RootsAction: Tell Wyden, Merkley we need a new majority leader

Jana Thrift (KEPW, Legalize Survival): This is Jana with Legalize Survival here on KEPW-LP 97.3 FM in Eugene and simulcasting at KEPW.org.

I am happy to say that today I’m here with Jeff Cohen, and he is the co-founder of RootsAction and the founder also, and director, of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). Thank you for being here.

Jeff Cohen (RootsAction, FAIR): Nice to be with you.

Jana: Will you tell listeners a little bit about RootsAction as well?

Jeff: Sure. RootsAction is a grassroots organization that fights for social and economic justice and for peace and defunding the endless wars.

We have a big email list. We send out an email every day. And lately we’ve been campaigning to get rid of Schumer because the Democratic victories across the country were so exciting and people voted for a new status quo. They don’t want the old status quo. They don’t want old business as usual.

And Schumer will be the majority leader unless Chris Van Hollen, the senator from Maryland, can defeat him. And so all week we’ve been trying, first encouraging Van Hollen to throw his hat in the ring.

Sen. Van Hollen of Maryland, the progressive, has thrown his hat in the ring against Schumer.

Schumer, as I think your listeners know, is a representative of Wall Street. He’s a big ally of big tech. He’s a big ally of the health insurance industry. He’s a big ally of AIPAC.

People in this country voted for Democrats because they were voting against business as usual. In many states, including very conservative ones, they were voting against data centers. Van Hollen is against data centers. Schumer is not.

In many states, Democrats and other voters were voting to stop the Iran War and stop all the weapons going to Israel. Van Hollen supports stopping those things, whereas, Schumer is Israel right or wrong.

So that’s what RootsAction does. We campaign for economic and social justice and for peace, and that’s why we’re doing all we can to make sure that Schumer does not become the Senate majority leader when there’s someone like Van Hollen who is more bold, more progressive, more articulate, more energetic, and that would be a validation of the voters, if someone new became the leader of the Democrats.

I should say real fast, Jana, that Van Hollen bravely went to Israel and Palestine and he went to the borders of Gaza with Sen. Jeff Merkley. And they came back and they talked about how Israel was blocking even humanitarian aid into Gaza, which is a violation of the humanitarian law.

And they also went to the West Bank. So I’m assuming Sen. Merkley is going to support Van Hollen against Schumer. I sure hope Sen. Ron Wyden does, and people in and around Eugene should be contacting their senators by phone today or by email and saying that you support Van Hollen, that we need a different status quo in Washington.

Jana: Definitely, I sent my email already. It’s fun. Can you tell us a little bit about the current status of the process? A brief description about how it works?

Jeff: Yeah. There will be a vote sometime, I think it’s early December. It’s a secret ballot of the Democrats in the Senate, and I’m pretty sure it includes the Democratic senators-elect, the new ones, the ones that won’t be sworn in until January, and most of those new senators had said during the campaign that they’re not going to support Schumer.

I mean, to be elected, especially in some of the states that Democrats won and flipped from red to blue their U.S. Senate representative, those candidates were running against the status quo and they said, ‘No, I’m not going to support Schumer if I get elected.’

So it’s a secret ballot that will happen in December. That’s why we’re organizing round the clock here, to get people, and you’ve got two senators that are crucial. If Merkley and Wyden announced that they’re for Van Hollen, it would really be important.

The majority leader appoints the chairs of the committees. The majority leader has big say sometimes on what gets voted on in the Senate and what doesn’t. They have enormous power. And Schumer, as I said, is a representative of the 1%: Wall Street, big tech, health insurance companies, AIPAC, Israel, right or wrong.

Whereas Sen. Van Hollen has been increasingly bold. And Sen. Van Hollen, in everything he says, we have an economy rigged against working people and we can’t just support the status quo in the U.S. Senate. So he’s running an insurgency here.

And you know, he not only went with Sen. Merkley during the bombardment of Gaza, which continues—if you watch Democracy Now, you know, or listen to it, you know, that he not only went with Merkley and came back and did a really important report on what they had seen—Sen. Van Hollen is the guy who went to El Salvador when an immigrant from Maryland had been kidnapped, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Abrego Garcia is now a free man because of what Van Hollen did.

So I mean, Van Hollen—and he’s, Van Hollen is a supporter of Medicare For All. Schumer obviously is not. So it’s on issue after issue. Schumer is with the corporate elite.

So I mean, to me the most important vote in Oregon is Wyden. And Ron Wyden should be getting calls saying, ‘We need a change.’ I think Wyden, he is such a smart guy, would understand that if the Democrats just go and choose Schumer as the majority leader in the Senate, it will blunt all this excitement and all this enthusiasm and all this energy that’s been whipped up in state after state for a change in Washington.

And if they impose Schumer on us, it’ll be just a real dampening of that enthusiasm.

Jana: I’m also curious about the speaker of the House position.

Jeff: Huge power. And (Hakeem) Jefferies has been wielding the power he has as the minority leader in the house, and he’ll have even more power as the speaker.

How has Jefferies been wielding his power? Well, Democrats overwhelmingly want to stop the weapons to Israel. They overwhelmingly want to stop the Iran War funding. And Jefferies has appointed, recently, to the heads of the foreign policy committees and subcommittees, people that are in the pocket of AIPAC. It’s utterly ridiculous.

Most Democrats want Medicare For All. The healthcare system is broken and two months ago announced he proclaimed that he’s going to do what he can to stop Medicare For All. He opposes Medicare For All.

When he was a junior member of the House, he was a supporter of Medicare For All. Now that he’s got power to actually bring it about, he’s working for the healthcare industry.

So the speaker of the House will have enormous power. Unfortunately, there’s no one who has yet challenged Jefferies for that job. There’s petitions going around to encourage Ayanna Pressley, the progressive congresswoman from Massachusetts, who was sort of an ally of The Squad in past years.

She’s an African American woman. There’s an effort to draft her to challenge Jefferies, and Jefferies is just as tied to Wall Street as is Schumer. Jefferies is just as tied to the Israel right or wrong lobby as Schumer, and we learned that about Jefferies when he appointed these Israel right or wrong people—

That’s a tiny minority position in the Democratic Party. When there’s polls of Democrats, Democrats want to stop the weapons flow to Israel. They want to get out of the Israel-U.S. war on Iran and end it.

And Jefferies has just appointed these people as the foreign policy leaders in the House, and they will become the chairs of the committee when he’s the speaker, unless he is deposed. And Ayanna Presley is the only name I’ve seen as someone whose name has been floated.

Van Hollen responded to the pressure where people were drafting him, and he said, ‘All right, I’m hearing from people across the country, I am going to challenge Schumer.’ And it really lit up the internet when it happened.

Right now we don’t have a challenger to Jeffries as speaker of the House, but we need one.

Jana: When I heard this was an issue, it really kind of scared me, ’cause I thought, ‘Oh no. If we don’t get the right people in leadership positions here right now, we might not get the change we desperately need.’

Jeff: Yeah. I’ll tell you this: About 50 young people with the Sunrise Movement, the movement of young people around climate change, they sat-in Schumer’s office.

There are so many activists that delivered this victory for Democrats, that knocked on doors, that made phone calls to voters and all of that energy, those people that worked their a— off, if they hear that after flipping the Senate, flipping the House, that we have the same exact Democratic party leaders, the corporatist, militarist, AIPAC-allied leaders that we had last year, I think it is going to really dampen the enthusiasm that’s needed to transform this country.

That’s why I think a key vote is Ron Wyden. If he were to come out for Van Hollen, since Wyden is sort of in the middle of the Democratic party, that would really be something.

People need to contact both senators and contact them repeatedly to support Van Hollen against Schumer as the Senate majority leader.

Jana: For those people who would decide to contact their representative at this crucial moment in time, his phone number, Ron Wyden’s phone number is (202) in Washington DC is (202) 224-5244. (202) 224-5244. And you can also contact him through an email form: wyden.senate.gov/contact.

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley has also got contact information, of course. Her number is (202) 225-5111. That is a possibility it sounds like, maybe all over our country we could try to be reaching out to her as well and encouraging her.

Jeff: If people go online, and they put in her name, they’ll see that there are these petitions going around.

When Sen. Van Hollen started getting pressure to throw his hat in the ring against Schumer for Senate majority leader, his phrase was, ‘Well, I’m getting so many calls and emails, I am now in active listening mode.’

And then, you know, that’s what he was saying on Monday, Tuesday. And then he announced he’s actually going to challenge Schumer. So this stuff can happen.

There’s one petition going around that has a million people and Mark Ruffalo, the great actor-activist, has endorsed it. There was a petition that’s got more than a million people saying Jeffries should not be the speaker of the House.

So there is a lot of online energy in both houses in Washington to change the leadership. And I think that’s the crucial thing for activists to be working on in the coming days and the next couple weeks.

Jana Thrift (KEPW, Legalize Survival): I’m so very grateful for all of your wonderful work. So thank you for coming and sharing this information with our listeners here in Eugene.

Jeff Cohen (RootsAction, FAIR): Thank you very much. It’s always great to talk to people in Eugene and people can find us at rootsaction.org. Thank you, Jana.

Presenter: Jeff Cohen, the co-founder of RootsAction and founder of FAIR, visits with Jana Thrift. You can hear Jana and Legalize Survival every Wednesday at 7 on KEPW 97.3, Eugene PeaceWorks Community Radio.