Issue #24
If nothing else, Rubén Díaz Sr is never boring
New Developments
MA-01
Alex Morse announced his challenge to Richard Neal a couple weeks ago, and since then, local politicians have had their chance to weigh in on the race. A notable name to get behind Neal is John Barrett, mayor of North Adams (pop 13,000) for 26 years, who was elected to the State House in 2017 from the rural northwestern corner of the state. A freshman in the State House, Tricia Farley-Bouvier, who represents a rural district just east of Barrett’s, also backs Neal. Other members of the state legislature who represent part of MA-01, Adam Hinds and Paul Mark, also have expressed skepticism of Morse’s campaign.
Morse has received a warmer reception from the progressive groups in the area. President of the Berkshire County NAACP Dennis Powell had previously criticized Richard Neal for ignoring the organization during his 2018 by blowing off a debate they were hosting. Powell has called the attention the organization has received from Morse “quite a different contrast” from how Neal treated them. The local DSA chapter has said it’s looking into the race as well. They endorsed Neal’s challenger in 2018, Tahirah Amatul-Wadud. Another endorsement he picked up today was national, from the Justice Democrats.
Neal, for his part, either did his homework on Morse during the period where Morse’s run was just a rumor, or came up to speed quickly. Just after Morse announced, Neal said:
Did he happen to mention that the Holyoke schools are in receivership? Did he happen to mention that he’s had a number of campaign finance violations? That in the run-up to the Holyoke schools being placed in receivership, he missed 28 of 60 school committee meetings before the schools were put in receivership? So I understand that there ought to be room for a good vigorous campaign – and I’m ready.
Which means he’s scared enough by this campaign to be doing research, because nobody would have those figures on the top of their head.
NY-15
New York’s 15th district, located in the South Bronx, became open several months ago with the retirement of longtime Rep. José Serrano. Since then, homophobic nutcase City Councilman Rubén Díaz Sr. has entered the Democratic primary, making it imperative that he be defeated at all costs; progressive City Councilman Ritchie Torres has raised an impressive amount of money and snagged major endorsements from unions and progressive groups; and the campaigns of community activist Tomas Ramos and DNC Vice Chair Michael Blake have fallen flat, making it fairly clear that it’s either Torres or Díaz. This might be why State Senator Gustavo Rivera recently decided against running after sounding very likely to get in.
For some reason, former City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito looked at all this and decided she should run, increasing the chance that the vote will be split enough to elect Díaz. As if the gods saw this news and sought to send a clear sign to Mark-Viverito that Torres was the left’s only chance to beat Díaz, the Laborers’ International Union of North America, a major union representing construction workers, endorsed Torres just days after the news of Mark-Viverito’s impending run broke. Of course, whether this was coincidence or backroom scrambling is up to interpretation.
As for Díaz, he’s back in the news! As the councilman enters the uncharted waters of a congressional candidacy, he should try to avoid new scandals; if voters are reminded of his past controversies, after all, they may make him walk the plank. Unfortunately for his congressional hopes, Díaz seems to have set a course for a tempest on the horizon--a new scandal, this one involving...a pirate?
(I know the puns are bad, you have to suffer through them.)
Díaz Sr. paid Dionisio Nova $300 for “publicity” on May 21, about a month before Nova would be cited by the FCC for operating an unlicensed (or “pirate”) radio station out of his Bronx apartment. Nova has been paid by other Bronx campaigns before, according to The City, so this would be a rather mundane case of an otherwise shady character getting paid for above-board stuff if it weren’t for the councilman’s son, Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr.
Jr. met with FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly (one of the board’s Republican commissioners, as the FCC has seats reserved for both political parties) on July 11. For those keeping track, that’s less than two months after Sr.’s campaign paid Nova and only three weeks after the FCC cited Nova for his violation. Not a great look! While it’s quite possible that the younger Díaz never brought up the radio pirate’s case to O’Rielly (and quite possible that the elder Díaz never mentioned it to his son), it just reinforces Díaz’s reputation as an unethical politician, one who appears to skirt city council financial rules by taking tens of thousands of dollars in “birthday gifts” and who exclaimed, “I’m not gonna rat my people out! This place is full of rats!” during a mandatory city council training on sexual harassment.
NY-17
Mondaire Jones, who is challenging House Appropriations Committee Chair Nita Lowey in a safely Democratic suburban New York district, appears to have tapped some of his connections as a Stanford alum. Fellow Stanford alum Issa Rae, creator and star of the HBO series Insecure, is holding a Manhattan fundraiser for Jones. It’s unusual for a challenger like Jones, who is taking on a powerful Democrat from the left, to get attention from high-profile donors, but Issa Rae has long been outspoken about her politics. A Manhattan fundraiser headlined by a major TV star could bring in more in one night than most underdog campaigns raise in a month.
TX-28
Henry Cuellar is awful for so, so many reasons. One of the worst is his love of the NRA. He has an A grade [download warning on that link] from the organization and is one of only three Democratic in Congress to accept money from them - the other is Collin Peterson, who represents a rural farming district that Trump won 62-31 and who is likely the only politician alive who could hold it. Cuellar returns the favor to the NRA, not just by voting their way, but also by parroting their extremism. After a mass shooting in his district in TX-28, he went on television to repeat NRA talking point about how assault weapons weren’t the problem since there are other ways to kill.
The recent shooting in El Paso hasn’t in TX-28 obviously, but it is heartbreaking and on the Texas border. Cuellar was once again pressed to return or donate away NRA contributions. His campaign’s response? “Why would he do that?”. His primary opponent, immigration attorney Jessica Cisneros has been hitting him hard over this one, reiterating her claim that Cuellar is the NRA’s favorite Democrat and saying that “No one with an ‘A’ rating from the NRA deserves to call themselves a Democrat”. Local news coverage has been skeptical of Cuellar over his stance on gun control, as he trots out tweaked version of his NRA talking point from 2017: that the terrorists caused 9/11 and not the airplane. He left unmentioned that planes aren’t designed to kill people, and that 99.8% of Americans are legally barred from flying them, but of course NRA talking points don’t usually come with footnotes.
Queens, New York District Attorney
After winning an apparent victory on election night, Tiffany Cabán fell just behind in the vote once absentee voters and provisionals were counted. A recount followed, after which Borough President and Queens machine candidate Melinda Katz lead by 60 votes. Next came a series of court challenges, during which Cabán successfully decreased the deficit to 55 votes, but hit a wall when a judge decided not to consider affidavit votes with any information missing at all. Controversially, this means that bundle of votes where registered Democrats voting in the Democratic Primary who forgot to put their party as Democratic will not be counted. Last night, Tiffany Cabán conceded. That sucks, and it’s not hard to imagine a different result in a state where the election laws are less draconian (aside from all the provisionals, New York requires an insane six month waiting period of belonging to a political party before voting in its primaries). We hope to see more from her.
Hinds County, MS District Attorney
There’s better news out of Mississippi, however. Reformist DA Robert Shuler Smith gave up his job for a futile gubernatorial primary campaign, but civil rights attorney Jody Owens easily won the Democratic nomination to succeed him as DA in Mississippi’s largest county, which includes most of the city of Jackson. Owens, who said he would consider himself a “decarceral prosecutor,” campaigned on reducing the use of cash bail and refusing to prosecute marijuana possession.
New Primaries
MA-09
Getting a primary challenger: it’s the hottest new trend in Massachusetts politics. The latest trendy congressman to get in on the action is Bill Keating. Keating represents a district covering most of the state’s coast, including the South Shore and the Cape; the district voted for Hillary Clinton 53-42, making it Trump’s best district in the state, and also still a pretty safe Democratic district. Keating isn’t a conservative Democrat - he does support the Green New Deal and Medicare for All - but he’s nothing close to a leader on those issues, and his record elsewhere is not great. He voted for Kate’s Law (a Trump-supported anti-immigrant bill most Democrats opposed) FISA surveillance, and weakening the ACA. He also voted for the recent additional CBP funding.
Progressives in the district have been looking for a challenger to him recently, and now someone may have stepped up to do it, but he may not be who they’re looking for. Joe Rull, a selectman for the town of Norwell (pop 11,000), has openly floated the possibility of a challenge. If you’re unfamiliar with the role of a selectman, some Massachusetts towns have odd dual-track form of government where some larger decisions are voted on by all registered voters who turn up to a town meeting, while at-large elected selectmen run the day-to-day municipal operations; Norwell is one of those towns. Interestingly, Rull supports abolishing the office he now holds. He has a larger political pedigree than just his time as selectman, however. He has also been an aide to the last two mayors of Boston (Norwell is in the northern end of the district and is a Boston suburb), probably best known for working on the ill-fated bid to bring the 2024 Olympics to Boston.
Ideologically, Rull is hard to get a handle on. Walsh is a sometimes progressive, sometimes not mayor, but his staff has never been left-wing by any stretch of the imagination. As selectman, Rull handles issues like traffic and mall zoning, not hot-button national issues. What we can glean of his leanings are not great. For one, he supports Steve Pemberton for Senate, the only candidate of the three who has not laid out a clear progressive platform. For another, he supported primary challenger Mark Rooney in a 2018 Governor’s Council race, who ran to the right of the incumbent. His two other endorsements from his Twitter feed include Stephen Lynch and Michael Flaherty, the most conservative Boston City Councilor. Now it’s possible he’s just supporting his friends from Southie (Rull is from there), but until we see otherwise, he sounds worse than Keating.
NY-03
Last week, local political operative and DNC member Rob Zimmerman, who had long been rumored to take on incumbent Tom Suozzi in this Long Island district, announced he’d decided against a run, leaving Suozzi only challenged by local lawyer Michael Weinstock. That state of affairs didn’t last long, however. This week, local community organizer Melanie D’Arrigo announced her candidacy. D’Arrigo is the founder of a local wellness company who worked as the campaign manager for Assemblyman Tony D’Urso, who you may remember as the Assemblyman whose family hid a Jewish family during the Holocaust, who Michael Weinstock later tracked down. D’Arrigo has been particularly active on immigration activism, and she lists it as one of her biggest problems with Suozzi.
Also interesting is that the domain name annakaplanforcongress.com was just registered. Kaplan is a moderate state senator whose district is within NY-03. This doesn’t mean she’s considering running this cycle, or even that she registered that domain, but it is worth noting.
OH-03
As we mentioned in our MA-01 item, Justice Democrats endorsed Holyoke mayor Alex Morse’s challenge to longtime Rep. Richard Neal today. They made another endorsement today as well, backing former CFPB official Morgan Harper’s challenge to Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty. We had the opportunity to interview Harper late last week, and, as per usual, we’ll give you a sample of that interview today before we send the full interview to our paid subscribers.
On her time at the CFPB:
Nick:
So you worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For readers who don't know what that is, it...was Elizabeth Warren's idea, essentially. And it was created sort of as a backstop or a watchdog to make sure that financial companies are playing by the rules, not trying to rip people off. It was created by Dodd-Frank, and it's now kind of a gutted husk of what it used to be because of the Trump administration. But you worked at it while it was still...working. [...] So what did you do at the CFPB?
Morgan Harper:
I'll give a little context about the bureau's creation, too. The idea was part of the cause of the financial crisis was that a lot of the authority for overseeing financial products, particularly those that focused on consumers like mortgages, mortgage servicing, were scattered throughout many agencies. And so Elizabeth Warren's idea was to bring a lot of those different jurisdictions into one place that was solely focused on financial products that target consumers. In doing that, you would be able to have...an agency that was really an expert in those financial markets and able to best protect them for working people. And also that... It's a two sided thing; right? I mean when the markets are working well, it can also help everyone, in addition to consumers. The companies are doing better and also working people are protected against predatory lending and other harms that could come from nefarious activity by companies.
I started there in 2013 in the Office of Regulations, which was in the division called Research Markets and Regulation, RMR. And that's one of the core policymaking divisions of the bureau. So in the Office of Regulations, I was on the Prepaid Card rulemaking team, which was responsible for regulating the prepaid card market, which is a banking alternative. You've probably seen those in drug stores, the prepaid cards that offers a different financial product or banking alternative for maybe a person that isn't able to qualify for a bank account or doesn't want to pay fees associated with a traditional bank account. But it hadn't been regulated. So bringing some regulation and also more clarity around the fees for that market.
I was on that rulemaking team, and then eventually moved up to become one of the director’s senior advisors. And we sort of split the portfolio of markets that the bureau regulated into two. And so, I helped to oversee the policy development for payday lending, consumer reporting, mortgage servicing, et cetera.
[...]
So we were able to get $12 billion back in consumer's pockets. The division that I was first in, the Research Markets and Regulations, bringing lawyers, rule writers together with economists on to develop really strong policy, and also the markets office that brought in people who are very familiar with the industries themselves.
[...]
To me, it was a great example of, like I said, when the federal government is operating with a strong mandate and given the resources to actually execute on that mandate, you see the results, $12 billion [returned to consumers as a result of the CFPB.]
On living wages, universal income, and a federal jobs guarantee:
Nick:
You've said you support universal income. To you, does that mean universal basic income?
Morgan Harper:
Yeah. To me the idea there is that we shouldn't have people or families that, because of a $400 shortfall in a month, they are facing things like eviction that caused a financial spiral; right? That, to me, is crazy. And so, being able to make sure that there's enough money that that kind of a spiral doesn't occur for such a small amount...is common sense. I think it should be included in a package of other ideas around financial stability and housing stability to support working people, even if they're either not able to earn an income that would support housing, for example, and the cost of whatever market they're in. But yeah, I think it is absolutely crazy that $400 could send a family into a financial spiral and we need to do something about that. Particularly when we're finding that a lot of people are not able to have access to jobs that are providing enough money to meet those basic needs.
Nick:
You've also called for a jobs guarantee coupled with a living wage. So, if in your ideal world, the government is guaranteeing a job with a living wage, do you think a universal income is still necessary and worth fighting for or--
Morgan Harper:
Yeah. I mean, because my view on the jobs guarantee, if you're ready, willing, able to work, you should be able to have a job that will...provide a living wage to support meeting basic needs. That might not be possible for everyone. And I think we need to think of other strategies and supporting people's ability to meet those basic needs. But yeah, I think it's more of a package of policies that I'm advocating for.
Nick:
Okay. Okay. So for people who might not be able to work, you see it as providing more of a safety net.
Morgan Harper:
[agreement]
Nick:
On the topic of a living wage, how high do you think a living wage is? The common refrain is $15 an hour. But Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib suggested $20 an hour a few weeks ago. Do you think it's something else?
Morgan Harper:
A living wage, to me, means that you're making enough money. Look, first off, we know what people generally need, what we all need to be okay. Right? Stable housing, generally having access to quality healthcare in case we have medical problems, and enough money to buy food and all of those things. Right? And so, a living wage would be enough to support meeting those basic needs. Now, take, for example, I'm here in Franklin County, where the third district is located. We kind of know that you need to be making about or more than $17 an hour to support rental for a two bedroom apartment, let's say. Right? So, I don't think $15 is going to cut it if that's not enough money here to even afford housing. If you need a two bedroom place, which you probably do if you're more than one person or have a child or whatever. And so we need to be looking at something that's higher than that, that's going to allow people to meet those basic needs.
On being a progressive primary challenger:
Nick:
The DCCC has implemented a blacklist of any vendors or any vendors who work for a primary challenger. So anyone who's running on Democratic primary against an incumbent Democrat. That means anyone who works on fundraising, or does polling, or does ads for a challenger cannot get any contracts with the DCCC, which can be very damaging to their business. Other House challengers have said it's been a significant struggle for their campaign. Marie Newman has...said that vendors have dropped her campaign. We've interviewed Crisanta Duran in Colorado's 1st and Lindsey Boylan in New York's 10th, and they've also both said that they've gotten a chilly reception from vendors specifically because of this blacklist. So has that affected your campaign so far?
Morgan Harper:
Yeah. We had trouble getting a compliance firm to sign on board to make sure we are in compliance with federal election campaign law. Sometimes hard to know whether that's at a DCCC blacklist or generally just nerves around being associated with someone who's a primary challenger and working a little bit outside of the machine here. What I'd say there, and actually one thing that's been really cool is there are a lot of vendors and a lot of different people that are emerging specifically to support progressive challengers. It makes me hopeful, in a way, because it's a sign that our generation is prepared and has the skillset to really take back control of politics and make it work for normal people and we have the resources to support each other in doing that. So, no. I mean, the DCCC blacklist is certainly not helpful for this kind of effort, but at the same time it's not determining those and, and we're able. We can still do this.
