A woman’s worth
House Democrats put women and girls in the spotlight last week as electoral politics and a damning new report illuminate how federal policy and social stigmas underserve these groups.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome back to Once Upon a Hill. It’s the last legislative week before Election Day, which is 43 days from today if you’re counting, and Congress is pretty much where everyone in Washington expected it to be.
After two weeks of fruitless performance from Mike Johnson (R-LA) in an attempt to appease his right flank (and former President Donald Trump), the speaker announced on Sunday that the House would vote this week to extend government funding at current levels through Dec. 20 to avoid a pointless and politically perilous shutdown a week from today.
The legislation, known as a continuing resolution (CR), excludes the SAVE Act, a controversial conservative bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections even though it’s currently against the law for noncitizens to do so. It falls short of the six-month deadline Johnson and the far-right House Freedom Caucus pushed for to prevent Congress from passing an end-of-year omnibus that combines all 12 annual funding bills into one mega package.
But it excludes additional funding for the disaster relief fund and $12 billion for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs to keep up with the demand for care without compromising wait times and staffing levels. (The House passed a bill last week to provide the VA with $3 billion in mandatory funding for compensation, pensions, and readjustment benefits.) These were both Democratic priorities in the negotiations.
The CR does include $231 million to bolster the Secret Service in the aftermath of the two assassination attempts against former President Trump this summer, provides flexibility to spend existing disaster aid faster, extends flood insurance, and includes millions of dollars for the upcoming presidential transition and inauguration.
What’s interesting is that Johnson will send the CR through the Rules Committee this afternoon. The committee is populated with three anti-CR conservatives who, with opposition from committee Democrats, can block the bill from coming to the floor.
If the CR stalls in Rules, Johnson can bring it under suspension, a procedure requiring a two-thirds majority vote instead of the simple majority required with a rule. But conservatives have railed against Republican leadership all Congress for adding major bills to the suspension calendar, so it makes sense that Johnson would attempt to avoid this criticism if he can. However it reaches the floor, it will require dozens of Democratic votes to pass, which is why the speaker had such a weak hand to play with from the start.
Watch this space as the CR moves through the House, over to the Senate and to President Joe Biden’s desk.
But before we get to this edition’s feature on how House Democrats are promising to meet the needs of American women and sounding the alarm on a crisis adversely impacting Black girls, a few news and notes:
1) In addition to the CR, the House will vote on a resolution to hold key officials in the Biden administration responsible for the withdrawal in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of 13 servicemembers and 45 injured servicemembers in the Abbey Gate terrorist attack on Aug. 26, 2021.
Republicans have intensified their focus on the Afghanistan withdrawal in the lead-up to the election as they try to paint Democrats and Vice President Harris as incapable of ensuring America’s national security.
Members will also consider bills to impose sanctions on China and a Republican-sponsored bill to reform bail policies.
2) Vice President Harris will give a speech this week on the economy as she works to build trust with voters on the issue.
“In short form, it is about what we can do more to invest in the aspirations and ambitions of the American people while addressing the challenges that they face,” she told reporters when she returned to Washington from a fundraiser in New York City, while pointing to the prices of groceries and homeownership. Harris said she would also touch on the care economy.
3) Harris raised $27 million as an upscale fundraiser in NYC on Sunday.
According to a campaign official, the event, held at Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan’s Financial District, was the largest single fundraiser since Harris has been at the top of the ticket. The same official said the campaign is grateful the event generated so much cash since it expects outside super PAC spending from the Trump side to spike in the campaign's final weeks.
It was around this time two years ago when then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and more than two dozen Republicans traveled to the Pittsburgh metro area to unveil the House GOP's “Commitment to America,” a four-part agenda the party would follow if it reclaimed the chamber in that year’s midterms.
McCarthy’s party won back the House, an outcome that bestowed upon him the speaker’s gavel for 10 months before he was voted out of his dream job. And as another consequential election approaches, the members he once led have little to show for their promises to create a strong economy, safe nation, future built on freedom and accountable federal government.
Instead, countless governing blunders have provided House Democrats with the backdrop to make their case for why they should be in charge. And the 93-member Democratic Women’s Caucus did its part last Friday in Washington, DC, with less fanfare than McCarthy and his allies did in Washington County, Pennsylvania, but with a similar moniker: Commitment to America’s Women.
“We are mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters, spouses and partners. We understand the joys and stresses of young families, the needs of our aging parents, and the fight for women to be in charge of their own personal health and economic security, said DWC Chair Lois Frankel (FL-22). “Every day we bring our life experiences to the halls of the Capitol to tackle the challenges facing American families. We stand steadfast against Republicans’ policies that attack women and families.”
The agenda focuses on three pillars—restoring and protecting reproductive freedom, lowering everyday costs and ensuring economic security—and is fortified by the belief that when America invests in women, everyone benefits.
But we’ve seen these agenda rollouts before. Most notably, McCarthy’s plan was fashioned after Former Speaker Newt Gingrich's (R-GA) “Contract with America,” the 1994 blueprint Republicans acted on when they won control of the House for the first time in decades. The success of each is determined less by the desire to implement them and more by the post-election balance of power in the White House and both ends of the Capitol.
It’s also worth noting some of the overlap between the Commitment to America’s Women and Vice President’s “opportunity economy” that would expand the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, provide first-time homeowners with $25,000 in down-payment assistance and increase the startup expense tax deduction for new businesses from $5,000 to $50,000. While there may be value in personalizing policy proposals to a key demographic like women, it was unclear if the Commitment to America’s Women was a departure from Harris’s proposals or an additive.
Rep. Annie Kuster (D-NH), who also chairs the center-left New Democrat Coalition, told me the DWC worked very closely with the Harris campaign on the caucus’s agenda, which she said fits with the vice president’s proposals.
“I think one way we’re trying to get people to understand is that women need economic security to get ahead. When you talk about lower wages, what you're really talking about is less access to opportunity, less access to education or job training,” she said, pointing to the half of the 12 percent of women in her state who didn’t return to the workforce after the pandemic. “Women make up an important part of our economy, as caregivers, as workers and as consumers, and we want to work with President Harris, Vice President walls, to make this dream the reality for everyone here in this country.”
Teresa Leger Fernandez, a New Mexico congresswoman and DWC vice chair, said the DWC’s agenda and Harris's plan recognize the need for people to have a vision of where the country will be under their leadership.
“We are in sync with her proposals,” Leger Fernandez told me. “We are all carrying legislation that is in sync with those proposals because we know that’s how you help American families get ahead. That’s true family values.”
It’s not just women who are facing societal disadvantages.
Federal data show that girls are struggling across all measures of well-being—including substance use, experiences of violence, mental health, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. These struggles can be exacerbated by their experiences in public schools and the detrimental effects of removing students from the classroom for discipline.
The Government Accountability Office released a disheartening report last week on school discipline that found Black girls face disproportionately severe discipline compared to other girls, including exclusionary discipline at rates three to more than five times higher than those of white girls for similar behavior.
The GAO analyzed the most recent Education Department data from the 2017–18 school year, which showed that Black girls comprised 15 percent of all girls in public schools but received almost half of suspensions and expulsions. Black girls are disciplined at higher rates in every state in the US; the discipline rates of Black girls with a disability grew larger.
The reasons for the disparity are plentiful. Black girls suffer from adultification—a form of racial and gender bias from adults who view Black girls as older and more promiscuous than their same-age peers, which leads to harsher punishments. There’s also colorism, another form of racial bias against people with darker skin that factors into the disproportionate discipline of girls. Black girls who fail to conform to traditional standards of femininity are also targets of unequal consequences than their white peers for similar behavior.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) requested the GAO review in 2022 to examine the underlying infraction data among disparities and identify factors contributing to them.
Following the report’s release, Pressley, along with Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) renewed their calls for Congress to take up the Ending PUSHOUT Act, a bill originally introduced in 2019 and reintroduced in 2021 and 2023 to end the criminalization of girls of color in schools and invests in safe and nurturing school environments for all students, including those at risk of punitive over-policing.
The legislation would establish new federal grants to support states and schools that commit to banning unfair and discriminatory school discipline practices and improving school climate. It would also protect civil rights data collection, strengthen the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, and create a federal interagency task force to end the school pushout crisis and its impact on girls of color.
The pushout crisis is festering as disinvestments in teacher pay and afterschool programs adversely affect student achievement, and attacks on affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion undermine efforts to level the playing field for historically underserved communities.
Pressley told me that the Ending PUSHOUT Act is one of many legislative tools to address the many destabilizing factors that young people and learning communities are experiencing.
“Certainly, it has been harmful when you have a weaponized Supreme Court making rulings like the decision ending affirmative action in higher ed, that has a chilling effect,” she said. “The active defunding of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, the banning of books that are representative of stories and affirming and diverse representation of lived experiences—it is the totality of all of those things that is having a cumulative and compounded impact.”
Do you have questions about the election? Drop me a line at michael@onceuponahill.com or send me a message below to get in touch and I’ll find the answers.