Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Rep. Richard Neal on Capitol Hill last month
Richie Neal may hail from Massachusetts and not St. Louis. But nobody took Tuesday’s upset primary victory for Cori Bush over longtime Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) more seriously than him. Bush’s victory was the second incumbent toppling by a Justice Democrat–sponsored challenger in recent weeks, joining Jamaal Bowman in New York. And if Clay, whose congressman father co-founded the Congressional Black Caucus and whose seat has been in the family for 52 years, can be beat, nobody is truly that safe. Especially not the next Congressman in the sights of Justice Democrats: Richie Neal.
Neal didn’t waste any time with his response: a hastily released ad the next morning featuring a rare personal appeal from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, seeking to bolster Neal in his primary challenge from Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse. The ad is a study in how establishment Democrats have a level of contempt for their audience, and offer an alternative version of reality to protect themselves.
“When I needed someone to lead the fight against Donald Trump, I asked Richie Neal, because he doesn’t back down from anyone,” Pelosi begins. Neal, in fact, backed down from challenging Trump directly for months, shying away from an effort to secure the president’s tax returns. He waited several months to request the tax returns, which is under the authority of the House Ways and Means Committee he chairs. Neal was more interested in getting Trump’s signature on a bipartisan retirement security bill, which facilitated the appearance of high-cost annuities in 401(k) plans, a gift to some of Neal’s biggest insurance donors.
The request for the taxes went out the day after the retirement bill passed his committee, then stalled for months to issue a subpoena and make the necessary demands to expedite the request. The issue ambled through the courts and a recent Supreme Court decision ensures that there will be no release of the tax returns before the election. This is the work of the fighter who “doesn’t back down from anyone.”
“When COVID-19 struck, I trusted Richie to negotiate the best deal for working people,” Pelosi adds. Neal himself has talked about his role in the CARES Act, the bill responding to the coronavirus crisis. He said in a virtual event at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute (the video of which has now been made private, in transparent fashion) that he “immediately sought out Bob Rubin” to gather expert advice on the subject.
Robert Rubin, of course, is the banker and Clinton-era Treasury Secretary who is as responsible as anyone for the Democrats’ right turn toward neoliberalism and fealty to Wall Street. No surprise, then, that the bill included a $4.5 trillion Federal Reserve money cannon designed to inflate asset prices and put large corporations and investors completely at ease during the anxiety of the crisis. While the Fed’s money haul was massive enough to be effectively unlimited, aid for individuals and small businesses was all temporary and has now run out.
It’s unknown how much of that is the result of Rubin’s advice. But if Pelosi is saying that Neal forged the “best deal for working people,” and Neal says that Rubin was his north star in that negotiation, we can conclude on those terms that Neal at least didn’t object to a bill framed with permanent inequality-fueling support for corporate America and temporary aid for everyone else.
The lack of state and local government support in particular created the damaging dynamic of cash-starved governors and mayors itching to reopen their states prematurely, leading to a surge of coronavirus cases. The structure of the CARES Act that Neal played a role in designing, in other words, helped push America into its world’s-worst position in fighting the virus.
The rest of the ad talks about how Neal “delivers for his district,” the kind of transactional political pitch that has less resonance in a more ideologically active age. Neal didn’t deliver for Massachusetts or the country when he personally intervened to block a fix to surprise medical billing, leaving millions of patients, including his constituents, vulnerable to huge medical costs. The private equity firms and insurance companies that profit from the status quo are grateful to Neal for that and have plied him with campaign donations.
Fight Corporate Monopolies, the organization that highlighted Neal’s surprise-billing issue with ads in Massachusetts, also ran ads against William Lacy Clay in the Cori Bush race. Justice Democrats, which helped Bush to victory, has Neal in the crosshairs. The same forces that have been surprisingly successful with targeted attacks on incumbents not serving their constituents have been targeting Neal for months.
That doesn’t mean they’ll be successful, necessarily. But Neal wouldn’t have brought out his big gun, an ad from Pelosi, if he were ultra-confident. Clearly progressives have the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee nervous, and if the content of this ad is any indication, he should be.
