, which amounts to just a little over 1 percent of their annual profits.
Sanders orchestrated a letter in December, signed by over 70 representatives and senators, asking President Biden to use his executive power to require federal contractors like rail companies to provide sick days as a condition of keeping those contracts. Adding Braun, a Republican who is running for governor of Indiana in 2024, adds a new dimension to the organizing. Braun was one of six Republicans who voted last year in favor of modifying the contract imposed on rail workers to add paid sick days.
Representatives from five rail unions will also take part in the event, alongside the National Association of Chemical Distributors, a trade organization. A coalition that includes Democrats, Republicans, unions, and corporate trade groups is a rare sight.
Second, next Monday Sanders has planned a virtual town hall with the heads of the two major teachers unions, to discuss what he describes as a crisis in teacher pay. “Right now if you decided to become a teacher, in half the states do you know what the starting wage is? It’s $16 an hour,” Sanders told me. “When we talk about a cultural war, it’s not the stuff [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis is talking about. We are a society that says to people, go on Wall Street to engage in speculation, do nothing to improve life in America. You don’t want to go into teaching for low wages. We’ve got to reverse these cultural incentives.”
America has seen rising numbers of teachers leaving the profession, with shortages in almost every state amid the combined stresses of low pay, poor working conditions, gun violence, and anxiety over what they can teach their students. The town hall will give four public-school teachers an opportunity to discuss these challenges directly on the panel, along with an audience question-and-answer period. Sanders plans to live-stream the events on Twitter and Facebook.
“The great political crisis in our country today is … that ordinary people, working-class people do not even believe that the government understands their problems.”
This is the beginning of an effort that will include hearings and town halls held outside of Washington. Taking the work of the HELP Committee outside of the normal format makes sense given the expected gridlock in Congress for the next two years.
Sanders recognizes that his priorities are highly unlikely to be adopted by the House Republican caucus or even a majority of a closely divided Senate. While he will reintroduce his Medicare for All legislation this year, he told me that he knows if it came to the Senate floor, it would only get about 15 to 20 votes. On the less-heralded pension side of the committee’s work, he plans to reintroduce legislation to scrap the cap on Social Security payroll taxes above $250,000 a year, and to push some of that money to increasing benefits at the low end. Again, it may not pass but sets a marker for the conversation about entitlements to come, he said. “We’re going to be using the bully pulpit to educate people.”
Sanders does think there are opportunities to move the needle forward in the wide variety of areas under the jurisdiction of the HELP Committee. On health care, a longtime crusade of his has been expanding support for community health centers, which provide primary care, and in some cases prescription drugs and dental services, to all comers, regardless of the ability to pay. Community health centers also give patients a “medical home” to coordinate care and track wellness. Community health centers now provide for around 30 million Americans, up from ten million a couple of decades ago. Sanders’s goal is to work with Republicans who represent medical deserts and have expressed prior support for community-based clinics to expand the program even more. “If we can’t guarantee health care to all, we can deliver primary care to all,” he said.
Prescription drugs is another potential area of compromise, though Democrats had to go it alone to pass the modest advances in drug price reform in the Affordable Care Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Sanders cited polls showing that rank-and-file Republicans place the high cost of medications atop their list of priorities. CEOs of pharmaceutical firms will almost certainly be on the witness list for future hearings at the HELP Committee, forced to justify their higher prices.
They will doubtlessly be joined by CEOs of firms that have been repeatedly cited for unfair labor practices. “The good news is we are seeing a significant increase in organizing around the country,” Sanders told me. “The bad news is you’re seeing companies like Starbucks use vicious union-busting efforts. If you’re asking me will we be very aggressive to hold companies accountable, yes we will.”
Sanders attributed the labor shortages we continue to see in certain areas of the economy, particularly consumer-facing and lower-wage sectors, to the fact that the pandemic gave people reason to rethink their careers. “And families are saying, you know what, I’m not working for starvation wages, I want respect and dignity on the job,” he said. Focusing on how to staff up underserved professions, from mental health counselors and pharmacists, to nurses and dentists, to child care professionals and teachers, will be a big focus.
In doing so, Sanders hopes to turn the tables on the loud megaphone on the right around issues of race and gender and sexual orientation that have stood in for the debate around public education. Sanders wants to bring it back to the very real workforce issues of teaching the nation’s children, while offering a strong rebuttal to the conservative noise.
“The idea that in the year 2023 in the United States of America, there are efforts to ban books, and a growing effort to try to deny the ugly realities of American history, is of great concern to me,” he said. “The horrors of slavery are real. Segregation and racism are real, homophobia is real. I don’t know why anybody who believes in freedom would not be understanding those realities and debating those realities.”
