At the beginning of the 119th Congress, the Congressional Equality Caucus is the largest* caucus in the United States House of Representatives with 191 members, the most the caucus has ever started a Congress with. In the 118th Congress, the Equality Caucus had a peak membership of 195.(There are 214 Democrats in the House. 191 of them belong to the Equality Caucus.) The mission of the caucus is to work for LGBTQI+ rights. The caucus is chaired by the most senior openly LGBTQ member of Congress and co-chaired by the other openly-LGBTQ members of the House of Representatives. Membership is open to any member of Congress who is willing to advance LGBTQI+ rights. Caucus co-chair Becca Balint talks about what the Equality Caucus can achieve if Democrats take the House, even with a hostile president: Rep. Becca Balint says Dems can slow Trump's anti-trans warfare. But first they must win midterms. LGBTQ Nation, Faefyx Collington This post was inspired by someone who recently received an unwanted check from the government and thought donating to pro-trans rights Democrats would be a fitting use for the money. I hope these links are helpful to any MeFites finding themselves with an unpleasant partisan windfall they'd prefer not to keep. The length of this post was inspired by my admiration for so many wonderful posts by kliuless. This post is dedicated to fabulous MeFite mephron, and also to my personal hero, Montana State Representative Zooey Zephyr. (I have mentioned on MetaFilter that when I'm obsessing about the current horrorshow, I try to steer my thoughts to people who are doing the work to make the world better. Zooey Zephyr is in my thoughts a LOT.) * Some numbers: The Democratic Caucus has 214 members. The Congressional Equality Caucus has 191 members. The New Democrat Coalition has 112 members. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has 99 members (in the House, plus 1 in the Senate). The Congressional Black Caucus has 54 members (in the House, plus 4 in the Senate). The Problem Solvers Caucus has 48 members (26 Democrats). The Freedom Caucus has 31 members (all Republicans; at least 6 will be gone next year).
When Assemblyman Smith saw reports of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, he understood immediately what he was looking at. The fire, and the deaths weren't just an accident. They were the predictable result of an economic system that treated employees — those young immigrant women, hoping to build better lives — as inputs to a production process; with no concession to their employees' dignity or lives.
Al Smith's conscience had been formed in the immigrant Catholic parishes of lower Manhattan, in a Church that had told the world, twenty years before — in words it had itself not used in many years — that what happened that March day in Manhattan was wrong. That it was a sin.
That Church was Pope Leo XIII's Church. The words were Rerum Novarum.[2,3]
The intellectual tradition spurred by Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical manifested in G.K. Chesterton's distributism, to Jacques Maritain's personalism, and Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker. These were movements of thought and conscience and direct service: enormously important, but operating at the level of ideas and personal witness.
Al Smith is not usually discussed alongside G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy Day, but he belongs in their company. Where they applied Pope Leo XIII's principles to economics and philosophy and works of mercy, Smith applied them to workmen's compensation law, factory safety codes, public housing, and the hours women and children could be required to work. From encyclical to intellectual, from intellectual to activist, from activist to legislator — each stage spoke with conviction: human dignity is not mere sentiment, but a structural demand that the state exists, in part, to enforce.
But she was not done. In 1919, over the fervent objections of men, Governor Smith appointed Perkins to the New York State Industrial Commission to help weed out the corruption that was weakening the new laws. She continued to be one of his closest advisers on labor issues. In 1929, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced Smith as New York governor, he appointed Perkins to oversee the state's labor department as the Depression worsened. When President Herbert Hoover claimed that unemployment was ending, Perkins made national news when she repeatedly called him out with figures proving the opposite and said his "misleading statements" were "cruel and irresponsible." She began to work with leaders from other states to figure out how to protect workers and promote employment by working together.
In 1933, after the people had rejected Hoover's plan to let the Depression burn itself out, President-elect Roosevelt asked Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor in his administration. She accepted only on the condition that he back her goals: unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor. She later recalled: "I remember he looked so startled, and he said, 'Well, do you think it can be done?'"
She promised to find out.
Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the administration's massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934.
In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services.
In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.
"The people are what matter to government," she said, "and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life."
A majority of Americans of both parties liked the new system, but the reworking of the government shocked those who had previously dominated the country. As soon as the Social Security Act passed, opponents set out to destroy it along with the rest of the new system. A coalition of Republican businessmen who hated both business regulation and the taxes that paid for social programs, racists who opposed the idea of equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, and religious traditionalists—especially Southern Baptists—who opposed the recognition of women's equal rights, joined together to fight against the New Deal.[4,5]
For nearly a century, the conservative movement's white whale was the government the New Deal and the Great Society had built. Republicans chipped away at it but feared the political ramifications of going too far. Now, Donald Trump and men in his inner circle like Russell Vought have come promising to do what their predecessors could not, and kill the beast outright. In its place they intend to leave a fascist, personalist, but otherwise greatly diminished state.[6] If they are going to shoot their shot, then liberals need to be ready to shoot ours. The Reconstruction Papers is a guide to what that shot should look like. The aim is not to go back to normal, or repair the damage, but to offer bold plans of action for political liberals who manage to retake power from the fascists, as soon as 2029.HCR: We're Watching MAGA Collapse - "[I]n the two years between this election and the next one, we get to decide what the major issues for the American government are going to be. What do we want to see happen? Like what are our top things? And the people who best articulate those for us are going to be the people that we get behind in the 2028 election... What do we want the government to do? [I]n the long term as you're watching MAGA collapse... also think about what comes next because this is going to be so important going forward. We're not just saying what we don't want but we're also saying what we do want."
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