DeLauro Cheers On Sanders, Sticks With Clinton

Bernie Sanders is giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money — and Clinton’s most prominent New Haven backer says that’s great.

Sanders’ insurgent quest for the Democratic presidential nomination is bringing the bid for protecting American jobs and increasing workers’ wages to more prominence, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro said Tuesday.

“I think there’s a synergy that plays off one another. And I think that is to the benefit of working families today. I think the spotlight is there on what is going on in the economic lives of middle-class families. That can be nothing but good,” DeLauro, who has endorsed frontrunner Clinton’s Democratic presidential campaign, remarked during a wide-ranging discussion with local reporters at her second-floor Congressional office a block from the New Haven Green. (Click on the audio file at the top of this story to hear her speak more about the subject.)

Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist who has represented Vermont as an independent in the U.S. Senate for eight years, has startled the Clinton camp and the political establishment by climbing in the polls and drawing big crowds in the first presidential battleground state of Iowa (as well as in liberal enclaves like Madison, Wisconsin, and Portland, Maine). He is running on raising the hourly minimum wage to $15, cutting military spending, and taxing the wealthy far more to pay for universal free college tuition and a $1 trillion public-works job-creation program. He has also promised to insist that any Supreme Court nominee commit to overturning the Citizens United decision that recognized corporations as people and basically eliminated caps on individuals’ financial contributions to federal candidates.

Sanders also has opposed the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal with 11 Pacific Rim nations. In Congress, DeLauro has led the fight against that treaty, arguing that it will cost Americans jobs, depress wages, and lead to spikes in prescription-drug prices. (Click here for a previous story about her fight, and on the video to watch DeLauro address the issue after a previous victory last month.) On Tuesday DeLauro declared that even though her side lost a crucial vote on the treaty — handing President Obama ​“fast-track authority” to negotiate a deal that Congress can only vote up or down without amending — the battle has not ended, despite the conventional wisdom. She noted that 85 percent of U.S. House Democrats and 70 percent of Senate Democrats had voted against fast-track authority, demonstrating a largely unified stand. ​“Democrats found their voice” on the treaty, she said. Clinton, who previously supported the pact (favored by Wall Street donors), has now staked a neutral position amid the stirrings of the left Democratic base whose influence is felt most in presidential primaries.

DeLauro said she stands by her Clinton endorsement. ​“I think she will be the nominee,” she said.

At the same time, she called Sanders ​“terrific. I’ve served with him in the House. I think he has an agenda that I’m very very much supportive of … [that] current economic policy is not helping people … He has the same view on the trade issue … We need to address those issues.”

DeLauro was asked if a strong Sanders showing in the Iowa presidential caucuses could drive Clinton from the race, the way Eugene McCarthy’s New Hampshire primary showing in 1968 pushed President Lyndon Johnson to abandon his reelection quest. She responded that, by contrast, the Sanders-Clinton face-off will strengthen her candidacy and her party.

“The debate itself engages one another. I think that’s a good thing, to engage in debate,” she said. ​“With regard to Hillary Clinton, she has spent a lifetime engaged on issues that face working families and children. She’s been a pioneer on all of those efforts — family leave, paid sick days … She has been out there challenging Republicans, not being afraid to do that.”

DeLauro was also asked about terrorist attacks — or more precisely the absence of any major terrorist incidents on U.S. soil since the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks until last month’s massacre of nine black members of a Charleston, S.C. AME church. The conversation went as follows:

We watched what happened last week in Tunisia. Since 9/11, except with the one incident with Dylann Roof, we’ve had no major terrorism incidents, even though we are the world’ biggest target. We’ve heard so many stories about what hasn’t worked in [stopping terrorist attacks, like] the NSA overreaching; waterboarding hasn’t made us safe. Have we done something right we haven’t been hearing about?

DeLauro: I think there were measures that were put into place in terms of being more careful about security issues in ways that people didn’t take for granted. I believe that there is the fine line between privacy and security, and we have to always be observant.

Why did France have the Charlie Hebdo and the supermarket [attacks] and we haven’t?

DeLauro: They certainly know so much more than any of us do about what the threats are and so forth. I suspect they have thwarted many of those threats in a number of ways and they’re not willing to reveal how that happens for security reasons. You’ve got copycat stuff. So I do think they do hold that very, very close.

Have you had briefings on successes…

DeLauro: No.

Have [Presidents] Bush and Obama done a good job in keeping us safe from terrorism?

DeLauro: I think we have been safe. So I think that that redounds to the credit of the people who are trying to do this.

There have been lapses. We do get concerned about. I think there’s been a heightened sense of that security. They’re taking the kinds of precautions that are necessary to do that.

I say that being very concerned about the rights of privacy and torture, etc. I don’t condone … You have to strike the balance. You’re never going to have zero tolerance. You can’t. But you can safeguard, try to do that in as many ways as possible. You should write a story about their success.

They won’t tell us …