It was the kind of meeting that conspiratorial conservative bloggers dream about.
A
month after President Barack Obama won reelection, top brass from three
dozen of the most powerful groups in liberal politics met at the
headquarters of the
National Education Association (NEA), a few blocks north of the White House. Brought together by the
Sierra Club,
Greenpeace,
Communication Workers of America (CWA), and the
NAACP,
the meeting was invite-only and off-the-record. Despite all the
Democratic wins in November, a sense of outrage filled the room as labor
officials, environmentalists, civil rights activists, immigration
reformers, and a panoply of other progressive leaders discussed the
challenges facing the left and what to do to beat back the deep-pocketed
conservative movement.
At the end of the day, many of the attendees closed with a pledge of
money and staff resources to build a national, coordinated campaign
around three goals: getting big money out of politics, expanding the
voting rolls while fighting voter ID laws, and rewriting Senate rules to
curb the use of the filibuster to block legislation. The groups in
attendance pledged a total of millions of dollars and dozens of
organizers to form a united front on these issues—potentially, a
coalition of a kind rarely seen in liberal politics, where squabbling is
common and a stay-in-your-lane attitude often prevails. "It was so
exciting," says Michael Brune, the Sierra Club's executive director. "We
weren't just wringing our hands about the Koch brothers. We were
saying, 'I'll put in this amount of dollars and this many organizers.'"
The
liberal activists have dubbed this effort the Democracy Initiative. The
campaign, Brune says, has since been attracting other members—and also
interest from foundations looking to give money—because many groups on
the left believe they can't accomplish their own goals without winning
reforms on the Initiative's three issues. "This isn't an optional
activity for us," Brune tells me.
"It is mission critical."
Liberal groups have joined forces around issues—and elections—before.
Health Care for America Now (HCAN) was a megagroup formed to support
Obama's health care reform bill in 2009. And in 2003, leaders from EMILY's List, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), AFL-CIO, and Sierra Club
formed America Coming Together,
the most sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation in the history of
Democratic politics, to help elect presidential candidate John Kerry.
Indeed, progressives have collaborated specifically on voting rights or
campaign finance before, too. But the Democracy Initiative may be the
first time so many groups teamed up to work on multiple issues not tied
to an election.
"This is really the first time that a broad spectrum of
groups have come together around a big agenda that impacts the state and
national level," says
Kim Anderson, who runs the NEA's center for advocacy and outreach and attended the December meeting.
The Democracy Initiative grew out of conversations in recent years among Radford, Brune,
CWA president Larry Cohen, and
NAACP president Ben Jealous.
("We all have a knitting class together," Brune jokes.) Brune says the
four men bemoaned how the dysfunctional political process was making it
impossible for their groups to achieve their goals. "We're not going to
have a clean-energy economy," he says, "if the same companies that are
polluting our rivers and oceans are also polluting our elections."
Greenpeace's
Phil Radford notes that for decades conservatives have aimed to shrink
local, state, and federal governments by reforming the rules so they
could install like-minded politicians, bureaucrats, and judges. Radford
calls it "a 40-plus-year strategy by the
Scaifes,
Exxons,
Coors, and
Kochs of the world…to take over the country."
So
last spring Brune, Cohen, Jealous, and Radford called up their friends
on the left and, in June, convened the Democracy Initiative's first
meeting. A handful of groups attended, and they began to focus on the
triad of money in politics, voting rights, and dysfunction in the
Senate.
By December, the Democracy Initiative's ranks had swelled
to 30 to 35 groups, Brune says. (He expects it to be 50 by the end of
the winter.) Other attendees at the December meeting included top
officials from the League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth,
Public Campaign, the AFL-CIO, SEIU, Common Cause, Voto Latino, the Demos
think tank,
Piper Fund,
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, People for the
American Way, National People's Action, National Wildlife Federation,
the Center for American Progress, the United Auto Workers, and Color of
Change. (A non-editorial employee of
Mother Jones also attended.)
According to
a schedule of the meeting,
the attendees focused on opportunities for 2013. On money in politics,
Nick Nyhart of Public Campaign, a pro-campaign-finance-reform advocacy
group,
singled out Kentucky,
New York, and North Carolina as potential targets for campaign finance
fights. In a recent interview, Nyhart said the Kentucky battle would
likely involve trying to oust Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
(R-Ky.), Public Enemy No. 1 for campaign finance reform, who faces
reelection in 2014. In New York, Nyhart said,
activists are pressuring state lawmakers, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo, to
pass a statewide public financing bill in 2013. And in North Carolina, the fight is more about countering the influence
of a single powerful donor, the conservative millionaire Art Pope, whose largesse
helped install a Republican governor and turn the state legislature entirely red.
On voting rights, a
presentation by a Brennan Center for Justice staffer identified
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, and Minnesota as states
where efforts to modernize the voter registration system and implement
same-day registration could succeed.
But the most pressing issue
right now for Democracy Initiative members is Senate rules reform. At
the December meeting, attendees heard from Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and
Tom Udall (D-N.M.) on rule changes to curb the spiraling use of
filibusters to block legislation. The use of the filibuster has exploded
in recent years, and Republicans now block up-or-down votes on nearly
everything in the Senate, requiring Democrats to muster 60 votes to
conduct even the most routine business. Liberal groups in the Democracy
Initiative want to fix that, and they used the December meeting to plan a
coordinated push to urge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to
rewrite the rules. Democrats
have until January 22, when the window closes on easy rules changes, to get the reforms they want.
Other potential targets for Democracy Initiative action include Chevron, which
gave $2.5 million
to a super-PAC backing House Republican candidates in 2012.
Google was
mentioned as another target for its continued membership with the
generally pro-Republican US Chamber of Commerce. And a 16-member
coalition
targeting the American Legislative Exchange Council, the
conservative "bill mill"
behind many voter ID, school choice, and anti-union laws, wants to use
the Democracy Initiative to recruit members and so expand its efforts
identifying lawmakers and corporations who are ALEC members and urging
them to cut ties with the group. "We're going to put the pressure on
ALEC even more" in 2013, says Greenpeace's Radford.
Radford,
Brune, Cohen, and others say the Democracy Initiative is no flash in the
pan; they're in it for the long haul, for more than just this election
cycle and the one after it. It
took four decades,
these leaders say, for conservatives to shape state and federal
legislatures to the degree that they have, and it will take a long
stretch to roll back those changes. "The game is rigged against us; the
corporate right has done such a good job taking over the Congress and
the courts," Radford says. "We're saying we need to step back and change
the whole game."
