Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) speaks during a signing ceremony last week after the passage of a fourth coronavirus response bill, April 23, 2020, on Capitol Hill.
The most important primary contest this year is the challenge to House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal, 71, by the young fourth-term mayor of Holyoke, Alex Morse, 31, in Massachusetts’s First Congressional District. As the Prospect reported in this piece, Neal is the ultimate corporate Democrat, often making special-interest deals with Republicans and looking out for big business.
As Ways and Means chair, Neal wields vast power over taxes, trade, tariffs, Social Security, Medicare, pensions, and management of the national debt. His influence equals that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a close ally.
Neal epitomizes corporate power in the Democratic Caucus. Morse by contrast is an effective grassroots progressive, with a record of creative economic redevelopment policies for one of the Commonwealth’s most depressed old industrial cities and a skill at bringing new people into politics.
The CARES Act and its $484 billion emergency supplemental last week displayed both Neal’s power and his vulnerability. With its failure to get timely aid to unemployed people, its bungled assistance to bona fide small businesses, and the diversion of tens of billions of federal funds to large corporate chains masquerading as local companies, the act left citizens more frustrated than appreciative.
Neal in speeches and media appearances made it sound as if the bill was his personal handiwork—and that may be a miscalculation that helps his challenger.
“Billions of dollars are not being spent in communities that have been most hard hit by disinvestment and lack of opportunity long before COVID-19. The small businesses in our district are not national steakhouse chains,” says Morse.
In many respects, the success of Morse’s insurgent campaign will depend on his skill at tying bad policies that fail to help local people to Neal’s power and handiwork. And Neal is giving Morse plenty of ammunition.
Speaking at a virtual event at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute on April 13, Neal boasted that Ways and Means, under his leadership, “wrote much of the CARES Act.”
Neal has made it sound as if the bill was his personal handiwork—and that may be a miscalculation that helps his challenger.
In gathering expert advice, he said, “I immediately sought out Bob Rubin.” He also reached out to Hank Paulson, Bush’s Treasury Secretary, on whose watch the economy collapsed, as well as Steve Rattner, a notable Wall Street Democrat.
These are exactly the people who should not be advising a Biden administration. But if Neal is re-elected, they will have side-door access via the House Ways and Means chair.
Neal has treated the CARES Act as one more benefit he has delivered for his constituents, following his longtime strategy in resisting primary challenges and getting re-elected as a corporate Democrat in one of the most liberal seats in the country. MA-01 runs west from Neal’s base in Springfield and then north into very liberal areas such as Berkshire County.
But at a hearing last week on Neal’s home turf, Springfield city councilors complained that their community was being shortchanged. Council President Justin Hurst asked, “Why does Western Mass. continue to get left out?” In a recent allocation of additional test kits for COVID-19, he added, none went to the western part of the state.
In the meantime, Springfield city revenue is down by $2.3 million in the past month compared to the same period last year.
One area that neither the original CARES Act nor last week’s supplemental delivered was aid to states, cities, and towns. Neal, like Pelosi, has said that Congress will come back for more, but Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is adamantly opposed to more help for “blue states,” and the moment of maximum partisan leverage may have passed.
“People are losing their health coverage,” says Morse. “Neal’s solution is to expand COBRA coverage,” referring to the law that allows laid-off people to temporarily keep their employer-provided insurance, as long as they pay the costs. “Neal’s solution to the health crisis maximizes the profits of the private health insurance industry rather than public health.”
The primary is on September 1. In D.C., Neal has been a corporate power broker. At home, his persona has been that of a public servant who delivers the goods. Let’s see if that straddle survives the pandemic.
