The Siege Revisited: The Rep. Gwen Moore Interview
This week Gaslit Nation welcomes Congresswoman Gwen Moore (D-Wisconsin) who gives us an inside view on the Capitol attack, what steps need to be taken to hold the perpetrators accountable, how the Biden administration can ensure a more just and fair United States, and much more!
Show Notes for This Episode Are Available Here
Madam Speaker:
The gentlewoman from Wisconsin is recognized for 30 seconds.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Madam Speaker, the President radicalized American citizens. And as his vice president fled from a lynch mob, the Speaker cowered. While people died, he watched with glee. That is why even though it's only seven days before the end of his term, we have the fierce urgency of now. Seven days is too long for him to be in power. He could declassify state secrets. He could monetize national secrets to foreign-
Madam Speaker:
... Woman's time has expired.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
adversaries. And he could even pardon-
Madam Speaker:
The gentlewoman's time has expired.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
The person-
Madam Speaker:
The gentlewoman's time has expired. The gentleman from New York.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Who killed our US Capitol Police officer.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best selling books; The View From Flyover Country, and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
Today, we are honored to be joined by Congresswoman Gwen Moore of Wisconsin. I'm going to read now from her biography on her congressional website: “Congresswoman Gwen Moore was elected to represent Wisconsin's Fourth Congressional District in 2004, making her the first African American elected to Congress from the State of Wisconsin. She is a member of the esteemed House Ways and Means Committee, which is the oldest committee in the United States Congress, and has jurisdiction over the social security system, Medicare, the foster care system, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, unemployment insurance, and all taxation, tariffs and revenue raising measures.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“She serves on the Social Security, Select Revenue Measures and Worker and Family Support Subcommittees. She is also a member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. She serves on the Research and Technology Subcommittee, and the Investigations and Oversight Committee.” We are thrilled to speak with her about the recent terrorist attack on the US Capitol and where we go next as a country for protecting our democracy. Welcome to Gaslit Nation, Congresswoman.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Oh my goodness, Sarah and Andrea. Thank you for having me. I love the name of your show. Gaslit. I love it.
Sarah Kendzior:
Well, thank you so much. We're very excited to have you. You really caught my attention when I was watching the House impeachment hearings against Trump. To be clear, I mean the second House impeachment hearings against Trump, which had to be held after the violent insurrectionist attack on the Capitol in January. And so we played a clip of you speaking during the hearing at the beginning of the show, and I want to ask you about your comments at that hearing that you made before you were cut off.
Sarah Kendzior:
Because in your comments, after establishing that leaving Trump in office even for two weeks was too dangerous for America to handle. You pointed to three specific threats, that he could declassify state secrets, that he could monetize state secrets to foreign adversaries, and that he could pardon the insurrectionists. Some of these threats, like the prospect of Trump monetizing state secrets to foreign adversaries, still remain threats even though Trump is out of office. Can you comment on what you said at the hearing and about these issues?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Well, thank you so much for really elevating this. What I hope was clear to people from listening to my much truncated comments—just one minute speech that you were allowed—is that it was really obvious from the beginning that this was a coordinated plot, and the absence of any early intervention was real clear indication that there was support at very high levels of our administration, not to name any names, but maybe even individual one.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
But yes, I was very, very concerned. It was so clear to me that he had his fingerprints on it. All of us witnessed him calling for months, claiming that the election would be stolen. We all saw what happened after December 14th, after the Safe Harbor Day, the effort to prevent the decertification at the US Capitol. We saw Trump's calls to the Georgia Secretary of State. We saw the crime unfolding in plain sight.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
On January 6th, I was one of those people that was pushed out of my house at exactly 1:00 PM, at exactly the time that the ceremonial certification was to occur. So, when I made that floor speech, it was really clear to me that the President would do anything to stay in power. Even though he was not going to be the president, we needed to remove him. The Senate needed to follow through and to remove him so that he couldn't put himself in the position again.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
We've already seen him monetize his position. I mean, he's in a big fight right now with the Republican Party about whether or not he can collect all the money and reclaim his brand as the former president for his own pecuniary interest. It's not clear to me that he won't have security briefings as an ex-president and be able to continue his chumminess with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un and the Saudi Prince. It’s really not clear to me that we are out of any danger now that he's the former president.
Sarah Kendzior:
So what are you worried about him doing? I know you said you didn't want to name names, but I feel like we're facing a dual crisis. We have actors within the US government that, at the very least, abetted this attack, were willing to look the other way as this attack was being planned, and we have an anti-American president. We have a president, who throughout his tenure was more loyal and more invested in foreign countries, in particular the ones you named—Saudi Arabia, Russia, also Israel, Turkey— I mean, the list is very long when you have-
Andrea Chalupa:
And China.
Sarah Kendzior:
And China, when you have a career criminal like Trump that's abusing executive power to enhance his personal wealth. But yeah, one of the things we've wondered for a while is it's not like Trump is going to change and become a good person when he leaves office. He's coming out vengeful, unapologetic, and looking to profit. Can you comment on the threat of him selling state secrets or using the privilege and classified information he obtained through his position as the president for his own ventures?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
I'll tell you, I don't think we have to stretch our imaginations too much. He's done this already. He's already done it. He sat there and whispered things. We don't know about conversations that he's had with Vladimir Putin. We've seen him modify conversations, tear up notes that dictation staff were taking during his meetings. We've heard him say to the Russian ambassador, "I've fired the-"
Andrea Chalupa:
FBI Director, yeah, in the Oval Office.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Right. So now we're done with that problem. I don't think we have to really speculate. We've seen him do this, and it's not clear to me that there's not some obligation to give him certain security briefings as a former president who was not removed from office. Of course, he's flirting with the idea of running a third time. Of course, none of us want to see that happen again. Most of us are speculating that he'll be too busy defending himself in various courts to do it. But the fact that he can spend the next four years dangling political contributions and threats and recruiting more Trumpian-like folk for various red states in the heartland is completely frightening. That he can have an outsized role in politics is unconscionable and, of course, this threatens our national security, our national identity, and it threatens our democracy.
Sarah Kendzior:
Why do you think he wasn't held accountable in real time during his four years in office or even beforehand? Because he had a long record as somebody immersed in or adjacent to mafia activity into all sorts of unsavory characters, among them the Kremlin. Yet he got away with it over and over again, despite committing these crimes in plain sight. Why was there such a failure of accountability?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Well, I can tell you, there are going to be a lot of PhDs [laughs] studying this. They have PhDs and not only in political science but in psychology. His own psychology and the psychology of the sycophants, quite frankly, who followed him. I think the Republican Party is having its day now, it's a fight over the money. Follow the money. I think this is going to be sort of a breaking point for those people who thought that they could just exploit Trump and use him and promote their own advancement in politics.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
He'd be out golfing and they'd have the reins in their hands. So I do think that we're going to see a very chaotic period as they wrestle over the money. But my best guess is that people saw some advantage with the White supremacists whispering that it galvanized so many formerly disengaged Americans, and wanting to inherit that base. I think that the hunter got captured by the game, as the song goes.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think there's concern here though, because with Gaslit Nation, our show isn't about Trump; It's about the institutional failure, the decades of Republican-driven corruption going back a very long time. We cover Reagan, Nixon, and so forth. So, I think there is growing concern among Americans. They're going to expect some accountability, some sort of national reckoning, some form of healing and not wanting to go back to the abuse and terror we were all under with Trump. So my question is, we saw George W. Bush get away with leading us into war—an invasion of Iraq based on lies—and now he's been rehabilitated. We all thought that George W. Bush was the worst president this country's ever seen, then along comes Trump. So I think our fear is that it could always be worse. There could always be somebody that makes Trump look rehabilitated. So what assurance can you give as a representative in Congress, that we are going to be able to secure our democracy and ensure that we never have to face this again?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
I just recently finished Rachel Maddow's, one of her books, Bag Man. I was really sad—and not to mess it up for those people who want to read it—but really, it was about Spiro Agnew, the Vice President of the United States. At the end of the day, he was never prosecuted even though there was a plethora of crimes that were provable and undeniable. He got away with it because he had been a vice president, and in the "best interest of the nation", he was not held accountable. So I think that the standard of holding these folks accountable was breached a long time ago, at least as early as when Richard Nixon was pardoned, didn't have to own up to committing these crimes. I doubt that we can have a president worse than Trump.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
But certainly, we've created an incentive for someone who's a lot smarter than him to try to get away with it since we have really established a pattern of not holding the most corrupt official in the United States history to account, Donald John Trump. This speech that Mitch McConnell gave on the floor after he acquitted Trump I think rivaled the passionate speech we heard from Jamie Raskin, Head Impeachment Manager. I mean, he should have had McConnell on his impeachment team with that speech, but he allowed him to get away with it anyway. So my concern is the difference, basically saying that the President is above the law.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I agree. I especially agree with you pointing to Spiro Agnew and the Nixon era as this beginning of just, "Oh, let's forgive in order to move forward. Let's look the other way." The same standard was, of course, applied to Nixon himself. Andrea and I are children of the 80s. We have no memory of a time of accountability. It's just been Iran-Contra and then a war in Iraq on false pretext, and Wall Street bringing down our economy and no one being punished for that. Then Trump coming into power and no one being punished for that either. So it seems like these issues of corruption and the loss of leverage among the public and this ability of criminal elites to live above the law has just gotten steadily worse. After his acquittal, I read your statement that you released to the press where you said, "This acquittal sets a dangerous precedent. Will elected leaders be held accountable if they threaten our country again? Will our political leaders have the courage to take a stand?" So, it's been one month since his acquittal. It's been one month since Mitch McConnell gave that little speech.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gaslighting speech.
Sarah Kendzior:
Gaslit us, yeah. This is why we have a show called Gaslit Nation, because of people like Mitch McConnell making that speech, but then continuing to support Trump, continuing to build the Republican Party into this kind of cult-like apparatus that protects these individuals from facing accountability. What should the Biden administration be doing? What should the DOJ or the FBI or other institutions be doing to finally enforce some accountability?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Well, I'll tell you, this is a very fragile democracy. You know, I know that you all study things, so we noticed that right before the January insurrection, the military came out and reaffirmed the fact that the military does not get involved in elections. We saw a DOJ under a corrupt and totally captured Attorney General stray. We thankfully saw the Supreme Court stand up, the judiciary stand up. But I mean, it is extremely fragile because we now see the fundraising that continues to be prolific around the Big Lie. We see, as the FBI has reported, the growing threat of White supremacy toppling some of these institutions. I mean, the fact that White supremacist groups have been able to accrue the kinds of money and celebrity around their issues is frightening.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
It's frightening to me to see the numbers of police officers and people with military connections who were associated with the January 6th sedition. These are institutions. These are not Trump, but these are institutions that are in peril. I think holding ourselves to account is something that we're going to have to figure out how to do. I think we need to revisit, for one thing, this memo at the Department of Justice about whether or not we could convict a president or investigate a president while he's in office.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
As it turned out, we couldn't investigate the president—any president—while they're in office. Once they've left office, the theory of the case that's been established is that, “He was corrupt, but you can't overturn him because he was out of office,” this so called January exception. So, I think that we need to really clarify the framers’ intent around tolerating someone who attempts to be a dictator, like Donald Trump. Because like I said, he's the slimiest person, but he certainly is not the smartest person. As soon as we find someone who's as slimy as he is and is smarter than him, we're going to be in trouble.
Andrea Chalupa:
Right. We call it Posh Trump on the show. [laughs]
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Yeah, Posh Trump, right.
Sarah Kendzior:
The slicker successor. On that note, one of the most disturbing things about this has been watching the reaction of Republicans, you know, who these White supremacists insurrectionists were coming in and also threatening. They were threatening to hang Mike Pence. They were going after the Capitol, they were trying to murder members of Congress. Yet you still find support from people like Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Mo Brooks, or my senator, unfortunately, Josh Hawley. They haven't apologized for encouraging this. They haven't backed down. How do you work side by side with individuals like that, who have encouraged these threats to your own safety, to the safety of your colleagues and threats to our country?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Well, I'll tell you, they certainly give the Ivy League a bad name. They're in some kind of debate club about the Constitution when people die on January 6th. So people, there's razor wire now surrounding the Capitol. These are people who fancy themselves to be intellectuals. They're what my mom would call educated fools. They're doing it for political posturing. I mean, look at somebody like Ted Cruz. I mean, Ted, you know, Donald Trump, he said his father was involved in assassinating JFK, that his wife was ugly, and so on, and yet he's a main Trumpster.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Just so transactional, to just want to have power so badly that you would sell out, your father, your wife, your values, your Ivy League education, because he knows better. He knows better. They know better. To want to manipulate vulnerable people who are feeling displaced because, you know, giving up White privilege is a big thing, White male privilege, ladies, in case you didn't know. To be able to not have to compete against the Juanita Lopez's of the world, and the Barack Obama's of the world, and the Letitia James' of the world for jobs or for school, that's a big deal.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
There was a time when, you know, we saw in recent years that White men had even stopped seeking bachelor's degrees! I mean, they didn't need them in order to succeed. It's a lot. So this subliminal message of, “We're protecting White male privilege” is very, very powerful. Ted Cruz and these other people know that this is the only way to retain any measure of power. Demographics are shifting. The younger you are, the more likely you are to not be White. You probably won't even be Black. You'll be mixed with something, or Latinx, and this desperate effort to hold onto White male superiority is really making people crazy. I think it's really proof that racism is a mental illness.
Andrea Chalupa:
[laughs] Absolutely. There's a lot of questions along that thread, because we're going to talk about the American Rescue Plan and lifting people out of poverty and why the Republicans formally voted against that. We want to get your thoughts on that certainly. But we want to just stay on the terrorist attack, because we feel really troubled that it's compacting the grief we feel over this horrific act basically being swept under the rug by the Republicans.
Andrea Chalupa:
So we want to just be grounded in it, that this is not normal. This was a huge warning to our entire nation how fragile our democracy is and how determined White supremacy is. Could you walk us through your own experiences that day, just to help us stay grounded in the gravity of the situation and also for history's sake, so we can contribute towards that record?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Well, thank you for this opportunity. I'm going to try to be as succinct as I can to walk you through this day. But it was really obvious to me at exactly 1:00 PM when the landlord was pounding on my door to evacuate my apartment because it was in the perimeter of the Republican National Committee, and that was the exact same time that the certification was to begin that we were evacuated. So little did I know that there was an actual live bomb there.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
But I saw it immediately as being connected with trying to interrupt what was happening at the Capitol and indeed, the Metropolitan Police, Capitol Police, were deployed from the Capitol to the Democratic National Club and to the Republican National Club. I'm standing out there in my nightclothes because I had just gotten out of the shower with my coat wrapped around me, and the police trying to, and all my neighbors and people in apartment buildings on the street. That was exactly 1:00 PM. When I finally made my way through the tunnels and made it to my office to hide out in my office in the Rayburn Building and started watching things unfold on TV, it was so obvious to me that the storming of—I saw all this on TV—that the storming of the Capitol was connected with the pipe bombs being left there. It was so obvious and of course, they were Trump supporters. I didn't see any Black Lives Matters banners or anything there.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Then we were all sitting there wondering, "Where the heck are the reinforcements? Where are the National Guard? Where are people?" That was such an obvious, immediate question as we watched television. So filling in the blanks, we understand from Lt. Walker—Major General William Walker, who's the commander of the DC National Guard—that he called it 1:49. He was informed by the US Capitol at 1:49 that there was a breach and he informed the army leadership.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
One of the things that the army didn't want to admit is that when they contacted the army, and the army said, "Well, we just don't want to have bad optics by sending the National Guard out there." Totally different protocol than they had for the Black Lives Matter protests, which were not deadly or fatal. But they declared that ... They didn't admit that Lieutenant General Charles Flynn, brother of Michael Flynn, was in the room while they were making decisions to delay deployment of these National Guards troops. Major General William Walker had the Guard sitting on the buses, waiting to come, waiting for permission of the order to send them in. They delayed sending them in, I believe, three hours and 19 minutes later.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
In the meantime, what we know, in the meantime—and I mentioned this in my little one-minute floor speech—people were in the Capitol. People hung a noose out on Capitol grounds, chanted, "Hang Mike Pence", moved through the Capitol demanding to know where Nancy Pelosi was. We heard reports of our colleagues cowering in the gallery. And we heard many reports that Trump was watching with glee.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
We've had that reinforced by testimony of people like my colleague, Representative [Jaime] Herrera Beutler, who said that Kevin McCarthy was in his office—in the Minority Leader's Office—reminiscent of another time that we had a leader killed while they were banging on his door, trying to burst their way into his office. He called the president, called President Trump. Trump said, "Well, Kevin, you know they seem to be a little bit more upset about the outcome of the election than you are." He did nothing except watch it.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
So that is the reason that I was so fearful the last two weeks. We did see some very frightening things. We saw him implement the death penalty and kill more people in his last couple of weeks than we had seen since the ‘70s in this country. We saw him do things like deconstruct aircraft to watch the skies and to make sure that our enemies were not perpetrating into the wrong territories. We saw him do so many destructive things.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
We had the My Pillow Guy show up at the Capitol with legions of papers on how to implement the Insurrection Act, to occupy those states like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Georgia or Arizona, where they were disputed—at least disputed from Trump's point of view—election results. This is very, very frightening, to have seen in the last days after Trump lost the election, for him to remove key leadership at the Defense Department. Here, let me look at my notes and share with you some of the things that have had me extremely concerned. He purged the top leadership at the Pentagon, including Defense Secretary Mark Esper, replaced by Christopher Miller, who was responsible—he was responsible—for the delay of the deployment of troops to the Capitol.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Additionally, the Undersecretary for Defense Intelligence Joseph Keman, and Esper’s Former Chief of Staff Jen Stewart resigned before this happened. The Trump White House claimed that Trump wanted his own team in case he prevailed in the elections lawsuits. He did not prevail, but he put in his own people who stopped the National Guard for three hours and 19 minutes—people who, by their own declaration, wanted to kill The Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House. These are people in direct succession to the presidency, by the way.
Andrea Chalupa:
Do you believe that members of Congress and Capitol Police insiders were active in the days leading up to the terrorist attack in essentially allowing it to happen, allowing certain access like the congressional tours some members were giving, and just the weird occurrence of Ayanna Pressley, Congresswoman Pressley's panic buttons being removed from her office? They were working, and then suddenly they weren't working. Could you comment on the possible insider help by both Capitol Police and members of Congress and their staff that allowed the horrific success of the violent siege on our Capitol?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Well, I am really happy that my colleague, Tim Ryan, is heading up an investigation. And, of course, Nancy Pelosi has called on a broader sort of 9/11 Commission, if you could find people who would look at it with really clear eyes, because there's so much evidence that this was coordinated. As I indicated at the top of this conversation, I mean, I knew when the landlord is pounding on my door at exactly 1:00, the only thing I had planned to do at 1:00 was to watch them gavel in and start the debate on whether or not we were going to certify Alabama.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
I was waiting. I wasn’t dressed yet, because I was going to be on the floor because I expected my senator to challenge Wisconsin. Of course, Wisconsin is a long way down the alphabet from Arizona, the first place we expected to be challenged. So I knew from the beginning. We have heard many of our colleagues say that they saw tours. I don't know whether they were done deliberately or whether people were just useful idiots. That I think we're going... There are investigations to try to discern that. The FBI is also using cellphone technology to figure out who was pinging who that day. When you think about people like Liz Cheney, and the couple of people who voted to impeach Trump, and they told you, "There's going to be more information coming."
Rep. Gwen Moore:
I believe that a conviction, as far as I'm concerned, would have been unavoidable had we waited any longer because, obviously, Trump doesn't email. He probably doesn't text. But there's going to be information about direct conversations with this leadership. These people’s main defense is that the President asked us to come, and I think that the more we investigate, the closer we're going to get to the White House in terms of coordinating this display of power.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I agree and one of the things that's been troubling to me is that there are specific individuals who are longtime aides and advisors of Trump—you mentioned one of them, Michael Flynn, but also Roger Stone, Steve Bannon—that we're also working with the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers. They were going on and encouraging people following QAnon. They were giving instructions and encouragement to show up on January 6th for a violent act along with Trump. But what I've noticed is that a lot of the, both the media focus and I think the focus of the FBI and law enforcement has been on these low level actors—like the QAnon shaman and people like that—instead of Stone, Flynn and other very powerful people. Do you think there's a chance that those powerful actors who are, of course, implicated in other crimes, that's why they had to be pardoned by Trump, will be finally held accountable?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
One of the things that concerns me is the whole, “In the interest of the nation, we're not going to be prosecuting our political enemies. That would not be a good look.” I'm concerned that people will get away literally with murder because of a reluctance to hold them to account. Because people, the so called 74 million folks who supported Trump, will claim that it's just retaliation.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
So Merrick Garland, I don't know him as well as other people have known him. He's had a good temperament as a judge. I don't know how a good temperament as a judge evolves into the prosecutor at the DOJ. But I think that as information continues to develop, it's going to be unavoidable. Just like you said, some low level person will go to jail so the next Michael Cohen is out there somewhere that we can make an example of, and then call it a day.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, without question. So hopefully Merrick Garland rises to this occasion. As we refer to them on the show, we need Nazi hunters. In a time of actual Nazis, you need Nazi hunters. So we will be doing our part on the show to demand accountability and justice because we cannot go through this again. Our democracy is fragile. Along that line, we want to ask you about the American Rescue Plan. Given all the committees you serve on in Congress, your focus is very much on economic justice. We're living in a crisis of income inequality we haven't seen since right before the Great Depression. The pandemic, of course, has revealed a major crisis of poverty levels and vulnerabilities, especially for people of color. So we want to ask you, given all the committees you serve on and your focus in Congress towards these issues, how do you feel about the American Rescue Plan? What do you think further needs to be done to ensure building back better, as we've been promised in the 2020 election?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Well, thank you so much for asking me about this. As you mentioned earlier, I'm on the Committee on Ways and Means. Of the $1.9 trillion, literally half the package—$971 billion—came under the jurisdiction of the tax committee. Very clearly, this package differed so much than the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Bill where 83% of the benefit went to wealthy individuals and to corporations. We flipped the script on this. A huge portion of this money went to individuals in the form of those $1400 payments, rescue payments.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
I mean think about it, there are people out there who haven't paid rent for three to five months. In Milwaukee County, we've got at least 4000 evictions ripe, ready to execute tomorrow as the eviction moratorium expires, March 31st. I mean, and not one more court date, not one more appeal ready to execute. So this plan really is important. My mayor of my town is just over the moon. There has been so much deferred maintenance as we have grappled with dealing with Coronavirus. I mean, when the paramedics pick you up, I mean, the fire department, it has an expense when they pick you up and take you to the hospital when you've got COVID.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Those expenses need to be paid, the dearth of services. We talked about the unemployment insurance. We've got to get this thing signed into law by March 14th. I think we met that goal—the President is going to sign it tomorrow I think, today or tomorrow—so that there won't be any gap in the unemployment insurance. So while they shaved off 100 bucks a week for unemployment insurance over in the Senate, we think it's extremely important because of people who, through no fault of their own, found themselves unemployed, can have those unemployment benefits.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
By the way, the first $10,020 of it is not taxable, of this unemployment insurance. Very, very, very important not to put people behind the eight ball. There's money in there for schools. The thing that troubled me the most about the demand that we get kids back into school is that we hadn't provided one thin dime for one square foot of Plexiglas to put into these schools. And we've learned a lot about the importance of having proper ventilation. Schools are some of the oldest infrastructure in our country, and this notion that teachers don't have to be put in the front of the line to be vaccinated in order to return people to school is just absolutely absurd. So, there's money in there for that.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
I think the Republicans' contention is that we've done stuff like made the Child Tax Credit refundable. Their notion is that people need to work for money. Well, I don't know any child six or under that I would pay to do any work.
Andrea Chalupa:
[laughs]
Rep. Gwen Moore:
So children have suffered tremendously in an economy where we can't raise the minimum wage beyond $7.25 an hour, where tipped wages, where a lot of women with children find themselves in these jobs, where they're making $2.13 an hour plus tips, if they can get them. The permanent feminization of poverty through our welfare system. So now, to say that the Child Tax Credit is another form of welfare, this is the drum that they're beating on. There's going to be a tremendous fight to make this permanent, to expand it.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
I have a bill called the Worker Act, which expands the earned income tax credit in a similar way and makes it refundable. It expands it to those groups of folks that Reverend Liz Theoharris and Reverend William Barber called low wealth people, 140 million of them. I mean, if we can't get them the minimum wage increase—which is how we have been able to lift people out of poverty—if we can't do that, then we, at a minimum, ought to have an earned income tax credit that respects the fact that anybody who works ought to be able to eat and pay the rent.
Sarah Kendzior:
Absolutely. One of the things we're concerned about is because, like you, we want these changes to be permanent, not just part of a COVID relief package for a crisis, but a restructuring of our system so no one has to suffer in this way. A major obstacle to that has been the incredibly repressive voting rights or lack of voting rights laws that were passed as a result of the partial repeal of the Voter Rights Act in 2013. In particular, efforts to disenfranchise Black voters. I wanted to ask you about this because Wisconsin has really been a notable state in this respect. For example, in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost the state by only about 30,000 votes, but around 200,000, voters were disenfranchised. So what needs to be done to strengthen voting rights and to prevent the GOP from overturning all of these good and progressive policies that are slowly starting to be implemented?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Well, I'll tell you, as I listened to you form the question, my mind went all the way back to the 19th century, as long as we've been battling and fighting for the right to vote. All the way back to when Black people were considered three-fifths of a person. There's always been this effort to minimize our power and our impact in the body politic. We really didn't have any voting rights until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, quite frankly. So these efforts are not new, but when we stripped the Voting Rights Act of Section 5, that enabled all of these states—not just the ones that have formerly discriminated against people, but all of them—to put in restrictive rights to vote with impunity.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
I mean, the federal government no longer required them to give reasons why you can only have one voting booth in this county and someone will have to drive 30 miles in order to cast a vote, or explain why you've moved polling places so the Black community only has one and other communities have 10. You no longer have to explain this. The GOP has figured this out. They have not won a national popular vote for president since what? 1988. The majority of the people in this country, when they vote, tend to favor Democratic candidates, maybe not on a regional level, but on a national level.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
So the only way to prevent these kinds of progressive ideas, like a child tax credit, is to stop people who look like me from voting. It's not that hard to do when people are working every single day and suddenly one hour at the end of the voting day is cut off, so that when you're rushing from your shift as a nurse's aide, you can't make it to the polls before they close. Or, when you cut out that Sunday souls to the polls where I would have voted after church, the day I'm off. Or, when I have to give an excuse For absentee ballot, I can't just exercise my right to vote absentee.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
So I think that Republicans have figured it out. They've got to stop us from voting if they're going to maintain power. It's all about maintenance of who they think the true Americans are—and I'm not talking about Native Americans now. People have decided who the real Americans are, and in order to maintain control of America, they have to stop certain people from voting. Young people, you cannot vote. Black people, you cannot vote. New ethnic groups, you cannot vote. And for God's sake, let's stop most poor people from voting.
Sarah Kendzior:
So to achieve the protections we need, like passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, are you in favor of the Senate abolishing or reforming the filibuster?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Well, I tell you, the filibuster has a really interesting history. There was a time when there were 67 votes, a super majority of two-thirds, and of course, that just enabled the minority to rule. The filibuster was maintenance of White power. It’s how it has been used. I think there's a cautionary tale, because parties tend to move backwards and forwards in the majority or the minority. Maybe respecting the voice of the minority would count if people were negotiating in good faith, but it's not clear to us that Mitch McConnell is doing anything now except telling his caucus to just say “No” no matter what, “We have the same goal for Joe Biden as we had for Barack Obama, that they don't have any successes.”
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Democrats have not thought that way. So if we want to get anything else done, we may have to look at it. The whole question of the budget reconciliation process, I mean, it was a disappointment, but I mean, I wasn't surprised by it. I've been on the Budget Committee for 10 years. I thought that this would be a really heavy lift to have it pass the bird rule. But that being said, it would be moot if we, in fact, had a simple majority. This is not part of the Constitution, the filibuster is not. There's not any constitutional principles involved.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
I think that there are things they can do to reform it. I think maybe 67 still is a threshold, but maybe you need to debate all those hours and not just do what Senator Johnson did: make a clerk stand up there and read for 15 hours while you go to dinner and go to bed. There ought to be some real accountability for stopping good legislation, other than picking up the phone from your office saying, "I object."
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. So basically make it harder to employ. We interviewed Harry Reid's former Deputy Chief of Staff, Adam Jentleson, who wrote a great book called the Kill Switch, all about the history of the filibuster not being in the Constitution and rather being a tool used by White supremacists to stop progress, stop civil rights. With that said, one point he made which is really interesting was that even if the Democrats got rid of the filibuster and Republicans come back in power, their policies are so destructive and unpopular.
Andrea Chalupa:
We see that in the polling because they're just unpopular. That would give us the protections we needed in the sense of the outrage they would unleash against them, and the people and the press and others would be a good check on the use of the filibuster. They simply don't stand for anything but tax cuts for the rich and just staying in power for power's sake. So with that said, given that we're up against a growing authoritarian threat, which is the Republican Party, what systemic changes should we and can we make soon—this year, next year—to protect our democracy?
Rep. Gwen Moore:
Well, I'm going to have to appreciate people like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney—never thought I'd be saying that—because we don't have an opposition party, a legitimate opposition party. I never thought I'd be pining for the days that I could debate with some of the Republicans that I served with in the Wisconsin legislature many days ago where you could not agree, but you could sit around a conference table and cut a deal and get half of what you wanted, or some of what you wanted. These people don't want anything except power.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
So I think that this is a puzzle because Democrats are at the point where we're in the minority when we're in the minority, and we're in the minority when we're in the majority. So I think we can't be shy with these empty, vacuous accusations of our being non partisan when we don't go along with what they want to do. This notion that we bring forth the $1.9 trillion bill and you say, "We're negotiating in good faith to give you $600,000 and none of it can go to those liberal blue cities," you're not coming to the table in good faith. You’re coming to the table with nothing but your political agenda.
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, thank you so much, Congresswoman Gwen Moore. We are grateful for your time today and helping us understand these issues better. You're always welcome back at Gaslit Nation.
Rep. Gwen Moore:
All right. Well, thank you so much.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, thank you so much for coming on.
Andrea Chalupa:
Hopefully, we'll have less gaslighting to talk about next time.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller Level or higher.
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