Rock the Senate!

Rock the Senate!

The year 2006 pushed me into electoral politics. Not only did right-wing Republicans control the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the public agenda, but in my very blue home state of Maryland, too many establishment Democrats had grown cozy with corporate predators like Enron and collaborationist with the degraded politics of the Bush era.

My own state senator in eastern Montgomery County (Silver Spring and Takoma Park) was the powerful president pro tem of the Maryland Senate, chair of the Montgomery County Senate delegation in Annapolis, and the widely feared boss of our local Democratic political machine. After she voted for the death penalty, introduced a pro-Iraq War resolution, and co-sponsored legislation to deregulate the state’s electric utilities (a disastrous decision that caused everyone’s bills to rise more than 50 percent), I decided to run against her.

The Maryland General Assembly is in session only ninety days a year, so I could run for the Senate without surrendering my teaching career as a law professor. But the decision was terrifying. The incumbent had been in office for thirty-two years, enjoyed a reputation for hardball politics, and had not faced a serious challenger in decades.

I had never run for public office before and experienced cognitive dissonance in changing my self-image from that of an analyst of political events and a “professor” of laws to a shaper of political events, a leader of people, and a lawmaker. I kept worrying about a jarring fragment I had read from Wittgenstein in college, that “ambition is the death of thought.”

Worst of all, the tradition in Maryland is that incumbent senators are not challenged in primaries. I was one of only two Democratic primary challengers in the entire state, and the other was a former U.S. ambassador who had served previously in the House of Delegates. Everyone told me to forget about winning because all of the unions, environmental organizations, and liberal groups would endorse the incumbent, not out of enthusiasm, but out of inertia, fear, and a sense of chastened expectations.

On the other hand, most rank-and-file Democrats were hungry for change. Our district, on the border of Washington, D.C., once overwhelmingly white and suburban, had experienced dramatic demographic change. It is home to large numbers of African American professionals, Hispanic immigrants, environmental activists and union members, gays and lesbians struggling to raise families in the face of discriminatory state laws, and nurses and doctors seeking single-payer health care. The only city in my district—the legendary nuclear-free Takoma Park, where I live—rebels against lethargic, old-school politics.

Every campaign is different, but they all take on cinematic proportions in the minds of the candidates. Mine was dramatic for me because we worked around the clock to galvanize the complexity of progressive politics rather than dumbing down everything to monosyllabic platitudes on a glossy brochure.

We ran circles around “the machine,” mobilizing large constituencies that had been ignored or taken for granted: writers, poets, passionate anti-death penalty activists, consumer advocates, civil libertarians, community-minded soccer players and coaches, gay and lesbian people waiting to marry, peace activists horrified by the Iraq War, college progressives and high school student journalists, parents angry about poor food in the public schools, disability advocates, union activists frustrated by go-along politics, environmentalists and animal rights activists. Upward of five hundred people showed up for events.

The release of all this pent-up cultural and political energy allowed me to raise more than $180,000 in small amounts without taking any checks from corporations or Annapolis lobbyists (not that they wanted to give me any). Although I was still badly outspent, we assembled the resources we needed. In the process, we showed that, especially with the Internet, it is feasible to run outside of machine politics and against corporate money. Indeed, when I spoke to the local Chamber of Commerce, I called for Maryland to join the twenty-two states that now ban corporate campaign contributions. I introduced the proposal by saying, “I have a plan to save Maryland’s businesses tens of millions of dollars a year. . .” I went on to say that I wanted business to prosper and thrive—but not to govern.

The incumbent did not take our insurgency well and lashed out. But all the negative ads and inside ploys were no match for my youthful, tech-savvy campaign staff, which told voters to “rock the Senate!” and organized a canvass of every strong Democratic household in the district. I personally knocked on 13,000 doors, which constituted both the best physical workout and best political education of my life. By the time the polls closed, it was not even close. We swept 67 percent of the vote and carried nearly every precinct in the district of 135,000 people. All of the pundits who had earlier declared my victory “impossible” carefully explained to the public on election night why it was “inevitable.”

Now, as I enter the fourth and final year of my first term, I feel certain that the independence of this insurgency is what has permitted me to keep my principles intact through the byzantine twists and turns of legislative politics and the conservative undertow of big-money power. I was elected beholden to no one but my constituents. During my first week in office, a Senate colleague took me out for lunch and said, “You know, Jamie, I followed your campaign closely. I just want to tell you this about Annapolis: when you’re campaigning, it’s a cesspool, but when you’re elected, it’s a Jacuzzi.” Thanks to my constituency, I still haven’t had to get into the swirling waters of let’s-make-a-deal politics.

And, more important, I can take strong positions that many senators would not touch with a ten-foot pollster but that galvanize progressive motion. One issue I campaigned on was restoring the voting rights of ex-convicts in Maryland who have done their time, gotten out of prison, and had every other civil right restored to them. I was told by many people that felon re-enfranchisement would be a fool’s errand in the General Assembly. I went to see (the late) Senator Gwendolyn Britt from Prince George’s County, who had been introducing the bill for many years, to offer my help. She thanked me and said she would be in touch.

One day, Gwen approached me on the floor and said that she had managed narrowly to get the bill out of committee. Would I be willing to lead the floor fight? I told her I was honored, to which she replied, “Well, don’t be that honored, you were the only white senator willing to do it.” I laughed and got ready.

After the Republican floor leader railed about how our side wanted to give voting rights to murderers, armed robbers, and violent felons, Gwen turned around in her seat, motioned me up, and whispered, “Your turn.”

I rose and pointed out that many of the prisoners the Republicans were talking about would never be released, and that the vast majority of Marylanders who would be re-enfranchised under our bill were nonviolent felons, many of them in jail for drug charges or financial crimes.

“Take one of my constituents, for example: Jack Abramoff,” I said. As all eyes turned to me, I continued: “He just got sent off to prison in the western part of the state for five years for his crimes against our democracy. If anybody should be disenfranchised for life, it is someone who has tried to corrupt the political process itself. But you’re right, we do believe in rehabilitation on this side of the aisle and we believe that all citizens have the right to vote, including those who once committed crimes and have served good time and had their other rights returned to them. Although I know he’ll never vote for me, it doesn’t make any difference—Jack Abramoff should have the right to get his vote back one day.”

At that point, most of the Democrats rose to speak on behalf of what quickly became called the Jack Abramoff Voting Rights Act, and it passed in the Senate, then in the House. Maryland thus restored the voting rights of more than 100,000 people.

This was not a rare victory for progressives. We have expanded the ranks of the medically insured by hundreds of thousands, extended unemployment insurance to part-time workers, and passed sweeping climate change legislation. I have seen some twenty-five of my bills become law, including major planks of my campaign: consumer and tenant protection laws; the state’s first statewide civil rights law giving litigants the right to a jury trial; a state Farm-to-School program to get junk food out of the schools and locally grown farm food in; a fiscal transparency law to put all public expenditures of more than $50,000 online; the Lily Ledbetter Act establishing that new acts of job discrimination reset the statute of limitations; legislation extending the right to vote in primary elections to seventeen-year olds who will be eighteen at the time of the general election; anti-spying legislation we passed after the state police infiltrated meetings of environmentalists, gay rights groups, and anti-death penalty activists; and the National Popular Vote Plan initiating an interstate compact for states to allow their presidential electors to vote for the winner of the national popular vote.

For many of these bills, we overcame fatalistic expectations simply by practicing a model of politics as public education. Take the National Popular Vote plan, which is a way to move America to popular election of the president. Working with former U.S. Senator Birch Bayh and Ryan O’Donnell of Fair Vote, we proceeded to educate the 188 members of the General Assembly, the media, and the public about the history of the electoral college, its vulnerability to mischief and manipulation in the states, the “wrong winner” problem, and the structural marginalization of the vast majority of Americans—ncluding Marylanders—who are consigned to “safe states,” where no real general election presidential campaign takes place. (We even had a number of Republican legislators on board until they apparently got the message from on high that democracy and demography are unlikely to favor Republicans.) Maryland became the first state in the union to adopt NPV, and the proposal has since passed in New Jersey, Hawaii, Illinois, and Washington, as well as both houses of the California legislature, before being vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Power still holds sway on two issues of importance to my constituents. Take the question of marriage equality. There is no rational excuse for denying gay and lesbian people equal access to the hundreds of legal, financial, and social benefits of marriage routinely extended by the state to heterosexual couples. We have succeeded in legislating bits and pieces, such as medical visitation and property inheritance, and I am convinced that we will win outright one day because demographics are on our side. The young see the prejudice for what it is.

Capital punishment provides another example of power edging out justice. In 2008, after New Jersey repealed the death penalty, I introduced a bill to create a commission to study the fairness of capital punishment in our state. The commission was headed by former U.S. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti and found some striking things, including that the death penalty is enormously expensive at every phase and riddled with racial bias. We have executed only five people since the death penalty was restored three decades ago, and all of them were convicted of killing white people. Five people are on death row today—and all of their victims were white. But more than 80 percent of the victims of homicide in our state are non-white. The first American on death row exonerated by DNA evidence, Kirk Bloodsworth, was a Marylander who was the victim of freakish bad luck in the criminal justice process. He would have gone to his death protesting his innocence had science not progressed to the point of proving definitively that he was not the killer. The detective in that case sent a letter saying that he was as conservative a “law and order” official as anyone but that he could no longer support the death penalty after seeing what happened in the Bloodsworth case.

But the commission’s recommendation to repeal capital punishment crashed into a blockade of opposition from prosecutors and conservative Democrats who use the death penalty as a signal of “tough on crime” attitudes. We failed by a couple of votes to repeal, but we succeeded in requiring proof of either DNA evidence or a videotaped confession before capital punishment may be imposed. This last-minute compromise reduces the chances of the state’s executing an innocent person, but the racially coded, wasteful, and arbitrary regime will survive until we can add to the number of progressives in the Senate.

However, no legislative setback has diminished my enjoyment of public service. The work of a legislator sweeps far beyond parliamentary maneuvering to include lots of little daily successes. In a typical week, I might help constituents resolve an adoption problem, perform a wedding, write some college reference letters, appear at a health care reform rally, speak at a breakfast with small businesspeople, send a letter to advance a street lighting request, certify aspiring notary publics, pressure a landlord about problematic conditions in an apartment building, mediate a conflict between auto dealers and manufacturers with respect to employee compensation, lead a giant outdoor game of “Simon Says” for a group of seventy-five kids, speak at a labor rally and a state college, and conduct a meeting about storm water regulatory and legislative reform.

Representative government requires leadership that has the patience to address people’s problems and people’s dreams, collective requests and individual ones, concerns large and small. Indeed, if one conceives of big issues like controlling climate change or providing decent health care in the right way, one sees that all politics is a form of constituent service. And we cannot be choosy about the levels of government where we try to operate. One thing you will never hear anyone say in my office: “Sorry, that’s a local (or federal) problem.”

In his brief career in the House of Commons, John Stuart Mill passionately championed democratic and liberal reforms. During his first election campaign in 1865, as recounted by Bruce Kinzer et al. in A Moralist In and Out of Parliament: John Stuart Mill at Westminster, 1865-1868, Mill wrote a letter to his fellow partisans setting forth the conditions upon which he would agree to run and serve. One was that he “would attend to no local constituency business” and another was that, while he would be proud to represent his constituents, he “would not present himself to the electors to win their votes.” While the intellectual in me could see exactly where he was coming from, the political voice in my head said, Is he crazy? Doesn’t he want to get reelected? Sure enough, although he very much wanted to return to the House of Commons in 1868, he lost his first reelection campaign. Whatever else figured in his defeat, his refusal to engage in “constituency business” and the persuasive interaction of campaign activity could not have helped.

When young people ask me how to enter politics as a career, I urge them to get deeply involved in the community and to master a craft or profession before running. The most effective legislators I know are those who have succeeded in a trade or discipline, such as the former police chief, the longtime public defender, or the surgeon I serve with. They speak with intellectual authority on a body of issues and are not pushed around by lobbyists or leadership.

But the legislators who arrive only as ambitious politicians with no independent intellectual ground to stand on are constantly in peril of being manipulated by special interests and enlisted by leadership to ever more dubious causes. The key to progressive success in government is to steadily uplift the intelligence, expertise, and moral quality of our leadership—something we did triumphantly in the 2008 presidential election—and to constantly educate the citizenry about the fundamental fiscal policy choices we face.

It is idle to long for the kind of politics that prevailed during the founding period when many elected leaders—people like Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Tom Paine, and James Madison—doubled as scientists, inventors, and philosophers. We live in an age of telegenic career politicians bankrolled by big money, but I do wish that more activists and intellectuals—the readers of Dissent magazine, I imagine—would plunge into electoral politics in order to change the rules of the game.

It is true that public office requires reserves of energy, extroversion, oratory, and patience for compromise that not all people maintain. But the experience provides an education unlike anything you will find in academia, where highly generalized and precious models of analysis proliferate endlessly, but practical understanding of how to make political and moral change is elusive. I have found that the reigning abstractions of progressive academic discourse—words like “postmodernity” or even “socialism,” have no relevance to fine-grained realities of political life and public policy. I have never once heard a postmodern solution to a policy problem, and the only kind of socialism that comes up with my constituents are the billion-dollar bailouts to Wall Street.

None of this is to disparage the significance of theory for practical politics. Indeed, the one proverb that frequently runs through my head is John Dewey’s admonition, “Theory without practice is empty, and practice without theory is blind.” Just as we need democratic theory to be better informed by political practice, we need democratic practice to be better informed by political theory. To my mind, the most useful scholarship today will be succinct analyses of intractable social problems—like the War on Drugs, the frequent resort to war to resolve international conflict, traffic congestion, male violence, religious hysteria and unreason, the boom-bust cycle, the growth of inequality, the power of money in elections—combined with strategies for unfreezing public opinion and creating new political alliances to make deep changes.

This kind of scholarship will be a gift to progressive legislators, who cannot make public policy with John Rawls, much less Michel Foucault. I was disappointed that right after the 2008 election—the time of greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and greatest political hope since the 1960s—the Democratic leadership presented few new approaches but fell back on so many discredited habits of neoliberalism. The government pumped trillions of dollars into the banking sector and businesses like the auto industry, but the words “worker ownership” were never uttered. Meantime, the unions that contribute generously to the party are on the ropes. We face an environmental crisis of devastating scope, yet still have no sweeping “Green Deal” to remake the premises of our obsolescent carbon-based economy. The mounting failures of war are all around us, yet military violence continues to be an organizing principle of foreign policy.

I was and I am a passionate Obama supporter; I chaired his campaign in my county, knocked on countless doors and was an Obama delegate at the Denver convention. But electing a good and charismatic president is just the beginning of the change we need. To be successful, progressive politics requires sustained passionate engagement at all levels of government—in red states and blue—by well-rooted leaders who are willing to fight together for justice against power. “If you run, you might lose,” Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., told me. “But if you don’t run, you can’t win.” No good act in politics is ever wasted, and two or three progressives—a critical mass—can completely change the dynamics of a legislative debate. Things can be pushed much farther, much faster than we think. New generations of progressive young people have been empowered by Teach for America, the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project, and City Year and now understand the inner dynamics of progressive organizing. Just as President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize must be seen as a “challenge” to strong action in foreign policy, as he put it, his election itself must be a challenge to strong action for progressive political change in every part of America. So what are we waiting for?

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Jamie Raskin is a Democratic state senator in Maryland, representing Silver Spring and Takoma Park, and a professor of constitutional law at American University, where he directs the Program on Law and Government. He is the author of Overruling Democracy: the Supreme Court versus the American People (2003) and We the Students (3d ed. 2008). E-mail: Jamie.Raskin@Senate.State.MD.US.