In the News

Congressman Richard Neal said one way to understand what is happening – and not happening – in the House of Representatives concerning legislation reflecting President Joe Biden’s agenda is to look at the math.

Neal explained during an interview on Oct. 18 with Focus Springfield and Reminder Publishing, “The dilemma highlights the arithmetic of the House. At the moment we have a three-vote margin and in the Senate it’s 50-50. President Biden moved forward correctly with a very ambitious initiative. We had a lot of success with the president’s rescue package, which the Ways & Means Committee wrote most of – we wrote most of the Cares Act and Heroes Act as well – so that in itself constitutes a significant investment, not only in public initiatives but also public spending.”

He continued, “This time around the president proposed we proceed to a series of issues that perhaps only happens once in a career, maybe once in a lifetime. The difficulty is I hear many people say why isn’t Joe Biden offering more Lyndon Baines Johnson-type initiatives, and my response is Lyndon Johnson in 1964 had 295 Democrats who won on the heels of his landslide, which was a transformative moment from ’64 to ’68 in what was accomplished. Others will say he [Biden] needs to offer FDR-type initiatives. The arithmetic at that time was pretty simple. FDR in 1932 had 314 Democrats in the House. So our margin of error here is very small.”

Neal believes House Democrats will get the bills passed and recounted that Biden told the Democrats who oppose the compromise legislation that they will not be able to get $3.5 trillion passed, as there is not enough support for that amount in the Senate.

“Let me say this: $2 trillion in new public investment is a heck of a lot money,” Neal said.

“The American people are all in for infrastructure, that’s pretty clear … the plan the president outlined was expansive,” Neal said, added the president is “on-target.”

Although many political observers have written about the potential outcome of the mid-term elections on Congressional Democrats and Biden, Neal believes such discussion is important and not premature.

Holding onto the House is “essential,” he said.

As he noted in previous interviews, the attitude of bipartisanship has changed in Congress since he first arrived years ago, and is still changing. He said he likes crafting legislation with members of the other party.

“Let’s also be honest about something else, each day that falls off the calendar, the Republicans are likely to be less helpful if they think they are on the path to a majority in a little more than a year. Now, the rebuttal to that, I think reasonably so, is that history leans against us. I was there when Bill Clinton defied those odds and picked up seats in ’98. I think in this instance with Joe Biden there is another reality: as long as Donald Trump has the hold on the base of the Republican Party that he does they are likely to nominate a lot of candidates that are well outside the mainstream. They’re likely to have a lot of bad primaries on their own side.”

Predictions from Republicans that they are “homeward bound” are “premature and ill-considered,” he added.

When asked if there are any similarities between former House Speaker John Boehner, who had opposition from radical members of his own Republican Party during the Obama Administration, and those progressive members of the House who are making demands of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Neal explained, “Many of the people that are taking the hardest positions come from very safe Democratic districts. I mean, so, if you’re looking [at] a Democratic district that performs at 60 or 70 percent, so what are we saying now, we want to get 80 percent of those Democrats for the next round of elections? We have to take into consideration members who come from marginalized seats, perhaps in a place like New Jersey, that comes to mind, where we’ve been very successful in the last two cycles of Congressional election; Virginia, we’ve been very successful, but we are pretty much shut out in much of the South in America.”

Neal was direct in his analysis for Democratic success in Congress: “ We need to find path forward to achieving these goals, but we can’t let purity be the driving force … my attitude is ‘Do you want 218 next year or don’t you?’ And the path to 218 is achieving the president’s stated goal of getting the economic package over the goal line.”

In terms of east-west passenger rail and the possibility for federal funding, Neal concurs the time is right. “It should be our moment. I think the federal government is well positioned for that purpose. It’s fair to say and accurate to say I met with the governor a month ago and talked to him about it, and three other House members from Massachusetts. We continue to do this; I think the description would be in a carefully prescribed manner. That is to test out where he is. Remember, no matter how much money we pass in this infrastructure bills, one of the interesting manners in which it is disseminated is it goes through the governor’s office and they decide how to dispense it,” he said.

Neal added that he was even more optimistic about Gov. Charlie Baker’s support after his last meeting with him.

Neal sees the success of north-south rail, with increased numbers of trains and ridership, as an argument for east-west passenger rail.

The complete interview can be seen on Reminder Publishing’s Facebook page or at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IosIbaDNnM8.