Negotiating The Down Payment

Progressives make a bargain with the new Democratic majority in Congress.

Isaiah J. Poole December 05, 2006 House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi is going to have a powerful wind at her back as she pushes her “100 Hours” agenda through the new Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, thanks to the commitments of progressive grassroots organizations who came together today at an historic meeting. The expectation in return: that Democrats treat the 100 Days agenda as a down payment on a longer list of progressive policy changes. The Tuesday Group is a biweekly gathering of labor, environmental, economic, civil rights and social policy organizations in Washington. Today’s Tuesday Group meeting was an unusually large standing-room-only crowd of more than 100 activists who have varied agendas of their own, but are committed to helping the new Democratic majority fulfill their mandate for change. They are coming together under the banner, “Change America Now,” or CAN. Campaign for America’s Future co-director Robert L. Borosage, who organizes the Tuesday Group, stressed the strength of that mandate when he addressed the group, and said that Democrats need to correctly interpret the message voters were sending in November when they threw out the old Republican leadership. “The problem is not that the Democrats are too extreme,” he said. “It is that they are not defined.” This agenda will help define the Democrats and make clear to middle- and low-income voters who stands with them and who stands against them as they consider their choices in the 2008 election, Borosage said. Pelosi’s 100 Hours agenda includes ethics legislation, implementation of the 9/11 Commission recommendations, increasing the minimum wage, changing the Medicare prescription drug program so that the government can bargain with pharmaceutical companies, cutting rates for student loans and redirecting subsidies for oil companies to alternative energy and conservation. “The first 100 hours is 'training camp'” for what is expected to be a more difficult legislative fight over the agenda items in the Senate as well as a broader fight on behalf of progressive policies, said Brad Woodhouse, communications director for Americans United. Borosage noted that when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, their much-vaunted “Contract with America” passed the House easily but got mired in the Senate. The same thing could happen with the 100 Hours agenda as K Street lobbyists line up allies on both sides of the aisle. For that reason, “we need big momentum in the House,” Woodhouse said. The coalition of organizations includes Americans United, USAction, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and allies such as MoveOn.org, ACORN, the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, the National Organization for Women and People for the American Way. Many of these organizations already fear that the Democrats will be too timid in pressing for economic policy changes. That sense of impatience is mirrored in today’s TomPaine.com commentary by Jonathan Tasini, who considers Pelosi and the Democrats' opening gambit “mealy-mouthed mush.” That may or may not be an overstatement, but Borosage calls this an opportunity for progressive organizations to “walk and chew gum at the same time” — by getting behind the new Democratic majority in their first steps toward change and then holding them accountable to a continuing agenda of making America work for working people