This morning, Daily Kos is excited to announce that a long-time friend of our community, Representative Brad Miller, is our latest endorsement for the Orange to Blue page.
Please, chip in $4 to Brad Miller here.
Representative Miller stopped by to chat in the comments of this post earlier today. So, if you would like to get to know him better, check out the comments. Also, his answers to the Orange to Blue questionnaire are below the fold.
Some of you may already know Brad as Daily Kos diarist Rep Brad Miller, who has made the recommended list on several occasions. In fact, Republicans have even attacked him for associating with our community.
During his nine years in Congress, Brad Miller has focused on financial issues, specifically fighting to protect consumers against Wall Street corruption. This gives him a lot in common with Elizabeth Warren, the first federal candidate added to Orange to Blue this cycle. Just ask Elizabeth Warren herself:
"I have great respect for Brad. He's someone who's smart, someone who cares and someone who works his tail off," Warren said in a telephone interview.
In the wake of the Wall Street meltdown of 2008, Warren, then a Harvard law professor, proposed and fought for a new federal agency to protect consumers against predatory banking practices, including—as The New York Times columnist Joe Nocera wrote in a column June 10—the practice of pushing subprime mortgage loans on people who don't understand the bad deals they're getting.
That put her in league with Miller, who, as a member of the Financial Services Committee in 2004, sponsored the first-ever House bill seeking to curb subprime mortgages.[...]
Miller's bill, too, became law as part of Dodd-Frank, as Miller worked closely with Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank, then chair of the Financial Services Committee, on the consumer protection aspects of the measure.
He also worked closely with Warren, a fact he emphasized in an interview last weekend with the Indy. Her name came up as he argued that it's no accident that he's being targeted by the GOP. "There's a reason they want me out," Miller said. "I've been a pretty effective advocate too."
If I needed proof, he said, I should ask Warren.
The next day, I did ask, and Warren responded with a wholehearted endorsement: "Brad has a long and deep history" with banking and consumer-protection issues, she declared, and "sees the side that families live back home."
That allows him to challenge the industry's lobbyists, she went on, not in a blustery way, "but in a carefully thought-out, detailed and therefore a much more effective way."
"Nobody owns Brad," Warren said.
For the 2012 election, Brad has drawn into a heavily Democratic district in North Carolina's Research Triangle against another Democratic incumbent, David Price. But this endorsement isn't a negative commentary on Price, who has a respectable record. Rather, it's a positive affirmation of everything Miller has done during his career in Congress, and a demonstration that we stand with our friends through thick and thin.
At Daily Kos, we are proud to support a smart, fierce and effective advocate for the 99 percent, especially one who has been a part of our community for many years. So please, chip in $4 to Brad Miller's campaign.
Answers from Brad Miller to Daily Kos “Orange to Blue” Candidate Questionnaire:
1. Do you support:
a) A public health insurance option, offered by the federal government and tied to Medicare reimbursement rates plus 5% (H.R. 3200, Subtitle B, including § 223(b)(1)(A), as introduced in the House, 111th Congress)?
Answer: Yes, I support the “robust public option.”
b) The Medicare You Can Buy Into Act (H.R. 4789, 111th Congress), which would allow all citizens or permanent residents to buy into Medicare?
Answer: Yes. I discussed the bill with Alan Grayson at some length. I was surprised at how affordable universal issue coverage would be on a break-even basis for Medicare according to the CBO’s analysis. A very brief waiting period would likely make the coverage even more affordable.
2. Do you agree that any immigration reform bill should:
a) Contain a meaningful path to citizenship — one that does not include overly-punitive fines or a touchback requirement — for law-abiding undocumented immigrants currently in the United States;
Answer: Yes. I support comprehensive immigration reform including a path to citizenship.
b) Ensure that expanded legal permanent immigration, rather than expansion of temporary worker programs, serves as the United States' primary external answer to workforce shortages; and
Answer: Yes.
c) Ensure that any non-agricultural temporary worker programs maintain current caps on the total number of non-agricultural temporary worker visas issued, and also include a meaningful prevailing wage requirement keyed to the Service Contract Act and the Davis-Bacon Act?
Answer: Yes.
3. Do you oppose each of the following changes to Social Security and Medicare:
a) Raising the retirement age;
Answer: Yes, I oppose raising the retirement age.
b) Eliminating or reducing the cost of living adjustment;
Answer: Yes.
c) Directly reducing benefits;
Answer: Yes.
d) Means-testing recipients; and
Answer: Yes. Programs for the poor inevitably become poor programs.
e) Privatization, so-called "personal accounts," and vouchers?
Answer: Oh hell yes.
4. Do you support the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 1409/S. 560, 111th Congress), including the provision known as "card check"?
Answer: Yes. I am a co-sponsor.
5. Do you pledge to vote against any efforts to extend the temporary tax cuts for income over $250,000 (Public Law 111-312)?
Answer: Yes, I voted against extending the tax cuts last December and I will again.
6. If elected to the House, do you pledge not to join the Blue Dog Coalition?
Answer: Yes. If I was going to become a Blue Dog I would have done it by now.