--:-- Noelle King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
--:-- [Discussion of the Democrats' performance in 2024]
--:-- Noelle King: The rap on the Democrats in 2024 was that they only spoke to the very rich and the very poor, so they lost the working class. But not all of them lost. Marie Glucincan-Perez did not just win, she won in Trump country. Democrats work in the trades. We live in rural communities. We are not the devil. We are your neighbors.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: Before being elected, I ran an auto repair in a machine shop with my husband. And we live in unincorporated Skamania County. And our son is three years old now. Skamania County in Washington state has a national forest and a population of about 12,000 people. We get our internet from a radio tower. We get our water from a well.
--:-- Noelle King: In her first term, Glucin Camp Perez crossed the aisle to vote with Republicans on behalf of her rural and working class constituents. And she horrified some Democrats along the way. Her plans to get things done despite a Republican majority in Congress coming up on Today Explained.
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--:-- Noelle King: Support for this show comes from Macy's. Layering is an art form. All it takes is a bit of intention, style, and of course, the perfect cold weather staples. So find the perfect look for you with the help of Macy's Fall Fashion Guide, your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts. From leather to denim to cozy knits, find everything you need to piece together your new fall look. Explore the Macy's Fall Guide for yourself and shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
--:-- Noelle King: This is Today Explained. Last week, I went to Capitol Hill to talk to Representative Marie Glusenkamp-Perez, who represents Washington's 3rd District. This is a swing district. It was held by a Republican for 12 years before she won in 2022. And this time around, Donald Trump backed her opponent, Joe Kent.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: So I asked her, why do you think you won? Well, I think what we want in southwest Washington is to see our priorities and our culture reflected in Washington, D.C. We don't want a national agenda or a culture from somewhere else imported and replacing our community, our values, our priorities.
--:-- Noelle King: You know, the district went for Trump by seven points in 16. And this time we were able to point to my record and say, like, I'm not here to play partisan football. I'm here because I see and value what we have and I know it's worth writing for.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: You know, on the student loan forgiveness, I looked at the data. My district only holds 3% of the federally issued debt. This was a regressive tax policy. If you support progressive tax strategies, you should do that consistently, not just when there's party favors.
--:-- Noelle King: People looked at you and said, a Democrat. Oh, yeah. So they were really aggressive on our online reviews. We take real pride in the quality of work we do and had that take, you know, people were just bombing it who'd never been customers.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: But hearing from my community, like, yeah, like we don't want the trades to be considered as an afterthought. We don't want to be second fiddle and really challenging the idea that like academic intelligence is the thing that we should be supporting.
--:-- Noelle King: We want good jobs that don't require a college degree. We want honors level shop class and junior high. Those are the things that reflect our values and our priorities. And so that's how I vote.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: The thing about national office, and I think this is where the pushback comes in, is when you vote, when you're in national office and you vote, you vote on something that affects everybody in the country.
--:-- Noelle King: So not many people in your district ended up in a lot of college debt, but all across the United States, many, many, many young people did. You're in national office, you don't just vote for this little corner of Washington because your vote as one of 435, it affects the whole country.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: How do you respond to that? Well, my job is to represent my community, you know, the people that live where I live. And that's my role. And I think the way that you arrive at good policy is by having everyone show up at the table with the unique perspectives of their community and loyalty there.
--:-- Noelle King: And that is how you end up with better policy in the end. Like you don't get good legislation without having people who are driving trucks and changing diapers and turning wrenches at the table, not as an afterthought, but in the inception of the legislation.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: Whether you support Donald Trump or are a critic of his, one thing that you can say he successfully did is he turned local issues national, right? Springfield, Ohio was struggling with an influx of immigrants. There is no reason that somebody in Maine or Florida or Texas should have cared at all about Springfield, Ohio.
--:-- Noelle King: That was a local issue. Donald Trump took that local issue, made it a national issue. Some analysts say that is what helped him win. I think, let me think about that like people want to be heard.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: I had a lot of people colleagues whatever saying like how do we get people to understand that the economy is actually great like what do we need to say them like this was a democratic line you don't you don't okay don't do that people are putting their groceries on a credit card you know it's like you go to Albertsons or whatever, your grocery store, and you feel like you're in a game of chicken with the CEO.
--:-- Noelle King: And so don't gaslight people. Hear them when they are telling, like, nobody cares about your spreadsheets you know And I think that is the loyalty that needs to guide any progress getting back to a place where we are finding the non-political ways of conveying our values.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: You know, like, I think, you know, people that can, like, get their Honda Civic to 500k miles, like, that's cool. And when those people are regarded as, you know, like the vanguard of environmentalism, like I think that's progress.
--:-- Noelle King: Like that is how you grow the field of people who feel real, like that is how you build a coalition that can actually pass useful legislation.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: The person who gets their Honda Civic to 500,000 miles, as you said, is not usually identified as like, wow, that person's a great environmentalist. It's like, oh, that person is broke, right? And that's why they've run their car to half a million miles.
--:-- Noelle King: Good for them. But do you think there's a kind of snobbery within the Democratic Party where maybe the heroes that the party is choosing are the wrong heroes?
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: Well, what I've seen being here is that, I mean, it feels like everybody is under 40 and has like at least two degrees. And, you know, that's not what the country looks like. That's not what the value system of merit is everywhere.
--:-- Noelle King: Do you mean over 40 and has two degrees? Under 40. Okay, you feel like Washington Congress is young. Oh, I mean like all of the staff and lobbyists. Okay, yeah. The people who are, you know, often writing legislation.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: Gotcha. Okay, keep going. Sorry. I was talking to a constituent. She works in child care. She told me she is not legally allowed to peel a banana or an orange. That is considered food prep.
--:-- Noelle King: They are not a licensed food prep facility, so they can open a bag of chips, can't peel a banana. And I went round and round and round for like four months.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: I had my office talking to local regulators and licensors and elected officials, and they kept saying she's dumb, she doesn't understand the rules. Does she understand the rules? Yes. Okay.
--:-- Noelle King: Their licensors said they would need six more sinks before they were legally allowed to be engaged in food prep. And I don't think this is a small thing.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: I have a toddler. I know how durable food preferences are. So are toddlers. Yeah. And like having regard and respect and agency and having people who are actually doing the work at the core of the legislative process.
--:-- Noelle King: So I've introduced a bill that creates a positive right to serve fresh fruits and vegetables. It says like if your state's taking federal dollars for child care, you will not infringe on the right to serve fresh fruits and vegetables.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: I'm like, this is the long work of building strong local agriculture and national health. It is also, if we're being honest, in a tradition that more closely hues to what Republicans think.
--:-- Noelle King: You're pointing to overregulation and you're saying this is ridiculous. And I can imagine Democrats saying, but what about listeria? Every time you turn on the news these days, there is listeria in something, there's E. coli in something. You're going to give it to the kids.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: How do you square the party that you're in and the historical positions that it's taken on things like regulation?
--:-- Noelle King: I don't know if it's like necessarily partisan as much as like parents know that food preferences in children are very durable, you know. And so my experience as a young mom is what's driving that, not like a partisan agenda.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: But I think that this is absolutely one of the reasons that there's one licensed daycare facility in my entire county. Think about the overhead of installing six sinks somewhere.
--:-- Noelle King: So what are the ways that we can find structural reforms to build health, to build access, to provide quality care?
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: I think there's a conception that being the minority party in the House, the Senate, and not holding the presidency means you cannot get anything done.
--:-- Noelle King: Certainly, you don't seem like somebody who wants to spend two years just spitting your wheels.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: No. I mean, I miss my family. I'd better be productive if I'm not going to be with them. And I'm on a plane every three days. I'm not doing that to just sit here and reflexively disagree.
--:-- Noelle King: It's as much as possible getting ahead of, you know, when a bill is dropped and figuring out, like, what are the parts here that my community agrees with? How could I make this more reflective of our values, you know, the fuller picture of a situation?
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: Like, frequently just being from a rural community means that, you know, that has not been considered by whatever committee staff drafted the bill. So getting our perspective, our values, our priorities baked in and then working on amendments afterwards.
--:-- Noelle King: But, you know, I mean, elections have consequences. So I think it's important to hear what people are saying with curiosity and figure out what are the shared parts we agree on.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: I don't know what bills will come to the floor, but I just continue to be myself and reflect my community and just work hard to knit our community back together.
--:-- Noelle King: Representative Marie Glucencamp-Perez, Washington State's 3rd District. Thank you so much for taking the time. We appreciate it.
--:-- Marie Glucincan-Perez: Thank you so much.
--:-- Noelle King: Coming up, so you're the minority in Congress. How to get things done anyway. Support for Today Explained comes from Chime.
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--:-- Noelle King: Plus, they say you don't need to worry about monthly fees or maintenance fees. You can work on your financial goals through Chime today. You can open an account in two minutes at chime.com slash explained. That's chime.com slash explained.
--:-- Noelle King: Chime feels like progress. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancor Bank N.A. Or Stride Bank N.A. Members FDIC. Spot me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Timing depends on submission of payment file. Fees apply at out-of-network ATMs. Bank ranking and number of ATMs according to U.S. News and World Report 2023. Chime checking account required.
--:-- Noelle King: Why shop at Burlington? Maybe it's the deals that are new each time you drop by. Maybe it's the brand names you'll be shocked Burlington has in store. Or maybe it's the quality of the items, the amazing selection, and the newest trends.
--:-- Noelle King: If you like to save but also like to stay in style, Burlington is your answer. And the question you'll be asking yourself is, why go anywhere else? Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow.
--:-- Noelle King: Support for the show today comes from LifeKit, the podcast from NPR.
--:-- Noelle King: What's in your life kit? I'm asking. They didn't ask that. Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life, but you can't flip to the back of the book to find an answer key.
--:-- Noelle King: Instead, you can listen to the Life Kit podcast from NPR. Life Kit offers real stories about common issues like relationships, finances, parenting, and your career.
--:-- Noelle King: If you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better, Life Kit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change.
--:-- Noelle King: From fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout, each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with.
--:-- Noelle King: LifeKit wants to help you approach your own life with confidence and clarity and walk away with a game plan you can implement right away.
--:-- Noelle King: Enough from me. Go listen to the show, LifeKit. It's a podcast from NPR.
--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King with Sarah Binder. She teaches political science at GWU. She's a fellow at Brookings.
--:-- Sarah Binder: For the next two years, Democrats will be the minority in the House and the Senate. They will try to get things done anyway.
--:-- Noelle King: Are there moments in the past where you can look back and say, dang, the minority really pulled that off?
--:-- Sarah Binder: George W. Bush in 2005, beginning of his second term, he and his administration is proposing to privatize Social Security. Give younger workers the option of putting a portion of their payroll taxes into a voluntary personal retirement account.
--:-- Noelle King: You are responsible for the investments of your Social Security, right? You take on the risk. And Democrats, so it was a Republican majority, Democrats in the minority in the Senate, they basically threatened a filibuster.
--:-- Sarah Binder: They said, if you do this, we're going to go ballistic. Today, as we are here on the floor of the House, House Democrats are offering a motion that will give members of Congress a chance to say exactly where they stand on the president's proposal on privatization.
--:-- Noelle King: Our motion says we're going to get the senior citizens on our side. We're going to defeat you. Not by voting things down, but by raising the stakes, right? Getting the public, getting their attention, getting them off the sidelines so that they are going to come to fight it as well.
--:-- Sarah Binder: Over 300 town hall meetings have taken place or shortly will be. And we're now going on to the next phase of them.
--:-- Noelle King: The Affordable Care Act under Trump in 2018 at that election, right? The minority party Democrats in the House didn't really have a lot of power. But they could attract attention. They could say, Trump wants to take away your health insurance for your children under 26.
--:-- Sarah Binder: Trump wants to take away the protection for pre-existing health conditions. We all have reasons to fix our health care system, but Republicans in Congress keep voting to repeal Obamacare instead of fixing it.
--:-- Noelle King: To take away health care from people with pre-existing conditions. He is just dead wrong, and that ain't going to happen. If seniors had to pay another $6,400 a year for health care, how would they manage? Eat less?
--:-- Sarah Binder: Raise the stakes, get attention. The minority can do that. And that's often their key to power, right? Force the majority to make concessions or even sometimes to back down.
--:-- Noelle King: Today's Senate, you need 60 votes to cut off debate. Most majorities don't have 60 votes, right? The new incoming one is probably at 53. So if they can't get Democrats to vote with them, to cut off debate, the Senate goes nowhere.
--:-- Sarah Binder: In politics in 2024, a lot of the analysis that we're seeing about the Democrats losing the presidency, the House and the Senate suggests that Republicans are going to go ham and roll over their colleagues, get done what they want to get done.
--:-- Noelle King: Some of the analysis almost suggests that it's kind of punitive. You guys lost, and so we are going to trample right over you.
--:-- Sarah Binder: Was it always this way? Well, over congressional history and American history, we've had periods of very high partisanship and very low partisanship. Sometimes it just means like the conservatives are on one side of the aisle and liberals are on the other side of the party aisle and they have core disagreements about the role of government.
--:-- Noelle King: But today's partisanship, it's really almost, it's just, it's team play, right? Your team is against it. So my team's going to be for this bill, right? You can switch positions. Oh, your party used to be against it, but now you're for it. And so we're going to be against it.
--:-- Sarah Binder: Like reflexive partisanship. You're for it. I'm against it. That is what seems seems a bit newer than we've seen before.
--:-- Noelle King: OK, so in the first half of the show, we talked to a young congresswoman who kind of made her name by crossing over the aisle. She's a Democrat and voting with Republicans.
--:-- Sarah Binder: And the think pieces that have been written about her suggest that oh my God she a traitor How could she do this
--:-- Noelle King: I think what I hear you saying is once upon a time it wasn't that way It hasn't always been that way We had periods of time where within the Democratic Party there were conservatives and there were liberals.
--:-- Sarah Binder: We've had periods of time in the past where we had in the Republican Party conservatives and liberals, right? We don't even have the term anymore, liberal Republicans, but we had them.
--:-- Noelle King: Who were the liberal Republicans? Senator Jacob Javits from New York. In our country, we don't tolerate police by terror taking the law into their own hands.
--:-- Sarah Binder: He was a Republican, right? Senator Dernberger, a liberal Republican from the state of Minnesota. Four years ago, you elected me to represent you in the United States Senate.
--:-- Noelle King: I promised to stay in touch with you, that I'd represent your views, and above all, that I'd be myself.
--:-- Sarah Binder: In his later years, Durenberger criticized what he called his Republican Party's hard swing to the right. And he endorsed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for president.
--:-- Noelle King: And on the same token, we've had conservative Democrats, right, even in the 1940s and 50s, we would say segregationist Democrats, conservatives in the Democratic Party.
--:-- Sarah Binder: These damnable proposals he has recommended under the guise of so-called civil rights. And I'll tell you, the American people from one side or the other had better wake up and oppose such a program.
--:-- Noelle King: Today's parties just don't look like that. But we do see these bipartisan pairs. I think it's important to, like, get below the surface of where most of the spotlight is.
--:-- Sarah Binder: You do see, not on big major bills, right, a bipartisan pair is not going to reform. and fix Social Security, right? But a bipartisan pair might deal with a special problem in an agricultural office. Loans aren't going through. Subsidies aren't working.
--:-- Noelle King: So there is room for bipartisanship, but oftentimes there are a lot of incentives not to work with the other team.
--:-- Sarah Binder: We've talked about how people at times have crossed party lines, teamed up on things. There does seem to be another way that the minority party can get things done, And that is to not get things done, to hold things up to whatever extent they can.
--:-- Noelle King: And I think in 2024, a lot of people are wondering, oh, will they try it this time? Can you tell us what it looks like when that happens?
--:-- Sarah Binder: Sure. So probably the most famous or infamous of these efforts by minorities and at times minority parties, but minority groups, to block majorities, especially in the Senate, was the efforts by Southerners to block action on protecting civil rights.
--:-- Noelle King: Right. Anti-lynching laws, anti-Poltex laws, the minority party or at that time, really a minority coalition filibustering in the Senate to block forward action on major civil rights measures.
--:-- Sarah Binder: We're going to give this fight against bureaucratic tyranny and totalitarianism everything we have.
--:-- Noelle King: In a period of unified party control, minority parties have been better suited toward blocking things or maybe sometimes we might say moderating majority agendas.
--:-- Sarah Binder: The most recent clear version of that was Trump in 2017, Republican House, Republican Senate. Republicans in the House had voted 60 times in the past decade to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It was top, top priority.
--:-- Noelle King: And technically, it was blocked because Senator John McCain, a Republican, broke from his party. Prompting an audible gasp in the chamber.
--:-- Sarah Binder: But keep in mind, what did the Democrats do? They made sure the public was very aware that it was the Trump administration and Trump trying to take away their health care rights.
--:-- Noelle King: Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated. So that's how minority parties can try to make a difference here by blocking things is just elevating and getting the audience out of the bleachers and onto the field to try to block the majority.
--:-- Sarah Binder: However, there were a number of big issues tackled that Democrats were part of. Renegotiating and redoing NAFTA, the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. House Democrats, led by Speaker Pelosi in 2019, played a big role.
--:-- Noelle King: Opioids addiction, that was bipartisan. Sanctions on Russia, that was bipartisan. So Democrats did not sit out the first Trump administration. They found some common ground, particularly with the Senate, not necessarily initially with President Trump, but tried to use it to move those priorities closer to their own.
--:-- Sarah Binder: The challenge here for the Democrats this go-round and for future minority parties is it's hard to break through the public's attention.
--:-- Noelle King: I think in part because many partisans are in their own news bubbles, right? And so let's say the Trump administration decides it wants to cut spending on health care for the poor. Is that going to be shown on Fox News? I don't know, right?
--:-- Sarah Binder: And so the Democrats have to figure out who they want to get off the sidelines. And so it's a challenge, I think, to find ways to reach different generations and how to break through these media silos that often people are stuck in.
--:-- Noelle King: This is how I think about it. Unified party control of government does not last very long. On average, unified party control basically lasts two years. two, three years.
--:-- Sarah Binder: So majorities like to overreach, and voters often make them pay the price.
--:-- Noelle King: Sarah Binder of George Washington University and Brookings. Today's team, Victoria Chamberlain, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Amina El-Sadi, Patrick Boyd, Andrea Kristen's daughter, and me, Noelle King.
