President Clinton Faces Hurdles From Republicans, Democrats At Outset
January 24, 2009
WASHINGTON, DC - We are not even a week into the Hillary Clinton presidency, and Clinton is already facing stiff hurdles to her governing plans. Not the least of which has been that due to her Cabinet appointments, the Democrats have lost a supermajority in the Senate not even a month into the 111th Congress. President Clinton and Vice President Daschle’s resignations from the Senate first opened up the holes in the Democratic defense of their vital 60 votes in the Senate as they were each replaced by hand-picked appointments by Republican governors. New York governor Bill Weld selected New York Assistant Attorney General Ann Marie Buerkle as Clinton’s replacement, while South Dakota governor Mike Rounds appointed state senate leader Dave Knudson to replace Vice President Daschle. Both Buerkle and Knudson took office on January 21, 2009 and dropped the number of Democrats in the Senate down to 59 including the two independents caucusing with the Democrats. It was a good thing the Omnibus Economic Recovery Act was passed when it was as the 111th Congress’s H.R.1 and S.1 because if the bill had stayed in debate for another few weeks, it is a question if it would have been passed as bills since then have run into difficulties in the Senate already.
Some might say the appointments of the replacements to Attorney General Ken Salazar and Commerce Secretary Evan Bayh were a surprise boon to Clinton’s administration in comparison to the choices to replace her and her vice president. The arguments for this are mainly that both appointments were Democrats and did not end up costing the party more Senate seats. The devil, however, is in the details. The choice of Denver schools superintendent Michael Bennet to replace Salazar was not bad but not a surprising pick either. Colorado’s governor right now is Democrat Bill Ritter, so choosing a Democrat was really a foregone conclusion. The real surprise came with the Indiana seat. Governor Mitch Daniels, possibly in a surface show of bipartisanship due to being the only Republican governor of Indiana since 1989, picked a Democrat to replace Bayh and keep the seat in the same party. However, the Democrat he selected, Representative Baron Hill, is a smart choice by the Republican governor. Hill had been a fairly conservative Blue Dog in his nearly 20 years in the House, so he is likely to be friendly to some Republican attempts to block bills in the Senate. Additionally, Hill’s 9th congressional district in the state’s southern counties is trending Republican. Hill even lost the seat in the 2004 elections and only regained it back in the 2006 Democratic wave by a narrow 10,000 vote margin. A special election for the seat would be a highly targeted Republican pickup, especially for Mike Sodrel, who has faced off with Hill for the 9th district in every election since 2002 and served as Representative in between Hill’s two stints.
The difficulty faced by the Clinton presidency even just a week in can be seen in the first bills that have fared in Congress now that Hillary Clinton is president. While the OERA was sent to Bush’s desk quickly by the Democratic House and Senate due to the urgency of the economic situation in the country, the next few bills on Congress’s agenda have not been so quick to reach Clinton’s desk. H.R. 2, the reauthorization bill for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, passed the House easily with several Republicans joining Democrats and only a few Democrats, mainly Southern conservatives such as Bobby Bright and Parker Griffith in Alabama and Travis Childers and Gene Taylor in Mississippi, voting against. In the Senate, however, getting cloture on the bill was difficult. The first cloture vote failed with 59 votes out of the 60 necessary. While Kay Bailey Hutchison crossed party lines to vote in favor, Baron Hill and Max Baucus voted nay and Ted Kennedy was absent for the initial cloture vote for medical reasons. The bill was voted on again in the Senate yesterday and passed with a bare 61 votes as Senator Kennedy attended and Senator Baucus switched his vote. The bill is now expected to pass the House and reach President Clinton’s desk next week.
Despite the headaches in the Senate, there have been some successes President Clinton can attest to this early on. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was H.R. 3 on the 111th Congress’s docket. The legislation amends the Title VII protections in the 1964 Civil Rights Act so that the 180 day statute of limitations on filing an equal pay discrimination suit against an employer resets with each paycheck affected by the discriminatory action. A similar bill failed last year, but since the 2008 elections the new Congress has been much more favorable to the bill. It easily passed the House with a nearly party line vote. However, in the Senate, the bill faced opposition from once again not just Republicans but from some of the more conservative Democrats. However, new Senate Leader Harry Reid was able to whip the Senate Democrats into line this time and get a full party backing of the bill. The Lilly Ledbetter Act passed with 65 votes, as 5 Republicans and independent Lincoln Chafee joined the Democrats. The Republicans were Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. The yes votes from Snowe, Collins, Hutchison, and Lummis made New York’s Buerkle the only woman in the Senate to vote against the Ledbetter Act. The act was signed by Clinton in a televise ceremony today in which Clinton, flanked by Lilly Ledbetter and the bill’s Senate sponsor Barbara Mikulski, gave a short address on the importance of the first woman president signing the bill and the bill’s importance for women’s rights in the workplace.
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South Carolina GOP Chair Katon Dawson Emerges as Next RNC Chair in Down and Dirty Election
January 30, 2009
WASHINGTON, DC - After the drubbing the Republican Party took in the 2008 elections, the sharks began to circle around Republican National Committee chair Mike Duncan. Duncan, who has been RNC chair since 2007, ran again, but he faced heavy criticism from big shot Republican names. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called the Republican Party outmatched and lamented the rise of the “modern left.”[3] Gingrich did not criticize Pataki, who he said performed much better than the circumstances would have foreseen, but still said the lack of resonance from Republicans “has led to another Clinton in the White House and a further move away from the values that our country is built on.” While Gingrich avoided direct criticism of Duncan, the former Speaker said that if the Republican Party is to succeed, it needs to look at what went wrong in the election and fix what went wrong.
The criticism from Gingrich and others quickly led to a number of Republicans throwing their names into the ring to contest Duncan’s campaign for the chairmanship. Former Maryland lieutenant governor Michael Steele was the first to jump in in late November and quickly became the front-runner in the contest as Duncan’s star continued to slip..He and former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell entered the race seeking to become the first African-American chairs of a major party committee. Texas Republican Party chair Tina Benkiser was the lone woman in the race, but her profile was boosted as a chairmanship for her could be seen as a direct response to the election of Clinton as the first female president. Other contenders like Benkiser also came from the state parties, who put the fault of 2008 on the national focus of the GOP and say the power needs to be put back in the hands of the state parties. These included South Carolina chair Katon Dawson, Michigan GOP chair Saul Anuzis, and former Tennessee GOP chair Chip Saltsman.
The debate over which candidate had the best path to lead the Republican Party quickly devolved into attacks on the various candidates. In December, Chip Saltsman, who had been endorsed by a number of Tennessee leaders including former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, came under fire from the party after he sent committee members a Christmas CD that included a parody song called “Barack the Magic Negro.” Saltsman withdrew his name from the contest shortly after the controversy. In January, another controversy arose regarding another of the Southern candidates in the race, this time against Katon Dawson. Opponents of Dawson’s campaign pointed to an article from September 2008 indicating that Dawson had left a whites only country club where he had been a member for twelve years as an indication that Dawson as chair would perpetuate the modern image of the Republican Party as a white, Southern party. Dawson’s spokesman Rod Godfrey rebuked the criticism, calling the country club membership a “gotcha” and citing that Dawson left after attempting to push the club to drop the policy. Additionally, Godfrey and Dawson’s campaign had been pointing to the promotion of black politicians in the South Carolina Republican Party, including Glenn McCall as the state’s first black RNC member, and electing Tim Scott as the first black Republican in South Carolina’s general assembly since Reconstruction[4].
The worry of the Republican Party being seen as an increasingly white Southern party was a constant concern throughout the campaign and ballot process. Four of the candidates - Dawson, Saltsman, Benkiser, and Duncan himself - are from the South. Mississippi governor and former RNC chair Haley Barbour that the GOP’s opponents “want to attack us for being too Southern,” and that in the selection of chair he “[doesn't] think we ought to make it easier for them.”[5] As the balloting commenced, it soon became clear that Duncan would not return to his position, and Duncan dropped out after the third round of balloting as Steele took a lead. Blackwell withdrew on the next ballot and backed Benkiser[6], but Benkiser did not gain enough to be within reach of either Steele or Dawson. After the sixth ballot, Benkiser withdrew. While the Blackwell votes that had gone to her broke for Steele, the majority of her votes broke for Dawson and Dawson won on the eighth round of balloting.
The question of where the Republican Party goes from here is still a very open one. Dawson particularly praised Steele and Blackwell in a statement following his selection, and said he wanted to work with them in an unofficial capacity as he placed an emphasis on expanding the Republican Party’s ability to recruit African-Americans to run for political office if the party is to have any future. Dawson spoke to his efforts to do so in South Carolina during his chairmanship in the state, saying he wanted to bring those efforts to the country as a whole. It is clear that Dawson’s direction of the party will attempt to tap into the African-American vote as a way forward, but with Dawson’s controversial history and being a white Southern face for the Republican Party, it remains to be seen as to whether Katon Dawson is the man who has the real skills and desire to do that.
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Hailed as ‘Architect of Green Success’, California Party Chair Peter Camejo Passes Away
January 31, 2009
FOLSOM, CA - Political activist and longtime fixture of the California Green Party Peter Camejo died on Wednesday at the age of 69. Camejo was a political activist throughout his life, helped pioneer the financial practice of socially responsible investing, and was a frequent candidate for office and served as chair of the California Green Party from 2007 to his death. Camejo was the Socialist Workers Party nominee for president in 1976, ran for governor of California twice in 2002 and 2003, ran for United States Senate in 2006, and was Ralph Nader’s running mate in 2004 in the states where Nader was the Green nominee for president. Camejo had been fighting a battle with lymphoma for several years and died at his home in Folsom, California.
Peter Camejo was born in Queens, New York to Venezuelan parents and held dual US-Venezuelan citizenship. He spent the first years of his life in Venezuela, but moved back to Long Island at age 7 with his mother after his parents divorced. Camejo often said that seeing the poverty in Venezuela as a child led him to fight for social and economic justice. He attended MIT to pursue a mathematics degree and later transferred to UC Berkeley, but never received his degree. While at Berkeley, Camejo became active in the Free Speech Movement and the protests against the Vietnam War. Camejo’s involvement in the protest activity and in the Socialist Workers Party led governor Ronald Reagan to put him on the list of 10 most dangerous people in California and pushed the Berkeley administration to expel him. Even though he never finished his degree, Camejo took his experience at Berkeley with him in how to organize and lead mass movements. He would use that knowledge when he helped found the Green Party of California and eventually rose to become the party’s chair. Matt Gonzalez, one of the most prominent Green elected officials as mayor of San Francisco and a good friend of Camejo, commented that Camejo was always a proponent of creating an active third party in the United States.
For much of his life, Camejo made most of his living as a financial analyst and consultant. He worked at Merrill Lynch for a time, and according to Gonzalez was one of their star employees and created the first environmentally screened investment fund for a major Wall Street firm, Merrill Lynch’s Eco-Logical Trust. However, after running for president for the Socialist Workers Party in 1976 and being arrested for protesting, Merrill Lynch pushed Camejo out despite his success. Camejo continued to work in the financial sector, founding investment firm Progressive Management Asset Inc. where he continued to develop and pioneer a strategy of investing in socially responsible companies and organizations. Camejo later founded the Council for Responsible Public Investments and wrote the book “The SRI Advantage: Why Socially Responsible Investing Has Outperformed Financially.”
In the 1990s, Camejo became active in the early years of the Green Party, He ran for office four times between 2002 and 2006, though only received over 5 percent of the vote during his first run for governor of California in 2002. Camejo was committed to helping create a third party in the United States that could compete with the Democrats and Republicans, and while he never achieved elected office at any level, he did leave his mark. In a prepared statement, Ralph Nader said “Peter used his eloquence, sharp wit, and barnstorming bravado to blaze a trail for the Green Party and for 21st century third party politics in the U.S.” His activism took many forms, but Camejo also gained a reputation for fighting for impoverished and marginalized communities. Nader also described Camejo as a “politically courageous champion for the downtrodden and mistreated of the entire Western Hemisphere.”[7] Camejo also never forgot his Venezuelan heritage and was active in many Latino groups including La Raza Unida and in the broader Chicano Movement. One of those friends, state senator Gil Cedillo, said Camejo “understood the movement and always attempted to integrate his leftist views in the context of the Latino struggle.” In 2002, while a state assemblyman, Cedillo was one of fourteen Latino legislators to refuse to endorse governor Gray Davis over his veto of a bill that would give California drivers’ licenses to undocumented immigrants. Cedillo endorsed Camejo in that election.
Camejo described himself as a “watermelon” - red on the outside, green on the inside - but while frequently associated with socialist movements he rarely used the lofty language that many others who shared his ideology use. In Camejo’s involvement in the Green Party from 2002 on, he frequently mentioned that he took his cues from the successful Latin American leftward movements. “The ones that found success didn’t try to model themselves after a European identity; they didn’t speak of ‘socialism’ or ‘Marxism’. They used clear understandable words and a message built on the living history of their countries and the consciousness of the people they are talking to. They take these universal issues of inequality and justice and place these issues in the culture, the history, and the language of the people they are trying to reach. That is how they convince people and find success.”[8] During the last decade of his life, Camejo ran into tension with other California Green Party leaders like Mike Feinstein over the direction of the state party, but the success of the Gonzalez campaign and others gave credence to Camejo’s message and saw him rise to the chair of the Green Party of California in 2007. From that position, he no longer ran for office himself, but instead championed others, and in 2008 oversaw the election of the Green Party’s first members of the state legislature elected in a general election - state senators Jerry McNerney and Norm Solomon and state assemblywoman Angela Davis. Earlier this month in his last public appearance congratulating the new Green members of the state legislature, Camejo spoke to his message. “When you look at the full historical and political landscape of the United States - the great traditions of our struggles for justice, our symbols, our language - so many in power today in both the Democratic and Republican parties have become disconnected with that reality. Even on the left, many have turned away from the struggle of the farmer or the service worker or the undocumented immigrant and become lost in ivory tower academic rhetoric.”[9] Camejo’s push for a more populist message from the Green Party broadened its appeal and helped lay the path to the party’s recent victories.
In the last months of his life, Camejo finished writing his autobiography, currently titled “North Star,” which will be published by Haymarket Books[10]. Camejo is survived by his wife, Morella Camejo, by his stepchildren Alexandra Baquera and Victor Baquera, and three brothers. The family will hold a private funeral, but a public memorial service will be announced at a later date.
[1] OTL vote on 2009 CHIP Reauthorization:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/111-2009/s31
[2] OTL vote on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/111-2009/s14
[3] Gingrich’s statements except on president Clinton from here:
https://www.nbcchicago.com/local/gingrich_says_gop_is_outmatched/1845162/
[4] Godfrey’s statements on Dawson’s controversy here:
https://web.archive.org/web/2009020...msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/11/24/1687821.aspx
[5] Barbour quote from here:
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/politics/2009-01-04-gopchair_N.htm
[6] Benkiser did not officially run for RNC chair in OTL, but she was part of Blackwell’s campaign in an alliance where Blackwell would be chair while Benkiser would be co-chair. This time, Benkiser launches her own campaign instead but is still friendly with Blackwell on cross-support in the balloting rounds.
[7] Nader’s quotes on Camejo are taken from his obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle here:
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Peter-Camejo-dies-helped-found-Green-Party-3269521.php
[8] This quote is cobbled together from various parts of Peter Camejo’s autobiography
North Star: A Memoir. In his memoir he is specifically talking about the FSLN in Nicaragua, but Camejo says it was a turning point for him and from his experiences and his later approach to politics and activism, it’s a good general description of his approach.
[9] This quote is also partially based on how Camejo recounts how his experience with FSLN rallies affected his thinking. In his memoir it’s directed solely at the left and how the FSLN became successful while other leftist movements in the Americas at the time failed.
[10] Considering how useful his memoir has been as a source, I couldn’t not give it a bit of a shout out.
In OTL Camejo died in September 2008 when the manuscript was largely finished, but he was still working on the penultimate chapter when he died. In the publisher’s note, Haymarket says that Matt Gonzalez brought the manuscript to them following Camejo’s death from his lymphoma. For the timeline, I decided to give Camejo a few more months to live and see the Green Party have its 2008 breakthrough, and to let him finish the manuscript (which ITTL likely has an additional chapter or two on 2008)