Congressman Jared Huffman in Sebastopol, Part 2

Huffman on the central role of Congress, fire funding, and what Democrats should do during Trump's State of the Union address

Congressman Jared Huffman speaking at Burbank Heights. (Photo by Laura Hagar Rush)

This is Part 2 of a two-part article about Congressman Jared Huffman’s Q&A at Burbank Heights, a low-income senior living facility in Sebastopol. See Part 1.

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QUESTION: Is it worth it for us to send letters to even Republican senators? I’m certainly out doing peaceful demonstrations. I’ve done that since the 60s. What’s your inside feeling about if Republicans are getting it at all? Is anything happening? Because this is pretty weird.

HUFFMAN: So my suggestion is everything matters. You can even contact me. People often ask me, ‘Should we reach out to you, even though we know you already get this?’ I don’t think it hurts and it gets listed, right?

I think Republicans are the ones that really need to hear it the most, because that’s where the pressure is needed. The question is, is it breaking through? Are there signs that it’s breaking through? Well, for a few it is. But I will tell you honestly, I am shocked at how few, because we’ve never seen a president just so thoroughly dismiss the United States Congress.

Our founders wanted Congress right up front. We were Article One of the Constitution, the first line of democracy, because their big concern is that we didn’t want to have a king, right? Kings didn’t work out too well, and so Article One, the very first part of the American government was the Congress—the elected Congress. You don’t get to the President until Article Two.

And Congress has all of these powers over the president: the power to impeach and remove a president, the power to confirm the Cabinet officials, although that was a rubber stamp, right? So that was a huge failure by the Senate. But the power of the purse, the spending power, power over trade, power over declarations of war—there’s all this power that the founders put into Article One, not Article Two.

Donald Trump just is ignoring all of it, and the Republican majority in this Congress is just selling out Article One. They don’t care. They think they work for Donald Trump, and they need to reread the constitution. So, I hope they’ll get to a point where they find their Article One identity. But it’s distressing.

I’ll be very honest with you—to see what’s going on with Ukraine right now and to hear even someone who has been a staunch defender of Ukraine, like Lindsey Graham, just kind of start to knuckle under—you can just watch him folding in real time—it’s totally distressing. But a few are holding up. I’ve got a couple in the house. There are a couple of senators that are, you know, you’d be hopeful for.

QUESTION: I really want to know what are some of the solutions? You keep restating the problem. And if anybody, by this time, doesn’t know what the problem is, I don’t know what’s wrong with them. So I want to hear solutions.

HUFFMAN: Okay, so solutions to this runaway train trying to become a dictatorship. What is the solution? I think there’s sort of three ways in which we have to confront this.

The solution set one is in Congress, and again, I’m in the minority. I don’t have everything I want to work with, but that majority is so slim on their side. Again only three people that we need to break our way in the house. That means they’re going to need a lot of Democratic votes, and government funding runs out in just a few weeks, March 14. So that’s the first time, they will need Democrats to help them do something, and we should just make sure that we leverage the heck out of that opportunity and extract something in return for it. Now it may mean that they shut the government down. I got to give you full disclosure about how this may play out, and we don’t like government shutdowns because we like government and they don’t. But they may shut the government down, thinking that that will cause Democrats to buckle, and I think we’re all going to just have to steel ourselves to ride that out as long as it takes in order to get the assurances we need to address all this stuff. That is one part of the solution.

The other part is the legal challenges, and this is a really important one. I think the courts will stop a lot of these things. Even with Republican judges, we won a few days ago with the judge who had clerked for Clarence Thomas. That’s how conservative they were. And so, you know those court rulings, especially if they are appealed and upheld, can be an important backstop.

And then the third one, and you know this: the most powerful solution we have is public opinion, and that’s why this awareness, this awakening and this engagement, all of which is starting to happen in a big way, it’s way more powerful than you might think. It is the thing that they have to listen to, and the thing that could ultimately turn this around, even if the others don’t.

QUESTION: I have a suggestion that I’d like to run by you. The Democrats need more media attention. So would it be possible for the Democrats to create a shadow government like they do in the UK, have a Democrat opposite every Cabinet member and every department head, and every time they say what they’re doing, the Democrat in that position can stand up, get some media attention and tell us what the Democrat would do. Can we do that?

HUFFMAN: That is an interesting idea. I think our models in the UK and the US are a little bit different, but I kind of feel like we’re doing that now. I mean, in every way we can, with the public platforms we have, we are saying ‘They’re wrong, and here’s what we would do; they’re wrong and here’s what they ought to do.’ We can always do it better.

QUESTION FOLLOW-UP: But if the one person that the public started to…

HUFFMAN: We don’t have one person…

QUESTION FOLLOW-UP: We could assign someone.

HUFFMAN: Here’s why it’s tricky. We’re in between presidential cycles. We don’t have like a Democratic standard bearer right now. We have a bunch of excellent messengers, and you probably see them on television.

A lot of them are addressing the changing information landscape too, which is another part of my answer to your question. People don’t get information the way they used to, and so the traditional stuff like, ‘Let’s have a press conference!’ A lot of people will never hear about that press conference. A lot of press doesn’t even exist anymore and won’t show up. ‘What if you just have lots and lots of press conferences…” A lot of well-intended people tell me that all the time: ‘You should have 10 press conferences a day!’ No one would show up, I promise you, and you would never hear about it. I’d probably say beautiful things in those press conferences, but no one would ever hear about it.

So we have to get better at navigating this evolving information landscape, and I’m trying to do that. My colleagues are trying to do that. We’re going on weird podcasts, and I’m showing up on radio and all these different other mediums. There are some great messengers, and they are saying really good and important things. It’s just not always breaking through.

So we will keep doing what we can with the tools we have. The Democratic Party is too multifaceted and unwieldy to have everyone agree on one person that will be like our messaging Messiah—that just won’t happen. But we have a lot of other great messengers, and we can and should try to do better.

QUESTION: One of my solutions is to shut down the government. I think you would have—from all that’s going on—you would have the support of the public to go for that, because that’s the only thing you really have with what’s going on. That will make a statement, and everybody would start to pay attention. The other thing is, can we get some Ukraine flags? We used to see them.

HUFFMAN: Remember when you guys renamed the Russian River? I thought that was pretty cool.

QUESTION: I just think that everybody ought to have Ukrainian flags in their yard and carry one around. We need to show support for Ukraine, because the president—he’s just a bawling baby. It’s just the worst. It’s just so embarrassing.

HUFFMAN: I’m with you completely on Ukraine. It’s just so heartbreaking and maddening in every way.

On the government shutdown, the one thing I will add is that we never want to say that Democrats are shutting down the government. If the government shuts down, it’s because these guys who have the majority chose not to vote to open the government. It’s going to be on them, and we need to make sure that it stays on them. But they also think that we are weak-kneed and that a little bit of government shutdown, and we will basically come begging them to reopen it on their terms.

And I think people are going to have to be stronger than we’ve ever had to be in a situation like this. So I agree with you. I think there’ll be great public support at the beginning of that. I hope that that sustains.

QUESTION FOLLOW-UP: Well, they are shutting everything down now.

HUFFMAN: That’s a great point. We are seeing functional shutdown beginning to happen across the government—that’s how I’m characterizing it exactly.

QUESTION: You talked about the failure of your Republican colleagues to honor their oath as Congress folk. Is there anything that you can do, like drop in the hopper a resolution procedure for the illegality of what they have done? It will never go anywhere, but will that give you a tool to embarrass them and, we hope, to have somebody get voted out next time?

HUFFMAN: So there are a few little gimmicky things when you’re in the minority that you can do to force things to at least a debate on the floor. They’re called Resolutions of Disapproval. Each of our ranking members in the various committees have been tasked with coming up with three Resolutions of Disapproval. I’ve been working on it, and it’s hard to choose just three. There’s so many outrages that I can focus on, but I’m kind of trying to focus on fire, because some of that, some of the stuff they’re doing is shutting down fire resiliency projects all over the West. They’re preventing us from hiring federal firefighters going into the fire season. And I think that that is going to be a winning point.

I’m talking about water as maybe one of my Resolutions of Disapproval, because you saw Donald Trump just lie to everyone after the LA fires and say that there’s this magic valve that goes to Canada and the environmentalists won’t let us turn on the valve. It’s crazy stuff, right? And then he dumped a bunch of water in the middle of a dry lake bed and lied and said it went to Los Angeles. So, you know, we can do something on water.

But the other one is Native American tribes. In my Natural Resources Committee, we have jurisdiction over all indigenous issues, and a lot of what they’ve done in the name of going after wokeness and going after ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ is having a huge blowback on Indian country and tribes, which are a disadvantaged community historically, obviously. But they’re also a little bit different than other disadvantaged communities. Our federal government has a trust obligation to them that is in the Constitution, that is in treaties, that is in statutes that stands apart from all other DEI groups. And so it’s a strong position to push that on Trump and his administration and hold them accountable for it. And, if you know, tribes are kind of an emerging political force in America. They’re kind of starting to come into their own, and we want to make sure that they know that Donald Trump and this administration are throwing them under the bus.

So those are the three areas that I’m working on. We’ll do those resolutions, and the way it works is then Republicans will have two weeks under the rules to either bring them up for a House vote, or to send them to like wherever Siberia committees, where they go to sit. Either way, there’s an opportunity to vote, and I will try to make the most of that.

QUESTION: What would happen if the Supreme Court ruled that Trump didn’t have to abide by any court rulings?

HUFFMAN: That would be devastating.

QUESTION: Can you comment on the threat to the California Coastal Commission?

Next week, Trump is giving his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, and I’ve gotta sit through it. I should get combat pay. [laughter] But my guest—you get to bring a special guest and they sit in the gallery—my guest this year is Carol Hart, Sonoma County’s own California Coastal Commissioner. You are right to ask about that. There have been indications from some in the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress that—you know, California is just coming through a $40 billion disaster with these Los Angeles wildfires, biggest price tag for a natural disaster in American history—we’re going to need FEMA relief. And there are suggestions that the Republicans will condition California’s relief on doing a bunch of things they want us to do: like voter ID, to try to scare people into nonvoting, and they want us to get rid of the Coastal Commission. So that’s why I wanted to bring Carol Hart. We are going to have her meet with the whole California delegation while she’s there. And obviously, I’m going to fight to protect the Coastal Commission.

QUESTION: I think Trump is a puppet. I think that there are money interests that are actually behind a lot of what he’s doing, and I’m wondering if you agree with that or not, and if there’s a way to actually get at the money interests?

HUFFMAN: I agree that Trump is a puppet, and the question is, who’s pulling the strings and why, right? And I have long thought that at least one of the puppet masters is Vladimir Putin. And so you asked about, can we get to the bottom of why this is. And, you know, I don’t know. I would love to know. It took us a long time to get tax returns and any other information. He fights like heck against any kind of transparency. So I don’t know that we’ll ever fully know the reason for his corruption. It’s obvious the corruption itself is not really debatable. I don’t know what combination of actual money versus some weird affinity that he has with strong man dictators versus like some compromising stuff that they have on him, but my sense is some combination of those three things is the answer for why he is such a puppet to Vladimir Putin, and I’m just as concerned about it as you.

QUESTION: I’ve been calling Congress members and senators. Their voicemail boxes couldn’t even take any more messages when the firestorm began. What is the most effective way as individual citizens that we can help?

HUFFMAN: Yeah, I get asked this question a lot, and honestly, if I knew—like the one thing—I would tell you. I promise I’m not going to hold that back on you. The best I can do is tell you is do everything you can. I think all of it kind of cumulatively adds up to something that matters.

And I will just tell you, as one congressional office, we always have these interns from college—usually someone from DC colleges, like American University or Georgetown or George Washington. Right now, we have these three super earnest young college students that show up, bright eyed every day to be an intern in my office, and we park them in this back room, and they just work the phones all day long. And they love it! They are feeling like they are sort of in a moment, they’re part of something, and they are right. They will do that all day long, and then show up the next morning, and I’ll ask them how it’s going, and they’re like, ‘We got 1,000 voice messages last night.”

[Laughter]

There’s three of them, and they’ve got to figure out what to do with 1,000 voicemails, plus the incoming that is not stopping all day long. So I don’t mean to dissuade you from calling and leaving more voice messages. I think it’s being noticed. I think it’s being registered, and I think that is part of the way we’ll hopefully create some pressure.

QUESTION: During the election, during the campaign, you could get postcards and just send them out to people from all over the country. We’ve got to start doing that now. We can’t wait till four more years to all of a sudden start campaigning.

HUFFMAN: Again, I can’t tell you which political groups to be part of or support, because I will get in trouble. But I’m trying to think of a word that rhymes with indivisible [laughter]. There’s not one. You can’t even give me any clues.

QUESTION: I was so appalled by the firing of the park board groups. [Possibly she meant National Parks employees.] So is this state park run differently than national parks?

HUFFMAN: Yes, your state parks are going to be just fine.

FOLLOW-UP QUESTION: I’m very concerned about, as you said, fires. So there will be a lot less people on the ground to prevent fires in national parks.

HUFFMAN: Not just in national parks. Honestly, there’s a lot of federal money that was going out to local governments and to resource conservation districts and folks up and down California. That has stopped. And so projects that even didn’t involve the federal government—that were going to do prescribed burns, that were going to do thinning and clearing—are stopped. And it is absolutely going to make us less safe in this next fire season. That’s one of the reasons I’m talking a lot about fire.

FOLLOW-UP QUESTION: Why aren’t they seeing that picture?

HUFFMAN: Because they don’t understand it. Because, look, these are not real public officials that are going through these databases and firing people in these mass firings and line-iteming out agencies? These are tech bros, some of them in their 20s, that can’t even get security clearances, and so Donald Trump waived security clearances. They probably couldn’t pass a background check to be a babysitter. It’s illegal, it’s unconstitutional, it’s being challenged in the courts, but in the meantime, they are doing stuff to programs and funding streams and agencies that they have no knowledge of. They don’t know. Maybe they wouldn’t care anyway, but they just clearly don’t understand what a lot of this stuff does.

CRI DE COEUR FROM SOMEONE IN THE AUDIENCE: I cannot stand it anymore!

HUFFMAN: I know. I am not making you feel better. [laughter] I feel bad about that, I really do. But you’re supposed to feel better knowing I’m in there fighting like hell for you.

QUESTION: What are you going to do at the State of the Union when Trump lies?

HUFFMAN: Yeah, okay, that’s a good question. What are we gonna do? Are we just gonna stand up and politely clap like we always do at the State of the Union? Because that’s decorum. You know, I can’t do that. So what will I do? Honestly, we are on some text chains right now with a bunch of my colleagues, and what I am lobbying for is that we show up—because if you don’t show up, they will put a bunch of Republican staffers in your seats, and the public on TV will never know the difference. They’ll see everybody standing up and clapping, and they’ll think Congress loves Donald Trump. So we should not boycott this thing. We should show up. And then I think we should do something like the first time he tells a lie or says something outrageous, we should all stand up and leave. We might do signs, but I have 215 colleagues and we have 215 ideas about what the sign should say. I’m taking suggestions for what you think.

Several people yell out “Liar, liar, liar.”

I thought the word “Shame” might be the best, if I had to put it in one word.

[Mixed response from the audience]

See, the focus group doesn’t like ‘Shame.’ So we gotta workshop this if we’re gonna do signs. But we definitely, I think, could have a choreographed walk out. Okay, who wants the last question?

QUESTION: When President Obama was in office, a Republican Congressman said, ‘You’re a liar.’

HUFFMAN: Yeah, he did. Joe Wilson of South Carolina famously yelled out “You lie.” Obama wasn’t lying when he said that. That’s a funny thing. It made headlines, but not in a good way for Joe Wilson. I think Joe Wilson looked pretty bad when that happened. There’s stuff that, believe me, my colleagues and I are talking about right now. I have had colleagues say we should do Joe Wilson: we should stand up and say, ‘You lie.’ And I’m like, ‘That didn’t work out well for Joe Wilson.’ People thought he was being rude, and I don’t want to turn Trump into the victim here, right? Because he plays that card all the time. So we’ve got to be smart, we’ve got to be disciplined, and we’ll figure it out. You’ll see something from House Democrats and from me next Tuesday night, I promise.