Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Rep. Richard Neal puts his mask back on after speaking at a signing ceremony for the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, April 23, 2020.
Richard Neal, the U.S. Representative from Massachusetts’s First District, has long been one of the most powerful representatives in Congress while remaining one of its most invisible. But after Democrats took back the House, Neal became chair of the influential Ways and Means Committee in 2019 thanks mainly to seniority.
He explains his decades-long tenure in the House as a product of his fight for the constituents of the first district: He poses next to his recycling center on Earth Day and cuts ribbons when he’s not wooing donors in one of the private lodge boxes he rents at sporting events. Until now, Neal has held a safe seat.
At the beginning of May, Neal congratulated himself on his efforts to aid families “feeling the pain of a terrible one-two punch—a national public-health emergency coupled with a historic economic downturn.” He proclaimed, “The gravity of our new reality demands substantial solutions.” But Neal’s coziness with corporate lobbies has led him to side with powerful industries at the expense of the citizens of his district, and constituents are starting to take notice.
This year, Neal has collected more PAC donations than all but one member of Congress, with top donations coming from the hospital lobby, private equity, and capital-management PACs, all of which have crippled hospitals in Neal’s district while providing their CEOs with millions in executive compensation. Neal has further immiserated his already impoverished district by striking down progressive policies like free tax filing and surprise-billing reform while failing to advance any legislative legacy of his own.
Last April, Neal gained unwanted national attention for slow walking demands for Trump’s taxes. Investigative reporting by Prospect executive editor David Dayen revealed that Neal’s delay was connected to his efforts to gain support for a bill called the SECURE Act. The act allowed annuities access to 401(k) accounts, a key goal of many of Neal’s largest contributors in the insurance industry. Neal waited until April 3, a day after the bill had been safely reported out of committee with Republican support, to finally demand Trump’s taxes.
Driving through the worst hit parts of western Mass during COVID, it’s hard not to feel like Richard Neal’s legacy is anything other than a beckoning toward end times.
If there is a grassroots challenger best poised to reverse the damage done by one of corporate Democrats’ longest tenured champions, it is Alex Morse. The four-term mayor of Holyoke grew up in public housing, lost a brother to the opioid epidemic, and was reared by a father who still works in a meatpacking in Springfield. At the ripe age of 22, Morse campaigned for—and won—the Holyoke mayorship while finishing his senior year at Brown. With COVID-19 as the catalyst, the now 31-year-old mayor could very well win an upset victory, propelled to a seat in the House as Neal succumbs to a death by a thousand self-inflicted wounds.
IN 2019, NEAL drew criticism for axing a critical expansion of Democrats’ drug-pricing bill. As The Intercept then reported, Neal sabotaged the amendment that would have both broadened the number of drugs that could be price negotiated and extended negotiated prices to the uninsured. For Neal, the veto was a no-brainer: Since 2007 he’s received more than $500,000 from the pharmaceutical industry and become one of the most outspoken opponents of Medicare for All. But unlike Neal, thousands of Massachusetts residents are being forced to choose between rationing their life saving medications and putting food on the table as the number of unemployment claims in Massachusetts approaches one million.
With some estimates predicting up to five more years of coronavirus circulation, an amended drug-pricing bill could have saved Americans millions on expensive life-saving drugs in an economy rapidly headed toward depression. Thanks to Neal, that’s no longer on the table.
Neal furthered his war on the people of Massachusetts in February when he sided with private equity giant Blackstone and the hospital lobby (both of which have donated significant sums to his war chest) in killing a bill that would have prevented hospitals from slamming patients with surprise bills far exceeding in-network costs.
With a rapid influx of hospital patients seeking treatment for COVID-19, the uninsured are also the least protected from surprise billing costs from out of network services like the pulmonologist or cardiac specialist referrals increasingly common in the treatment of the coronavirus. Imagine losing your job, then losing your health insurance, then getting COVID-19, going to the doctor, and receiving a bill for thousands of dollars in unexpected medical fees. This is Neal’s legacy.
Meanwhile, Neal benefits directly from these hospitals’ windfalls. CEOs like Mark Keroack of Baystate Health have donated thousands to the hospital lobby which is also a major backer of Neal. Public records show that Keroack donated $4,500 to Neal directly, and another $3,000 to the American Hospital Association, which in turn has donated $7,000 to his campaign. From just doctors groups and hospital associations, Neal has raised well over $200,000 in the past two election cycles.
But as one hand washes the other at the executive level, nurses I spoke with throughout western Massachusetts report layoffs, intimidation, lack of PPE, and unsafe working conditions, including being forced to work between COVID wards and general hospital populations without adequate time or supplies to safely disinfect.
It’s not only Neal’s pre-COVID failures that have worsened the crisis in the Bay State; it’s also his failures to pass protective legislation in the past three months.
This is all taking place in hospitals that have received tens of millions in federal aid under the CARES act, and whose executives are also raking in seven figures: In 2016, Keroack took home well over $2 million in executive compensation. As nurses die from COVID exposure and patients succumb to the virus in climbing numbers due to layoffs and PPE shortages, hospital executives continue to claim massive bonuses, parts of which are recycled into Neal’s overflowing coffers.
Despite reports of mismanagement and negligence, hospital CEOs and VPs likely won’t face financial or legal reprimand for undermining their staff and the health and safety of their patients. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has copied Andrew Coumo’s legislation word for word to shield executives from liability for COVID-related deaths. This type of corporate immunity has also been championed by Mitch McConnell as his sole priority for the next round of COVID relief negotiations.
Neal also made headlines for one of the most ingenious bait-and-switch policies of the last 10 years: killing the free tax-filing program under the guise of inventing it. While Neal cast himself as a hero for passing legislation ordering large firms to offer free tax-filing services, what his legislation actually did was ban the IRS from offering the free service. Instead, Neal handed the keys from a public agency to a handful of corporations whose free filing systems are designed to make it next to impossible to actually file for free. Neal got kickbacks from the very companies he handed free filing over to: $16,000 from Intuit and H&R Block.
The repercussions of this decision go beyond the fact that filers are now forced to pay exorbitant fees to file as corporations are loosed to gorge on their returns. In light of COVID-19, it also means that they have to pay to get their stimulus checks: The fastest way to get a check is by filing for 2019, but to do that, you have to go through Turbo Tax or H&R Block, and that means you almost certainly have to pay. It’s a textbook extortion racket, and for Richard Neal, it’s paid out nicely.
It’s not only Neal’s pre-COVID failures that have worsened the crisis in the Bay State; it’s also his failures to pass protective legislation in the past three months. Instead of backing the progressive Paycheck Guarantee Act, which would have subsidized payrolls with direct grants (a strategy advocated by Neal’s challenger Alex Morse and House progressive caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal),Neal supports the Employee Retention Tax Credit (ERTC), cutting businesses huge tax breaks in exchange for half-baked promises to keep employers on the payroll. If the ERTC seems like a Republican solution to widespread economic fallout, that’s because it is.
AS THE FULL WEIGHT of Neal’s legacy comes bearing down on Massachusetts, the First District has been hit especially hard. Springfield, the district's largest city where Richard Neal first entered politics as mayor, boasts the highest rate of asthma in the nation, as concentrated poverty jumped more than 10 points under Neal’s watch, exceeding 33 percent.
Meanwhile, broad swaths of the First District still don’t have high-speed internet connections, leaving students struggling to complete coursework and employees asked to work remotely in increasingly dire straits. For years western Massachusetts hilltowns have struggled to enter the information age without high-speed broadband. (A 2015 map of internet access in the first district shows huge swaths with glacial broadband and sometimes no access at all.)
In the past year, with the prodding of progressive Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, Neal joined in the effort to secure federal funding to expand broadband in his own district over the next 10 years. But as anyone living in the hilltowns will tell you, 10 years for broadband is too little too late.
Driving through the worst hit parts of western Mass during COVID, it’s hard not to feel like Richard Neal’s legacy is anything other than a beckoning toward the end times: crumbling factories and abandoned strip malls; shuttered businesses and restaurants. If anywhere reflects a real turnaround, it’s Holyoke, a working-class milltown where the efforts of Alex Morse have brought massive increases in low-income housing, a thriving cannabis industry, and the prospect of widespread economic renewal. It could be that despite his war chest, the end times are coming for Neal, not his district.
While Richard Neal’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, Alex Morse had harsh words for the reigning representative: “People in this district are looking for leadership that meets the moment and power that goes beyond a title. Families in Holyoke and Springfield, in the Berkshires and the hilltowns, are fighting to put food on the table, make their rent payments, and keep the doors of their small businesses open. They want to turn on the TV and see their representative fighting with them in the trenches. Instead, our congressman is standing in the way of policies that will make a real difference now like the Paycheck Guarantee Act and Health Care Emergency Guarantee Act.”
