Originally published in The Intercept on April 1, 2022.
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THROUGHOUT 2020, as then-President Donald Trump issued baseless claims of voter fraud, local election officials called on the federal government to spend more to ensure a secure election season. Turnout was expected to break records; the pandemic had upended voting plans and safety protocols; and cybersecurity threats mounted. Leaders were acutely aware of the vulnerabilities in their aging election technology: Thousands of counties, for example, still ran their voting machines on Windows 7, an operating system so old it no longer receives routine security updates.

Congress did authorize $400 million to run elections in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, with funds permitted for expenses like buying personal protective equipment and hiring temporary staff to process the increase in absentee ballots. But those funds ran out quickly amid the costly primaries. Election officials, national security experts, and business leaders nationwide sent Congress letters throughout the spring and summer stressing why that figure could only represent a down payment ahead of the November election. A study of swing states conducted by the right-leaning Washington, D.C. think tank R Street Institute found that the election support afforded by the CARES Act provided just a small fraction — 10 to 18 percent — of what was needed.

But Congress didn’t budge. And so in an unprecedented move, private philanthropy stepped forward to plug the holes. A Chicago-based nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life administered nearly $350 million in philanthropic grants during the 2020 cycle, reaching almost 2,500 counties across 49 states. A majority of that funding was donated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and every eligible election department that applied for funding was approved, according to the group. “Despite election officials basically begging our federal government for assistance, that money never came through,” Liz Howard, a senior counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice, said weeks after the election. “Congress really failed our election officials.”

Fortunately for democracy, soon after Democrats took control of Congress and the White House, the party was laying plans to provide robust funding for election infrastructure.

But now, more than a year later, the politics that surround election funding have changed dramatically, though the need for modernizing and securing election systems has not. Conservatives, angry and suspicious that Facebook and Silicon Valley tilted the scales to help Democrats, have moved to ban future philanthropic donations for elections. In Wisconsin, a special counsel appointed by Republicans released an interim report accusing Zuckerberg of breaking bribery laws with the grants. More than a dozen Republican-controlled states, including Georgia, Florida and Arizona, have passed new restrictions on private donations to election offices since November 2020, and more states are currently drafting similar legislation. Absent new sources of government funding, these bans could yield cuts to election locations and election workers in the midterms.

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In its recently passed $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill, Congress included just $75 million for election security. That’s a fraction of what lawmakers authorized in 2020 and an amount experts say is nowhere near sufficient to address the needs ahead of the next election.

At the center of this failure is the Brennan Center, an influential liberal think tank and advocacy organization. Based in New York City, the Brennan Center rarely gets public scrutiny, but it plays an outsize role in the strategic direction of the movement pushing for voting rights and election reform. That flows partly from its massive war chest, which has skyrocketed over the last decade: Between 2010 and 2020, its net earnings grew from $196,000 to $58 million. Its assets jumped from $8 million to $90 million.

That financial firepower, coupled with the credibility in Washington that it has built over the years, gives the Brennan Center effective veto power over the voting rights advocacy coalition it leads. In Congress, revisions to election and voting laws are often met with the question, “What does the Brennan Center think?”

THE LEGISLATIVE DANCE has always involved inside players and outside pressure, but two interlocking trends have significantly walled off outsider influence and consolidated insider power. Partisan polarization means that there are few rogue bipartisan gangs to be pulled together, and the consolidation of power by congressional leaders has muted the influence of rank-and-file members and even committee chairs. K Street has rushed to fill that void — but so too have a select handful of major nonprofits, whose deliberations and strategic decisions have taken on exponential importance.

This made the Brennan Center’s decision to pull back on the effort to fund elections all the more consequential. Its political attention and lobbying shifted to passing the Free­dom to Vote Act, the Democrats’ comprehensive voting rights bill that would, among other things, expand voter registration, ban partisan gerrymandering, weaken state-level voter ID requirements, and restore preclearance, a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Brennan Center played a key role in crafting the omnibus legislation, including its earlier iterations like the “For the People Act.”

In a letter sent to congressional leadership in late July, a coalition of 19 national advocacy groups, including the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Mi Familia Vota, urged Congress to allocate $20 billion for election infrastructure, citing the hundreds of local election officials, mayors, and secretaries of state who had begged for that amount earlier in the month. “As the individuals and leaders closest to the administration of fair and secure elections, they have collectively called for federal support in meeting the immense needs they face,” the national groups wrote. “We write to add our voices to that important ask.”

The Brennan Center declined to sign.

“It was one of the most jaw-dropping moments of my professional life,” said one election reform lobbyist whose organization signed the letter and who requested anonymity to describe the coalition’s private discussions.

Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center, said his organization “felt that the dollar amount that the letter was asking for did not make sense based on our expertise and research and policy analysis … that it was too much,” though he could not say what a better figure would be. “My colleagues on this who are aligned certainly thought it was too much, and we thought the dollar amount was too high to be asking for at that time,” he added.

The timing of the ask also didn’t strike them as appropriate, Waldman said. “It was in the heat of the fight for the [For the People] Act, which we regard as the most important voting rights legislation in half a century. … I thought that [the request] was a distraction and a detour from the very hard fight needed to pass voting rights legislation.”

His comments about the size of the request for election funding reflected a departure from the Brennan Center’s previous public statements, a fact noticed by both this reporter and the organization’s press shop. The following day, a Brennan Center spokesperson, Alexandra Ringe, who had been listening in on our interview, called to ask if I would consider taking Waldman’s statements about the size of the election funding request off the record, saying they would not go over well with their coalition partners. I declined.

In a subsequent email, Ringe wrote that Waldman had “misremembered the decision-making related to the sign-on letter” and that fear of distracting from the Freedom to Vote Act was the sole factor in the Brennan Center’s decision not to sign. Waldman himself followed up to say that he had misspoken in our previous conversation, reiterating that the organization chose not to sign the letter “because of our concerns … that it would distract from the final push for voting rights legislation.”

BECAUSE OF THE wildly varying ways that counties tabulate their costs, the precise amount of funding election officials need is not clear. “What we do know from three years of surveys of local elections officials nationwide is that consistent and reliable funding is the most commonly mentioned issue,” Paul Gronke, the founder of the Elections & Voting Information Center at Reed College, told me. “We all recognize that what we are currently spending is far too low and funding is too irregular. … But hard numbers are difficult to obtain because of the diverse ways that budgets are managed.”

The last major federal investment in election funding was the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which authorized $3.5 billion for state upgrades. But it took years for that funding to get appropriated, and the costs and threats to elections have only gone up since then. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study recently estimated that the “current level of spending puts elections at near the bottom of spending for public services, ranking approximately the same levels as spending by local governments to maintain parking facilities.”

Advocates for more funding say that reliable appropriations can go toward things like bolstering election audit systems, patching cybersecurity vulnerabilities, upgrading voter registration databases, and investing in equipment like ballot sorters and envelope stuffers. The advent of election official retirements expected before the 2024 cycle is adding even more pressure, as hiring and training new staff will get more expensive.

The Election Infrastructure Initiative, a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, puts the tab to fully modernize U.S. elections at $53 billion over the next 10 years. The initiative has called on Congress to allocate less than half of that, $20 billion. That ask has been endorsed in letters by secretaries of state, mayors, and election administrators. In a February poll by Data for Progress, nearly three-quarters of respondents supported congressional spending to upgrade state and local voting equipment and security systems.

Many local election leaders have struggled to understand why the Brennan Center — a group with the ear of influential Democrats in Congress — dropped prioritization of election funding over the last year, particularly after helping elevate their concerns during the pandemic. Moreover, while the Freedom to Vote Act would push many election reforms that are needed and overdue, those changes would not come cheap. Advocates worried that chaos could come from a slew of new unfunded mandates.

Jessica Huseman, one of the country’s leading voting rights journalists, detailed many of these concerns publicly last spring in a Daily Beast op-ed. The For the People Act “was written with apparently no consultation with election administrators, and it shows,” Huseman wrote, noting that it was packed with deadlines and obligations that would be impossible for election officials to meet. “The sections of the bill related to voting systems … show remarkably little understanding of the problems the authors apply alarmingly prescriptive solutions to.”

The Brennan Center quickly issued a defense of the bill it had helped draft, publishing a response to Huseman’s piece on its website. The center defended the amount authorized in funding for upgrades and maintenance. But “there have been millions in authorized funding that has never been appropriated,” Huseman, who currently serves as editorial director of Votebeat, told me. “Looking specifically to voting, the funding promised in the Help America Vote Act took 15 years to actually become appropriated, even though the states were on the hook for the requirements long before this. This is the origin of the anxiety for state election administrators, and I think it’s a well-founded concern.”

“Brennan Center gets way over their skis on election policy,” said one national election reformer who has partnered with the organization on research and requested anonymity because their organization shares some of the same funders as the Brennan Center. “They’ve been great [at] fleshing out the more liberal position on voting rights, but when it comes to election administration … they are not that connected to the election officials community … and they haven’t really wrestled with the implications of what they advocate for.”

“The charitable answer is they didn’t want to have a fight about money until after the bill had passed, but you can easily pass the bill and not win the money,” said the election lobbyist, who was shocked that the center didn’t join the July letter. “There’s a few folks who work there like Larry Norden [the senior director of Brennan’s Elections and Government Program] who have done good work on these issues, but they couldn’t get it through to their higher-ups.”

FOR THOSE HOPING that 2021 would yield new federal commitments for election funding, things took a turn for the worse late last summer.

Throughout July, as Senate Democrats prepared their $3.5 trillion social spending request, lawmakers assured state and local election officials that their proposal would include billions for election funding. A Politico story published just four days before the package was unveiled confirmed that lawmakers were eyeing as much as $15 to $20 billion for that purpose and felt confident that they could deliver, even as their voting rights bill remained stalled.

But at the eleventh hour the funding was pulled, at the urging of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who had “abruptly” changed her mind, as Huseman reported in a detailed ticktock of the negotiations. Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., the author of the For the People Act, had convinced Pelosi that authorizing election funding would reduce their leverage to pass his bill, the same argument the Brennan Center used to justify not signing the coalition letter.

Leading negotiations in the Senate, Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was angry. She felt blindsided by Pelosi’s move, per Huseman’s sources, even as spokespersons for both House leaders defended the last-minute cuts. The spokespersons told Huseman that election funding would require more “safeguards” to ensure it couldn’t be used for voter suppression, but top federal elections experts say there is no history of misspending those funds. “After all,” Huseman wrote, “it costs far less money to close polling locations and remove drop boxes, and state legislatures across the country have been doing this without any additional spending since the 2020 election.” (Klobuchar, Pelosi, and Sarbanes did not return The Intercept’s requests for comment for this story.)

“All of the money that’s been released has been for specific purposes,” Kathleen Hale, a political scientist who directs the Election Administration Initiative at Auburn University, told The Intercept. “It’s all been audited; I’ve been doing this for the last 15 years, and there’s absolutely nothing going on like that.”

While it was becoming too late in the negotiations process to pivot to funding elections in the infrastructure deal, the Democrats’ Freedom to Vote Act was looking increasingly doomed in the Senate. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., made it clear that she was not willing to gut the filibuster — a legislative move that would have been required to ensure the bill’s passage. A Punchbowl News survey of senior congressional staffers found that even among Democratic staff, just 12 percent thought the bill had a shot.

Some leaders urged Congress to push forward with a narrower bill, abandoning demands like public financing of elections, to which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ala., had expressed strong opposition. Others within the voting rights coalition faced immense pressure to stay quiet when they raised concerns about technical language in the statute, saying the Brennan Center in particular warned that even private deliberations could derail passage of the bill itself.

Noticing the deadlock on Capitol Hill, some groups began to discuss alternatives. In January, for example, the Bipartisan Policy Center released a report in collaboration with the centrist and right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, Issue One, R Street Institute, and Unite America.

Their proposals recommend federal funding to states that meet a series of minimum voting standards but eschew federal mandates, in the hopes of garnering GOP support. The coalition urged steady, annual funding for elections but left the door open on exactly how to determine the formula.

Others had been pushing a narrower bill since last spring. In March 2021, professor of law and political science Rick Hasen published an op-ed in the Washington Post urging for legislation to protect voting rights directly and abandonment of the “wish list of progressive proposals” that stood little shot of survival in the Senate. “At the moment, it seems more likely that nothing will become law before the 2022 elections than that H.R. 1 will,” Hasen wrote, referencing the For the People Act. Edward Foley, the director of the Election Law program at the Ohio State University, wrote another Post op-ed two weeks later, arguing that the “priority should be ensuring passage of what’s absolutely essential for securing federal elections that enable voters to choose the officeholders who get to exercise power.”

And still others noted that the For the People Act would do little to actually stop the most immediate threat to elections that arose from the 2020 cycle: subversion. The New York Times editorial board made this point in June, writing that “Democrats in Congress have crafted an election bill, H.R. 1, that is poorly matched to the moment.” The For the People Act, the Times board said, ”attempts to accomplish more than is currently feasible, while failing to address some of the clearest threats to democracy, especially the prospect that state officials will seek to overturn the will of voters.”

The Brennan Center rebuffed criticisms that the For the People Act was too big. The scope of the legislation, Waldman stressed, was what gave it its power. “It enabled a movement to form of diversity and breadth that we have not seen on this issue in my 40 years working on democracy issues,” he told me. “This was the most important civil rights legislation in half a century … [and it] doesn’t always succeed on the first try.”

Narrower bills have narrower constituencies of support, Waldman wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last spring. He dismissed both Hasen and Foley as “some pundits” and said that keeping the legislation his organization helped craft together was the best way to ensure its chances of becoming law. While Waldman noted proudly that the bill claimed support of “civil rights groups, good government groups, labor unions, many election officials, and others,” it was not clear who among those left-leaning constituencies he thought might disclaim backing if Congress had decided to pare it down.

But the Brennan Center’s stance on the savviness of avoiding compromise and standing in coalition with partners stood in tension with its reticence to make big funding asks, including for election security. The Brennan Center discouraged Congress from whittling down the voting rights legislation, even as experts warned of unfunded mandates that could create new security and logistical threats for election workers.

ADVOCATES FOR NEW infusions of election funding have turned their sights to the White House, in the hopes that President Joe Biden can pressure Congress to act quickly before the midterms.

In mid-December, a coalition of 14 secretaries of state — including from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, and Arizona — sent a letter to Biden requesting that he include $5 billion for election infrastructure in his fiscal year 2023 budget, as part of a commitment of $20 billion over 10 years. (Last year Biden did not include funding for elections in his administration’s budget.)

In February, members of Congress joined in. Democratic Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux of Georgia, Colin Allred of Texas, and Tom O’Halleran of Arizona led 43 of their colleagues in a letter to Biden requesting that he include $5 billion in his next budget. Thirty-three Democratic senators, led by Klobuchar and Richard Durbin of Illinois, followed suit two weeks later. Advocates also pressed Biden to mention election funding in his State of the Union address, to no avail.

Advocates were heard, sort of. On Monday, Biden released his 2023 budget and called for $10 billion over the next decade for election infrastructure upgrades — half of what activists requested. While hailed as a positive step, it offers no guarantees: Congress often ignores presidential budget asks.

Meanwhile, as the voting rights package remains in limbo, the new year has brought momentum to the issue of addressing election subversion, or the threat that the true winner of an election will not be declared the winner. While many defenses against election subversion happen at the state and local level, from a federal standpoint lawmakers could make tweaks to an 1887 statute known as the Electoral Count Act, which governs the end stages of a presidential election. At present, the Electoral Count Act could allow Congress to object to counting votes from a state, and it is also vague on the responsibilities of a vice president in counting electoral votes. McConnell has suggested that he’s open to tweaking the law, and a bipartisan group of senators have been meeting to discuss a path forward.

Election funding and election subversion are not unrelated issues. While immediate fears about subversion have been tied to rogue election clerks and state legislators, poorly funding elections heightens risk too. “Inadequately funded elections can lead to foreign or domestic actors tampering with our voting technology, voter registration databases, or machines that count ballots,” said Hasen. “And when funding is inadequate it creates opportunities for mistakes to happen and creates opportunities for people to try to manipulate things without oversight.”

The Brennan Center, for its part, hasn’t abandoned the election funding issue. In January, Gowri Ramachandran, a senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, testified before the House subcommittee on cybersecurity about election risks and suggested that Congress could also provide support for the physical safety and security of elections personnel and elections offices, though she did not suggest a specific figure. Earlier this month, the Brennan Center published a resource estimating the cost of preventing insider election threats over the next five years to be about $316 million.

But the clock is ticking for more serious investments. Following the recent passage of the House budget on March 9, the Election Infrastructure Initiative issued a critical statement, blasting it for insufficiently funding physical and cybersecurity measures for local election departments. The $75 million that lawmakers approved was also far less than the $500 million the House included in its original spending proposal. The Brennan Center did not issue a statement on Congress’s allocation for election funding, though individual leaders, including Norden and Derek Tisler, an attorney for Brennan’s Democracy Program, criticized the $75 million amount as too small.

Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center, maintains that the organization took the right approach last year and will look for “every opportunity” it can this year to pass strong voter protections, “with eyes wide open about the challenges.”

“There’s this ‘Big Lie’ movement out there trying to undermine American democracy that is scary and alarming, but I think there is a democracy movement that has been formed in response … that is vibrant and diverse and angry,” Waldman added. “This movement is not done and this issue is not done. We push forward.”

Originally published in Bolts Magazine on March 22, 2022.
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Ketanji Brown Jackson’s past work as a public defender emerged as a focal point of her confirmation hearings this week as Joe Biden’s pick for the U.S. Supreme Court. If confirmed, Jackson would be the first former public defender on the high court in more than three decades, and also the first Black woman to join the court, carrying on the legacy of Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first Black justice and the last with public defender experience. Biden has already tapped former public defenders for federal judgeships at a record rate. 

“You are standing up for the constitutional value of representation,” Jackson said during her hearings on Tuesday, defending her record from Republican attacks. Her supporters, meanwhile, have cheered Jackson’s experience as adding a much-needed perspective to the court. From the way this clash has unfolded, you’d think that judges with public defender backgrounds are part of the routine tit-for-tat of judicial nominations, a perspective that Democrats relish adding to the bench when they get the opportunity.

But in state supreme courts around the country, there is comparatively little momentum to install judges with public defense backgrounds, despite the great power those judges hold in interpreting criminal law. The vast majority of criminal cases are decided at the state level, and according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, as of 2021 only seven percent of state justices are former public defenders. More than a third are former prosecutors.

In the two most populous states with Democratic governors, California and New York, efforts by some advocates to convince recent governors to appoint public defenders have fallen short, and former prosecutors have been added to the bench instead.

“The high courts of every state and the U.S. Supreme Court are regularly confronted with novel questions about the interpretation of criminal statutes and procedure,” said Alan Lewis, the chair of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’s screening committee. “It is very much regrettable if the only kind of experience that all of the judges bring to the bench from their previous career as advocates is for one side—the prosecution—with no experience on the other, representing accused persons.”

“We’re all creatures of our own experience and it is profoundly important that the courts’ membership be diverse, including diversity in previous experience,” Lewis told Bolts. 

Some legal experts have stepped forward to articulate the value of having more public defenders in the judiciary. In a new study that analyzed millions of charges handled by federal district court judges, political scientists Allison Harris and Maya Sen found that former public defenders were less likely to issue sentences that involve incarceration, and when they do send people to prison, the sentences are shorter. The difference may stem from public defenders’ intimate understanding of how incarceration affects individuals and communities, the study’s authors wrote in The Washington Post last week.

Emily Hughes, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law who is on the board of the National Association for Public Defense, told Bolts that she’s optimistic about increasing opportunities for “similar and needed” conversations on the state level. She pointed to Continuing Legal Education Programs and law schools that are increasingly prioritizing diversity equity and inclusion (DEI).

“There are DEI conversations happening at both ends of the spectrum, at the front end, at law schools training people who want to become lawyers, and on the back end, once you are lawyers to maintain your bar license,” she said. “This sets the stage for these discussions about professional diversity to then happen.”

One state where there has been a more pronounced public conversation is New York—though so far with little material results to show for it.

Of the three vacancies that recently opened on the state’s high court, known as the New York Court of Appeals, advocates were unsuccessful in securing a new judge with a public defense background. After former Governor Andrew Cuomo appointed a district attorney with a punitive record to the bench last year, criminal justice reformers mounted an unsuccessful effort to stop the nomination. After Cuomo’s departure, dozens of advocacy groups and progressive lawmakers urged Governor Kathy Hochul to nominate someone who formerly worked in public defense, to no avail.

New York passed a series of major criminal justice reforms in 2019, including revisions to its bail and discovery rules that the state’s prosecutor association fought fiercely. Implementing those reforms will now fall on the New York Court of Appeals, where four of the bench’s seven judges have backgrounds in criminal prosecution. Advocates worry that this imbalance may skew the court’s jurisprudence on criminal justice issues. On Tuesday, the court ruled against a plaintiff who had challenged the state’s practice of detaining people beyond the end of their sentence over a sexual offense if they haven’t obtained suitable housing. The four prosecutors joined the majority in the 5-2 decision. The dissenters warned that the ruling forces incarcerated people into a “dystopic game” of securing “compliant and affordable housing before their release date.”

Sam Feldman, a New York public defender who was involved in the efforts to add public defenders to New York’s bench, said Biden’s commitment to greater professional diversity on federal courts helped motivate local advocates. “I think some people were pushing in that direction before, but [Biden] speaking of the importance of public defenders gave them something they could point to,” he said. More than a third of Biden’s judicial appointees over his first year in office were former public defenders.

Another factor driving the push in New York, Feldman said, was a greater recognition that, as the U.S. Supreme Court tilts further to the right, state courts must play a greater role in protecting civil rights. This has borne out in Washington State, where its state supreme court ruled last year to bar mandatory life sentences without parole for anyone under the age of 21, and struck down the state’s laws criminalizing drug possession. Washington is one of the few states to install a former public defender to its high court in recent years, via Democratic Governor Jay Inslee’s most recent nomination in 2020.

But in California, advocates have seen little success. The California Supreme Court hasn’t had a former public defender on the bench since 1986. Both of Governor Gavin Newsom’s appointees to the court so far have experience as prosecutors.

It’s fallen to a red state Democrat to go to bat for a judge with experience as a public defender. Kansas Governor Laura Kelly’s nominee for the state’s second-highest court was rejected by the GOP-run Senate last year, with some lawmakers expressing reservations about the appointee’s background as a public defender.

Geoff Burkhart, president of the National Association for Public Defense’s board of directors, told Bolts that there’s a strong belief among his colleagues that the judiciary would be better off with more judges trained in public defense.

“If you look at the bill of rights, four out of ten amendments are focused on protecting us if we’re charged with a crime, and that’s something that public defenders understand intimately,” he said. “I think public defense is one of the most important types of lawyering you can do. You’re serving as a counterweight to this awesome power of the government, and it really falls back to this concept—that while there may be a time when someone needs to go to jail or prison, in every case, we have to make sure they get a fair shake.”

Originally published in Bolts on February 28, 2020.
—-

On the heels of New York City authorizing more than 800,000 noncitizens with legal status to vote in its municipal elections, Boston activists see their own opportunity to achieve noncitizen voting.

Chetan Tiwari, who has lived in Boston since 2015, says he would like the chance to weigh in on the local education policies affecting his family. He and his wife are from Canada, recently had their green cards approved, and have two daughters who are American citizens. “The level of education, the quality of education that my daughters are getting, is a conversation my wife and I have every single day,” he told Bolts. “Voting on those issues would make us very happy, it would be very important to us.”

This push gained new allies in November. Bostonians elected a new mayor, Michelle Wu, and new city councilors who said they support the effort. Now in power, they may pave the way for Boston to revisit the issue, and join a growing movement across Massachusetts. 

In recent years, the cities of Amherst, Brookline, Cambridge, Newton, Wayland, and Somerville, have all passed ordinances to enable noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections, though their efforts have stalled due to this state’s peculiar rules. In Massachusetts, unlike in New York State, cities must file a home-rule petition and the state lawmakers and governor must approve it. The Democratic legislature has for now ignored these cities’ petitions. Proponents hope that a breakthrough in Boston can give them further momentum.

The state’s 2022 elections, in which voters will select their lawmakers and a new governor to replace the retiring Republican incumbent, could also clear their path further.

More than a dozen communities across the U.S. already allow immigrants with legal status to vote in local elections, including 11 municipalities in Maryland and two in Vermont. Chicago has given noncitizens the right to vote in local school council elections since 1989, and noncitizens in San Francisco have cast ballots for the local school board since a citywide referendum succeeded in 2016. (Undocumented residents were also included in San Francisco’s measure.)  New York City brought many more eyes to the issue last winter when it enabled residents to vote in all municipal elections such as for mayor and city council if they hold a green card, are authorized to work in the United States, or are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. San Jose’s city council also voted last month to study the issue.

This practice was once common in local, state and even federal elections. For the first 150 years of American history, white, male property owners—regardless of citizenship status—were allowed to vote in many states, though the tide began to turn following nativist backlash after the War of 1812. Arkansas was the final state to end noncitizen voting in 1926. Efforts to shut the door to local reforms have also grown in recent years; Alabama, Colorado, Florida, and North Dakota all passed ballot amendments to embed in their state constitutions that only U.S. citizens can vote in local elections. 

Boston’s city council also has dealt with the debate in the past before. In 2007, Felix Arroyo, the first Latino councilor ever elected in the city, proposed a measure to allow legal residents to vote in local elections but it failed. The issue faded after Arroyo lost his re-election bid. In 2018, then-City Council president Andrea Campbell organized a hearing to discuss the idea. 

Campbell’s proposal would have granted the right to vote in local elections to immigrants who hold green cards and work visas, and to DACA recipients. The Boston Globe estimated that the proposal would enfranchise 48,000 Bostonians, which is about 7 percent of the city’s overall population. 

Campbell said at the time that the reform  could be a way to empower local immigrant communities who felt threatened and marginalized by the Trump administration. The idea was backed by Ayanna Pressley, who was then a Boston councilor and has since joined the U.S. Congress. “Our immigrant communities contribute to our economies, they contribute to our tax base, contribute to the vibrancy of our communities,” Pressley said. “I believe they deserve a say in who represents them at the municipal level.”

But not all councilors were on board. Ed Flynn maintained then that voting “is a privilege reserved for U.S. citizens.” Michael Flaherty also opposed the idea, saying enfranchising noncitizens to vote in local elections runs “watering down” the benefits of citizenship, “by either allowing folks to come in the back door or cut the line or expedite the process.” 

Still, much has changed in the last four years and activists say the conditions are more favorable now. It’s also not unusual for this type of issue to take a few tries politically. In San Francisco, voters rejected noncitizen voting for local school board elections in 2004 and 2010, before ultimately approving it in 2016. 

Beginning in 2019, Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots advocacy group, began asking local candidates in Boston if they would support noncitizen voting if it came up at the council. Ricardo Arroyo, Kendra Hicks, Ruthzee Louijeune, and Julia Mejia have all newly joined Boston’s city council since 2020 after telling Progressive Massachusetts that they support it. Wu said the same during last year’s mayoral race.

“I think you could get 10 out of 13 votes on the Council [today],” said Jonathan Cohn, political director for Progressive Massachusetts, who helped run those questionnaires. His experience resembles that of Beth Huang, executive director of the Massachusetts Voter Table, a voting rights group that has asked candidates around the state in 2021 for their views on noncitizen voting. “Eighty out of 126 candidates who responded to our questionnaire said they supported it,” she said. 

Boston is currently experimenting with other measures meant to bolster local democracy. In November, more than two-thirds of Boston voters approved a ballot question to overhaul the city’s budget process, which contained a provision to  establish a new participatory budgeting process for a portion of the budget. Wu, the new mayor, also supported participatory budgeting.

On the same day, nearly four out of five Boston voters also backed a nonbinding referendum to switch their appointed school committee to one elected by city residents, adding new pressure on the government to democratize local school decisions. This change would require a home-rule petition, though.

Carolyn Chou, executive director of the Boston-based Asian American Resource Workshop, says the successful local organizing for an elected school committee and participatory budgeting is creating new opportunities to promote noncitizen voting. “Immigrant organizing groups and SEIU32BJ have been focusing on this, and I’m hopeful that with this new city council we may be able to move it along,” she said.

Kathy Henriquez Perlera, a community organizer with Neighbors United for a Better East Boston, also told Bolts her grassroots group would absolutely support noncitizen voting. Members of her organization have recently been exploring the idea of getting the city to grant municipal IDs for all city residents, similar to a program that exists in New York City.

Some immigrants’ rights activists have major reservations, however. 

During the 2018 debate in the Boston city council, Veronica Serrato, then executive director of Project Citizenship, said her group had worked with two immigrants in Massachusetts who had mistakenly voted in an election, disqualifying them from future citizenship. Allowing immigrants to vote in some elections may lead to errors—for instance, if poll workers give them the wrong ballot and they vote in an election they were barred from voting in—with potentially major consequences.

Mitra Shavarini, the current executive director of Project Citizenship, told Bolts this remains a worry for her organization, though she said they would abstain from taking a stance this time if a new bill came up in Boston. “We also aim to safeguard green card holders against possible issues that may jeopardize their ability to naturalize,” she said. “We therefore believe that it’s far more important to remove obstacles that impede immigrants from naturalizing than to solely push for voting rights.” 

Huang pushes back against this worry, noting that she heard a similar concern when voting rights proponents in Massachusetts were pushing automatic voter registration (AVR). “That was not a good reason not to do AVR, and it’s also not a good reason to oppose noncitizen voting,” she said. “Of course we also need to have crystal clear expectations and communications.”

To address these risks, cities that have enabled non-citizen voting often set up separate processes, including alternative local registration forms and voter rolls that are specific to voters who should only have ballots for local elections. They may also offer to provide residents a letter to submit alongside a naturalization application, as Takoma Park does. Local governments have also partnered with immigrant advocacy groups, to distribute non-citizen voting information in multiple languages.   

Damali Vidot, a city councilor in Chelsea, has championed the issue  in both her own city and statewide. “I tried to introduce a conversation on this on the city council a few years ago and people voted down a discussion, but at the beginning of last year, with Trump finally out of office, I decided to try again,” she told Bolts. She reached out to city councilors in Cambridge, Somerville, Brighton, Lawrence, and Boston to talk about the idea, and connected with a local immigrant rights group in her city, La Colaborativa. “I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get a consortium of resolutions or get different municipalities to pass it all at once?” she said.

Huang said noncitizen voting has not been a “front-burner priority” for local groups that are in coalition with the one she leads; groups are more focused right now on getting driver’s licenses for undocumented residents. But she says there is growing support for the idea in cities with high concentrations of immigrants and working-class people. “We’re talking about the post-industrial cities that have now been inhabited by a lot of refugees,” she said, naming Worcester, Springfield, Lowell, New Bedford and Chelsea as examples. 

Huang stresses that keeping noncitizens from voting significantly skews the electorate toward white residents, especially in cities where the population that is eligible to vote is majority white but not the overall population. “That was not quite clear to me until I looked at the data community by community,” she said, in reference to census estimates updated last year.

The city of Lynn, for instance, has an overall population of more than 90,000 residents that is barely a third white. But of the residents who are eligible to vote, the majority is white. Latinx residents make up more than 40 percent of the city’s population, but only about 25 percent of the electorate. 

This pattern is very prevalent in the dense stretch of municipalities between East Boston and the North Shore, Huang added. “I think that presents a really good case for why we absolutely need non-citizen voting,” she said.   

For proponents of expanding the franchise, the biggest barrier they cite is the state legislature. Its Democratic leaders have not brought the home-rule petitions of recent years to the floor. Advocates in the state have long complained that state lawmakers have shied away from strengthening immigrants’ rights.During the Trump years, advocacy organizations like Progressive Massachusetts kept pushing for the “Safe Communities Act,” which would have limited how local and state law enforcement could enforce imigration law, to no avail. Three of the chamber’s leaders, state Senate President Karen Spilka, House Majority Leader Claire Cronin or House Speaker Ronald Mariano, did not respond to a request for comment.

State lawmakers are all up for re-election in 2022, and so activists see new opportunities to apply pressure on them. Cohn, of Progressive Massachusetts, also noted that voting for immigrants with legal status was included in the state Democratic Party platform last year for the first time, thanks to the rising organizing around the issue.

But the upcoming governor’s race is what may give the issue the most impetus if an ally is elected and uses their pulpit to support the local ordinances. The wide-open race has drawn a crowded field, yet so far, few are willing to comment. Bolts did not hear back from Democratic candidates Danielle Allen, Orlando Silva, and Sonia Chang-Díaz. Maura Healey’s campaign declined to comment. 

Josh Caldwell, a socialist running for governor in the Democratic primary, told Bolts that he strongly supports enfranchising noncitizens. “The fact of the matter is, that not giving representation to those that participate in taxation seemed to be a core argument to a certain historical revolution,” he said. “Our systems have and will always find a group to otherize.”

Keeping up local pressure will be key, proponents say. Vidot, the Chelsea councilor, is confident the issue is moving forward. “Progressive politics basically means we’re ahead of ourselves,” she said. “It will happen and we just have to keep pushing.”

Originally published in The New Republic‘s March print issue
—–

In late March 2015, just one month after 15 graduates of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges announced the first-ever student debt strike, a group of those activists traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with federal regulators.

They’d been invited by Rohit Chopra, the student loan ombudsperson of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency that had opened its doors just four years prior. The strike was against the Department of Education, but the CFPB had been investigating Corinthian for its predatory lending, and Chopra wrote that he’d like to discuss ways to address the activists’ burden.

At the CFPB’s offices across the street from the White House, Astra Taylor, co-founder of the Debt Collective—a national debtors union founded in the wake of Occupy Wall Street—remembers watching Treasury and Education Department officials shift uncomfortably in their seats, while Chopra remained friendly and curious. It was unusual, she said, to have someone in his position treat pressure from the grassroots as “not a threat but as a legitimate force with essential leverage.”

Chopra ended up leaving the agency a few months later, spending the last year of the Obama administration at the Education Department, an agency he had publicly critiqued for belittling the harms of the student loan crisis, followed by a post under Donald Trump at the Federal Trade Commission. But with a Democrat back in the White House, the CFPB needs fixing after a ruinous four years, and President Joe Biden tasked Chopra to return to his old agency. He’s been leading the CFPB since the Senate confirmed him as director in late September.

Chopra, who turned 40 at the end of January, served as student body president while an undergraduate at Harvard, where he earned a reputation for taking on campus administrators. “Chopra is not afraid to be combative with those in power … [and] has made the often overlooked council a force to be reckoned with,” reported The Harvard Crimson in 2003. “There’s no advantage to being a pushover,” Chopra told the student paper back then. He followed his Wharton MBA with a Fulbright in South Korea and a stint working for McKinsey. But by his late twenties he had switched to government, working at the Treasury Department to help launch the CFPB before it was an official agency. And along the way, he became a close ally of Elizabeth Warren, whose views he’s expected to revive at a CFPB that became captured by the GOP’s pro-bank dogma under Trump.

Born out of a 2007 essay published in Democracy, the CFPB’s mission, conceived by then-professor Warren and later enshrined in the Dodd-Frank Act after the Great Recession, is to regulate tricks and traps in the credit industry and make finance safer for regular people. “Financial products should be subject to the same routine safety screening that now governs the sale of every toaster, washing machine, and child’s car seat sold on the American market,” Warren wrote at the time.

In its first decade of operation, the CFPB emerged as one of the most admired and hated divisions in government. In 2017, President Trump called it a “total disaster,” and a week later Politico dubbed it “the most powerful and consequential new federal agency since the Environmental Protection Agency opened its doors nearly half a century ago.” The EPA comparison is a bit overstated, but since its founding the consumer watchdog has gone after all sorts of predatory actors, from large financial institutions to debt collectors. Under its first director, Richard Cordray, the CFPB returned almost $12 billion to tens of millions of Americans, extracting from companies a combination of consumer refunds and canceled debts.

That changed after Cordray’s resignation. During the Trump years, employee attrition spiked—with nearly 11 percent of staff leaving in 2018—and there was also a marked decline in investigations into potential lawbreakers. The New York Times Magazine ran a feature in 2019 exploring how Trump’s picks to lead the CFPB—first Mick Mulvaney, followed by federal budget official Kathy Kraninger—had quietly crippled its operations. “Where Mulvaney or his successor have allowed cases to go forward, lenders have often settled with lowered fines or none at all,” the magazine reported. Instead of a watchdog, Trump’s CFPB became a welcoming home for bank lobbyists. In 2020, a divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the president could fire the CFPB’s director without cause, a victory for its conservative critics who claimed the director’s independent five-year term was too unaccountable. While initially a win for Republicans, that same decision allowed Biden to immediately oust Kraninger.

Chopra returned to his old employer last fall, just as Covid-19 relief programs were winding down. By the end of June 2021, Americans owed $15 trillion in debt—roughly $800 billion more than at the end of 2019. “In many parts of the country and in many individual neighborhoods, conditions remain fragile,” Chopra acknowledged before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee in late October.

Those are the conditions out in the world. Inside the agency itself, he is taking over a department that has been rocked by staff protest, including charges dating back to the Obama years of racial discrimination and promotions based on favoritism. The president of the National Treasury Employees Union, Tony Reardon, offered cautious support, saying his union is “pleased that CFPB’s new leadership is working with us to use this opportunity to close the pay gaps for employees of color.”

Three weeks after he was confirmed as director, Chopra ordered tech titans such as Apple, Amazon, and Google to disclose details of their proprietary payment systems, to better understand what kinds of data they collect and what protections consumers have. It was an extension of the Big Tech inquiries he was fond of in his last job as a Democratic representative at the FTC. He followed up shortly after by announcing that the CFPB would potentially seek consumer protections for the $131 billion stablecoin market, a largely unregulated cryptocurrency that’s grown quickly in the last year.

“We are focusing on large market actors that are causing the most widespread harm, especially companies that exploit their dominant market position to take advantage of consumers and their law-abiding competitors,” Chopra told The New Republic. “You can also expect a sharper focus on repeat offenders.… Stopping that is going to require real deterrents, not just fines that are absorbed as a cost of doing business.” Asked what is meant by “real deterrents,” an agency spokesperson pointed to a 2018 memo Chopra wrote at the FTC, recommending measures like holding individual executives accountable and issuing bans on adjacent business practices. “He’s not someone who is going to be content with tinkering around the edges, and he can look down the road to see where things are headed,” said Lauren Saunders, the associate director at the National Consumer Law Center.

Since its founding, the CFPB has faced pressure to crack down on the payday lending industry—the businesses that offer cash-strapped individuals small loans with high interest rates and fees. The CFPB started collecting borrower complaints in 2013, reporting by 2014 that 80 percent of payday loans get rolled over or renewed within two weeks, a clear signal of a debt trap. In the last year of the Obama administration, the CFPB proposed a rule requiring payday lenders to verify that borrowers were financially capable of paying back their loans on time. It was finalized in October 2017, before Cordray resigned.

But it was blocked by litigation and the Trump White House. His administration’s alternate version—issued in 2020—had no such requirement. In effect, little has yet changed for payday loans. Chopra will not only have to wade back into this debate but also have to contend with the ways these small loans have continued to evolve.

Over the past decade, a suite of new companies cropped up to allow workers to get advances on their paychecks, in exchange for a fee. Under Trump, officials recommended that these so-called earned wage access products not be regulated as credit, but consumer and labor groups have urged Chopra to revoke this guidance, which they say creates dangerous payday loan loopholes. Chopra told me the CFPB will “be looking closely” at it, and that more broadly he’s concerned about the rise of employer-driven debt, such as workers taking out loans for training, equipment, or leads. “This is a troubling trend,” he said, “and as the distinction between consumers and workers blurs, we are going to be increasingly active in this space.”

Thanks to his early days at the CFPB, Chopra has spent years as a close ally of Elizabeth Warren. “I have no doubt you are the right person to lead the bureau at this moment,” the senator said at his confirmation hearing last year. Thanks to that friendship, progressive advocates have been optimistic about the direction Chopra will take the agency. “He’s extraordinarily progressive, but was also one of the very few registered Democrats to get confirmed through the McConnell gauntlet in the Trump years,” noted Felicia Wong, president of the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank where Chopra worked briefly as a fellow.

Still, as the payday lending jockeying illustrates, enacting reforms that can actually last will not be easy, which may partly explain why Chopra’s early actions have been focused on shinier Big Tech issues like Apple Pay or cryptocurrency. National consumer groups have granted trust to the CFPB’s new director, thanks to his background, but that goodwill may have also led to muddled silence on the agency’s new debt collection rule, which was issued in the final stretch of the Trump administration and took effect in November.

Advocates blasted the rule, which clarifies how debt collectors can communicate with borrowers, when the Trump CFPB finalized it in late 2020. They noted that it could open the floodgates to more daily harassment and revive obligations for payments individuals were no longer on the hook for. Yet when it became clear the Biden administration would not withdraw or delay it, advocates went generally silent.

Chopra didn’t directly answer why the CFPB was moving forward with the rule, but told me he agreed that it “didn’t solve most problems in the debt collection market,” and that debt collection “continues to be one of the top topics for consumer complaints.” According to an agency spokesperson, the CFPB received an average 80,000 consumer complaints each month in 2021, up a stunning 75 percent from 2020.

How long the CFPB’s new grace period will last among its more sympathetic allies remains to be seen, especially with credit card debt going back up and foreclosures looming. The CFPB at least embarks on its next chapter with more aggressive regulators heading up other critical agencies, including Lina Khan at the FTC and Gary Gensler at the Securities and Exchange Commission. And thanks to his job at the CFPB, Chopra serves as a board member at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In December, Chopra and his fellow Democratic board members battled FDIC Chair Jelena McWilliams, a Trump appointee who refused the board members’ decision to ask for public comment about bank mergers. “This approach to governance is unsafe and unsound. It is also an attack on the rule of law,” Chopra said in a statement at the time. On New Year’s Eve, McWilliams abruptly announced that she’d be resigning, giving Biden the opportunity to appoint yet another consumer-minded regulator.

Democrats in Congress are also leaning more aggressively into strengthening consumer protections, proposing to crack down on things like bank overdraft fees and exorbitant interest rates, which could give Chopra more room to act politically, even without new statutory powers. Not to mention the student loan landscape has changed dramatically since Chopra’s old days at the CFPB. The Education Department has canceled billions of dollars in loans since the Corinthian graduates first went on strike, and activists are ramping up pressure on Biden now to cancel student debt entirely. In late December, the White House announced it would push back the return of mandatory student loan repayments, originally to resume in February, until May.

The seeds at the CFPB, at least, are ripe. Maybe the agency’s next decade will leave a more lasting mark than its first.

Originally published in The Intercept on December 17, 2021.
—-

EIGHT YEARS AGO in New Orleans, an independent levee board created after Hurricane Katrina announced a lawsuit against 97 oil and gas companies, seeking damages for their part in destroying Louisiana’s coastline. By that point in 2013, the state had lost roughly a quarter of its wetlands, accounting for an area about the size of Delaware. Even scientists working for oil and gas conceded that at least 36 percent of the damage was due to their industries’ activities.

The case — which the New York Times would later call “the most ambitious environmental lawsuit ever” — was hailed as a monumental step in holding fossil fuel companies to account. Two parishes neighboring New Orleans, Jefferson and Plaquemines, followed with their own suits. The oil industry blasted the litigation, insisting that the levee board had gone rogue. One local leader seemed to have the industry’s back: Mitch Landrieu, then the mayor of New Orleans.

“Mitch Landrieu would never sue,” said Anne Rolfes, founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental justice group based in New Orleans. “During his tenure, there were all these calls for him to join the lawsuits, but he wouldn’t.” (The city’s current mayor, LaToya Cantrell, sued oil and gas companies over coastal erosion in 2019, in a case that’s still pending.) Landrieu had said that he preferred negotiation over litigation, but as Nola.com reported, “his proposals, including one for new oil and gas taxes, were quickly rejected by the industry.”

Climate activists like Rolfes were dismayed when President Joe Biden announced in November that Landrieu had been selected to oversee the dispersal of new funds for the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill now signed into law. It’s a high-visibility role that will allow Landrieu to travel around the country and build his profile as he eyes even greater national political power. But more importantly, they warn, his new post could tilt the scales in favor of fossil fuel interests as companies gun for new billion-dollar contracts to build roads, bridges, and pipelines. Landrieu did not return The Intercept’s request for comment for this story.

Landrieu said recently that climate will be his No. 1 priority for infrastructure implementation, but activists say this rhetoric is not reflected in his record from eight years as mayor. They point to his family’s close ties to the oil and gas industry; his weak, nonbinding climate plan released in his final year in office; his silence over a new gas plant approved for construction in a predominately Black and Vietnamese neighborhood; and his full-throttled defense of drilling.

“I think oil and gas production is good,” he told MSNBC in 2015. “People are gonna keep driving, and we need fossil fuels, and we need to make sure that we keep drilling.” In 2010, he urged the Obama administration to lift its ban on offshore drilling. “It is not a zero-sum game,” he insisted. “We must drill and restore.”

LANDRIEU, WHO SERVED as New Orleans mayor from 2010 to 2018, comes from a powerful political family in Louisiana that is sometimes called the “Cajun Kennedys.” His father, Maurice Edwin “Moon” Landrieu, served as mayor of New Orleans from 1970 to 1978, followed by a three-year stint as secretary of housing and urban development under President Jimmy Carter. One of his sisters, Madeleine, is the dean of Loyola University Law School and formerly was a judge on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. His brother, Maurice, works as an assistant U.S. attorney, and his other sister, Mary, was the last Democrat to serve as a U.S. senator from Louisiana from 1997 to 2015.

While in the Senate, Mary Landrieu was a close ally of the fossil fuel industry. In a 2014 review of her record, the climate-focused news outlet Grist noted that she was more conservative than some congressional Republicans on environmental issues. She voted for an amendment that would reverse the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to label carbon dioxide a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, against a bill to end tax loopholes for big oil companies, and for an amendment that would have opened up large areas of coastline to offshore drilling. She was the primary sponsor on a bill to approve construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and received over $1.7 million in contributions from the oil and gas industry while a senator.

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Upon losing reelection, Mary Landrieu went straight to the Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm Van Ness Feldman, which advocates on behalf of oil, gas, and coal companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, Cheniere Energy, and the Coal Utilization Research Council. In her time there, she’s personally lobbied for fossil fuel interests, according to Senate lobby disclosures. She did not return The Intercept’s request for comment.

In a statement to The Intercept, a White House spokesperson said: “The Biden Administration is committed to maintaining the highest ethical standard, including Senior Advisor and Infrastructure Implementation Coordinator Mitch Landrieu. As a White House employee, he will comply with the Biden Administration’s Ethics Pledge and all White House ethics and conflict of interest rules. He has received rigorous counseling on his ethics obligations, including avoiding any potential conflicts of interest. He is also required to recuse from particular matters involving his sister Mary Landrieu and any clients of hers.”

One way Mitch Landrieu could exert his influence is by steering infrastructure contracts to fossil fuel companies. Activists point to the $5 billion Clean School Bus Act, a provision of the bipartisan infrastructure package, as one example of how this could play out. That program allocates $2.5 billion for new zero-emission school bus purchases and another $2.5 billion for “low-emissions” buses, a broad category that could include compressed natural gas and propane.

“On paper, a lot of these programs are being sold as clean energy projects, but when you get down to the details, things like compressed natural gas and enhanced oil recovery can qualify,” said Lukas Ross, a senior policy analyst at Friends of the Earth. “There are neutral programs that could be corrupted, and someone like Landrieu can co-opt funds, because a lot of this stuff is left up to administrative discretion.”

“For formula-funding grants and competitive grants, it can really come down to who he decides to email back, who he is taking calls from, who can get a meeting,” added Dorothy Slater, a senior climate researcher at the Revolving Door Project, which scrutinizes executive branch appointees. Throughout his political career, Landrieu took at least $134,000 in campaign contributions from oil and gas interests, per campaign finance data from the Louisiana Ethics Administration Program.

Ross and Slater also point to New Democracy, an effort launched by centrist leaders in 2017 to expand Democratic appeal in red and purple areas, for which Landrieu served on an advisory board. “[New Democracy’s] mission is to expand the party’s appeal across Middle America and make Democrats competitive everywhere,” reads the group’s website. “These pragmatic Democratic leaders need room to maneuver, not purity tests and threats to ‘primary’ incumbents who deviate from left-wing orthodoxy.”

Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser for the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, published a New Democracy memo urging swing state candidates to “vocally support the shale natural gas boom that has been overwhelmingly good for American consumers, workers and the climate” and to point out that President Barack Obama “presided over America’s largest ever oil and gas boom.” A spokesperson for PPI said that Landrieu had nothing to do with its climate recommendations.

IN LIEU OF hard policy change, some of Landrieu’s more memorable political accomplishments have been symbolic, like ordering the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans and traveling to Paris in 2015 to talk about the role of U.S. mayors in stemming climate change.

Rolfes said that it was always hard for local climate groups to criticize Landrieu when his climate plans fell short, given the even more hostile political environment they were dealing with on the state level. “In a way, it was really politically shrewd of him to engage the groups who were worried about climate because he could also neutralize them,” she said. “Groups tried to walk that line and relationship diplomatically so they could maintain his ear.”

Elizabeth Gore, senior vice president of political affairs for the Environmental Defense Fund, a national organization, called Landrieu an “excellent choice” to lead on the infrastructure plan. “Environmental Defense Fund has had the privilege of working with Mayor Landrieu on community resilience, coastal protection and other climate smart projects, and we have seen firsthand his deep experience with disaster management after Hurricane Katrina at the state and local level, and his resilience planning response as Mayor,” she said in a statement.

Restore the Mississippi River Delta — a coalition of “Big Green” groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, and Pontchartrain Conservancy — also praised the selection.

“Louisiana desperately needs more investments in its coast, particularly through projects in the Coastal Master Plan,” said Kimberly Reyher, executive director at Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. “Mitch Landrieu understands this, so his appointment is great news for Louisiana. As Mitch said in his address at the 2018 State of the Coast conference, ‘South Louisiana is one of the most vulnerable places on the globe, making our work on long-term restoration even more important.’”

Landrieu’s elevation among national political commentators escalated in 2017 when he ordered the removal of four Confederate statues, something local activists had been organizing around for years. Leaning into the spotlight, Landrieu then published a bestselling book, “In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History,” and by 2019 went on to become a national political commentator himself, joining CNN.

New Orleans journalist Michael Stein observed that the national love for Landrieu seemed to arise overnight. “When I went to sleep, Mitch Landrieu was the mediocre mayor of New Orleans, facing lethargic public support and intense local disapproval,” he wrote in The New Republic in 2017. “When I woke up, he was a future leader of the Democratic Party and a 2020 presidential contender.” (Landrieu did not end up running for president.)

Mary Frances Berry, a professor of history and social thought at the University of Pennsylvania, criticized Landrieu for taking so much credit for the removal of the statutes. “Mitch is a nice guy. His father was a nice guy. They’re all good people,” she told NBC last year. “But he took advantage of all the work that activists in New Orleans did to demand that the city remove those statues. … Mitch was forced into the position he took. Then he hijacked the credit in a systematic way, wrote a book promoting the idea that he was brave.”

For now, Landrieu is leaning into his new gig, speaking with mayors, governors, and local media nationwide. Last week, Politico noted that sources inside and outside the administration have said that the former New Orleans mayor has been “building a power center in the West Wing” to potentially “positio[n] himself well for a future spot in the president’s inner circle and, perhaps, in a post-Biden Democratic Party.” As one administration official quipped, “Mitch Landrieu is a machine.”

Slater said the climate community was blindsided by Landrieu’s appointment. “Revolving Door Project follows all these sorts of things, we often get intel and whispers, and yet we did not hear anything about this before it was announced,” she said. “Now in hindsight it seems like the meetings may have been happening but that they were not leaked, so there really wasn’t an opportunity for climate groups to pressure the Biden administration, and it was really sprung on people right before Thanksgiving. I think that timing was intentional.”