From activist to mayor to U.S. Rep to U.S. Senator to Democratic policy trendsetter, Bernie Sanders has a long record of achievement
I’ve tried to keep this article relatively short — key word is relatively! — since I know folks prefer not to read long articles. If Bernie Sanders’s career were short and unremarkable, my task would have been easier!
Bernie 2020 campaign kickoff. Brooklyn, Mar. 2, 2019
And I’ve also tried to make this article readable — it’s informative, but it’s not a laundry list. I hope you’ll learn some things you didn’t know before.
As a Sanders supporter I wanted to post this so that, going forward, I could provide a handy link to anyone who is unfamiliar with Sanders’s record of accomplishment. Since Sanders might win the nomination, I think it’s important that folks have resources readily available to help them gain more knowledge and a good comfort level regarding his credentials.
(Obviously we have a big, talented group of candidates vying for the nomination, so I hope lots of folks will post articles about their favorites’ achievements.)
I.
Bernie Sanders has been elected mayor 4 times, U.S. representative 8 times, and U.S. senator 3 times.
The voters of my state have come to view him as a highly competent public servant, a true fighter for low- and middle-income folks, elders, veterans, family farmers…everyone who can use a fair shake. And we know him as a visionary policy leader who, even as a mayor, spoke out passionately for progressive reforms in our nation’s domestic and foreign policy. This was reflected, for example, in his strong support of Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential candidacy in 1988, which, in his endorsement speech (video) at the Vermont caucus, Sanders called “the most courageous and exciting political campaign in the modern history of our nation.”
This article will illustrate that Bernie Sanders
- has demonstrated the ability to forcefully and successfully advocate for progressive policies
- has a long record of progressive accomplishment as both an executive and a legislator
- has demonstrated the ability to work effectively with members of both parties to pass crucial and large-scale legislation
- has demonstrated dedication to the principle that going to war should be a last resort, and firm respect for Congress’s constitutional role in such decisions.
These credentials and qualities make him well-suited to be our nominee and our president.
This video of Sanders sprinting to catch a train went viral, and here he is shooting hoops!
And, while it’s not a “credential,” folks may well consider the health of a candidate, so I’ll mention Sanders’s unusual stamina. Is there a national politician today who demonstrates more energy than Sanders does? We saw a sign of this in 2010 when he famously stood on the Senate floor for 8 ½ hours — with no food or breaks — to argue (elaborately) against extending unneeded Bush-era tax breaks for the wealthiest citizens when our country is facing shameful crises like having one of the highest childhood poverty rates of any industrialized nation and more of our citizens incarcerated than any other country. He barnstormed the nation in the 2016 presidential cycle — and in the middle of that, right after the New York debate, he jetted across the Atlantic to speak at a Vatican conference, and then right away he was back home on the campaign trail. In 2017, his schedule included rally after rally speaking out in support of the Affordable Care Act when the GOP was trying to repeal it, and in 2018 he was stumping for Democratic candidates all across the country. He is indeed “the Energizer Bernie.”
Of course, some will point out that the average septuagenarian is statistically more at risk of health issues than the average younger person. However, in case of serious issues, every American president has a fallback — the vice president — and there’s no doubt Sanders would have a talented running mate.
II.
“One of his strengths was his ability to work with a wide group of people, even those he didn’t agree with” —Joan Mahoney, former law school dean and student activist
Sit-in at the University of Chicago protesting segregated housing. Bernie Sanders, standing, in dark sweater; Joan Mahoney, sitting to his left, in light sweater
Back when Sanders was a student at the University of Chicago, he was a leader in the university chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). These young activists led one of the first sit-ins in the North, which called attention to racial discrimination in University-owned apartment housing. In 2015, a fellow member of that chapter, Joan Mahoney, noticed herself in a recently publicized photo of the sit-in, and reminisced in a short article:
We were a Congress of Racial Equality student group (we called ourselves Core) – Bernie Sanders was our president [sic] – and we were occupying the offices of George Beadle, the university’s president. I’m sitting on the floor, on his left, in a pale sweater with a black bob. We were protesting against the segregation of some of the university’s private housing in Chicago.
...
Bernie was a year above me. We moved in different circles; my friends and I were politically to his left. If you’d told me he would run for president one day, I’d have said, “Oh yeah, right!” He was a swell guy, a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, but he wasn’t terribly charismatic. One of his strengths, though, was his ability to work with a wide group of people, even those he didn’t agree with.
That last point of Mahoney’s is an important one to highlight, since a common misconception about Sanders is that his passion likely makes him too single-minded in his beliefs to effectively work well with others. We’ll see numerous examples below which belie this notion, such as how, from the moment he entered Congress, he helped organize and lead one of the Democratic Party’s largest coalitions, and how his skills in working across the aisle to expedite passage of critical, large-scale legislation were so impressive that they became the subject of a white paper by a venerable American think tank.
Student activist Joan Mahoney would go on to become a law school dean, while Bernie Sanders took the path of public service.
III.
A mayor who knocked on doors after he was elected
Mayor-elect Bernie Sanders takes the oath of office, Apr. 1981
In March, 1981, Sanders won the mayorship of Vermont’s largest city, Burlington (my hometown.) A couple months earlier, Ronald Reagan had been sworn in as president (he had won 44 states, including Vermont) and the Cold War seemed like it would never end — or would end very, very badly. Lots of Burlington’s Democrats, the city’s longtime ruling party, were quite conservative and I remember many of them being extremely skeptical, to say the least, of this unabashed democratic socialist whose victory against the incumbent came as a total shock.
This was his first time in office. He would have to prove himself. And he did. He was re-elected three more times because he turned out to be a very competent leader. And very dedicated to serving his constituents. A remarkably detailed Atlantic portrait of Sanders, written in 1985 when he was mid-way through his four terms as mayor, describes Sanders knocking on doors after he was elected — not just before — to chat with constituents — in particular, working-class residents — to ask them directly if they had any issues he could help resolve for them.
A 2014 National Journal article lists some of the mayor’s accomplishments:
[W]hat got him sent back to City Hall three more times was his reform of a complacent municipal government that had been run by the same political machine for decades. ...
To wit: He saved money by opening the city's insurance policies to a competitive-bidding process. He created a spunky economic-development program that has for three decades incubated a vast swath of profitable, socially conscious local businesses. He successfully sued a railway company to wrest control of the Lake Champlain waterfront, which was later developed into an urbanist utopia—bike paths, green space, and so on. His legislative creativity and good-government initiatives in turn helped garner support for more-liberal causes, from creating a perpetual trust fund for affordable housing to keeping regressive property taxes low. Sanders, to use the early 20th-century term of art, governed more as a "sewer socialist" than a genuine radical.
Today, the organization whose creation he made possible—now called the Champlain Housing Trust—is the largest and most influential of its type in the nation. —Slate
A 2016 Slate article provides a portrait of one of the families who benefited from the community land trust championed by Sanders, which helps make nice homes more affordable (perpetually) for low-income residents.
Bob Robbins bought his home in 1995 amid a bout of long-term unemployment. Living with his wife and two kids in a rundown rental in Burlington, Vermont, he wanted to stabilize the family’s housing before his children started kindergarten.
Prospects seemed bleak. The family’s savings had dwindled after his unemployment insurance gave out. But in 1993 Robbins saw a newspaper advertisement for something called the Burlington Community Land Trust.
…
“We don’t understand why housing isn’t done this way everywhere,” says Robbins, who says the cheaper mortgage allowed his family to save money for college and retirement that otherwise would have gone toward housing. “It’s just such a logical thing to have land owned by a community and the house be your private property to do with as you wish. We’ve just had a terrific life here so far because of it.”
The man largely responsible for this good fortune? Bernie Sanders.
While mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, the democratic-socialist senator and current contender for the Democratic presidential nomination was an early champion of community land trusts. Today, the organization whose creation he made possible—now called the Champlain Housing Trust—is the largest and most influential of its type in the nation.
IV.
Mr. Sanders goes to Washington — and racks up one of the most impressive achievement records of any member of Congress
Sanders won a seat in Congress in 1990, defeating the Republican incumbent. In his freshman year, Sanders along with a handful of Democratic colleagues, including progressive stalwart Maxine Waters, founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which now has 98 members — the largest membership organization within the House Democratic caucus. Sanders served as chair of the CPC for its first 8 years. (Sanders today remains a member of the CPC — the organization’s only Senate member.)
Vermont has only one House seat, and Sanders held it for 8 terms before being elected to the U.S. Senate, following the retirement of Vermont’s other independent senator, the late Jim Jeffords. To win that office, the populist-progressive Sanders first had to beat a very wealthy Republican candidate with movie-star good looks who had co-founded a large software firm in Vermont. A lot of mud was slung at Sanders. Not only his opponent but outside Republican groups were very eager to win back the Senate seat the GOP had lost when Jeffords had quit the party and become an independent. Sanders won that election handily, and is currently serving his third term in the Senate.
Interestingly, only three Vermonters in history have ever caucused with the Democrats in the U.S. Senate: Pat Leahy, Jim Jeffords, and Bernie Sanders.
"There are so few members with large numbers of substantive and successful amendments" —Craig Volden, professor of public policy and politics, University of Virginia
A patient getting a trial medication for breast cancer
While the Republicans held the House from 1995 to 2007, Sanders passed more roll call amendments than any other House member, which is how he got to be dubbed the “Amendment King.” (Many of his amendments have also passed on voice votes.) His very first successful amendment helped to establish and fund statewide cancer registries throughout America and mandated a study of elevated breast cancer rates that had been identified in several states (including Vermont) and the District of Columbia. Other Sanders legislation enacted via amendment (just to mention a few) range from substantial investments in energy efficiency programs, to prohibiting the importation of goods made by exploited child laborers, to helping the victims of white collar crime receive restitution, to increasing funding for Meals on Wheels, to numerous amendments to help veterans and the families of active duty service members. He also amended a Department of Defense bill after the 9/11 attack to include a $100 million investment in community health centers and he amended an agriculture bill in 2009 to include $350 million in emergency funds to aid struggling family farms. And as impressive as these successes were, below I discuss some much larger-scale legislative achievements. Politifact:
Craig Volden, an expert on the legislative process at the University of Virginia, told PolitiFact that records like these are rather unusual in the House.
"There are so few members with large numbers of substantive and successful amendments," he said. "Sanders and Traficant were exceptions to that rule."
V.
If we view health care as a right, then the community health center network Sanders has championed surely is among America’s most important social justice programs
Community health centers serve over 28 million patients
One of his most significant legislative successes does not bear his name — but the benefits of his efforts are felt everyday, all across America. Four out of 10 Vermonters, along with tens of millions of other Americans, depend on community health centers for primary health care and dental care. All services are provided free or at a nominal charge. Some centers also provide psychiatric care, mental health counseling, and various other functions such as translation services. Sanders was instrumental in securing 11 billion dollars of investment in these centers as part of the Affordable Care Act.
Expansion of the community health center network in under-served rural and urban areas was a crucial part of ensuring that the ACA would make health care more available as it was becoming more affordable. The centers also dramatically help to reduce emergency room visits.
According to the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), the centers serve over 28 million people in over 11,000 urban and rural communities. Looking at demographics, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that in 2015 the patients served were 58% female, 59% non-white or Hispanic, and 92% had incomes at or below 200% of the federal poverty level ($40,180 for a household of 3 in 2015.) If we view health care as a right, then the community health center network Sanders has championed is surely among America’s most important social justice programs.
“There was no one who played a more important role than Senator Sanders” —Daniel Hawkins, vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers
In 2010, the NACHC honored Sanders as a “Distinguished Community Health Champion.” A 2015 article in The Intercept helps explain how Sanders earned the NACHC’s appreciation:
Sanders’s place in health clinic history will be remembered for his forceful role in the winter of the health reform debate. In December 2009, tensions ran high as Congress inched closer to a final health reform deal. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., tapped Sanders to help win support from liberals who thought the bill was too weak as well as from Democrats from rural states who were facing mounting pressure. More funding for community health centers, Sanders argued, was a win-win solution for both camps, since the program would ensure access to health care for even the most remote areas of the country while also helping those without insurance. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., among others, held out to the very last moment.
...
Daniel Hawkins, vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers, recalls that in the end Sanders was able to negotiate with Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., to increase health clinic funding through a special technical amendment that could modify the reconciliation Senate bill through a simple majority vote. The technical amendment passed, with $9.5 billion targeted for health center operations and $1.5 billion for construction and renovation projects. The House passed the final Senate bill, and President Obama signed the legislation with $11 billion in health clinic funding into law on March 23, 2010.
“There was no one who played a more important role than Senator Sanders,” Hawkins says, remembering Sanders’s constant lobbying of other lawmakers to support the funding.
VI.
VFW members in 2015 attending their annual convention
“He works for veterans. He’s not just saying that. He does do the work.” —Brenda Cruickshank, retired Army nurse and former commander of the Vermont Veterans of Foreign Wars
As I mentioned, many of Sanders’s successful amendments or bills involve helping vets or active-duty service members and their families. Politico:
His connection with [veterans] is an extension of what Brenda Cruickshank, a retired Army nurse and immediate past commander of the Vermont Veterans of Foreign Wars, describes as Vermont’s ethos of making sure people are taken care of. Sanders listens to his home-state veterans at town meetings, private meetings and through a veterans council, she says, and his staff does an excellent job when veterans call with questions or needs. “He works for veterans. He’s not just saying that. He does do the work,” she says.
President Obama signs the Sanders-Miller veterans bill
Most famously, when Sanders was chair of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, he led the effort in 2014 to pass major funding and reform of the Veterans Health Administration. This $16 billion investment was one of the most significant pieces of legislation passed during President Obama's second term.
While the work that is needed to improve vet care is far from finished, Sanders’s efforts and skills in working across the aisle to expedite this legislation were considered so outstanding that they became the basis of a white paper by the Brookings Institution in its “Profiles in Negotiation” series.
The American Legion praised Sanders for being “a powerful critic of attempts to privatize the Department of Veterans Affairs and its essential services.”
Here is how Sanders’s role in passing that legislation was described in National Journal by his colleague, Sen. Jack Reed:
“Last year when we had the scandal at the VA, he was incredibly effective, engaged in getting the legislation passed, in getting it funded. Frankly, without him, I don’t think we would have gotten it done because there was a lot of name-calling but there wasn’t a lot of constructive, ‘OK, here’s the resources. …’ And he did it,” Reed said. “And it was a great testament to his skill as a legislator.
“You’ve changed my life and if you run for president, I think that would be the best thing for the country.”
In a 2015 Burlington Free Press interview, Jane Sanders recalled a poignant moment when she and her husband were out to dinner, debating whether he should run for president:
[A] disabled veteran approached their table to thank the senator for the help his office provided in securing benefits.
Sanders' eyes welled with tears as she recalled what the man said next: "You've changed my life and if you run for president, I think that would be the best thing for the country."
As the man left, she remembered saying to her husband, "Okay, I think you have to do it."
VII.
Bernie Sanders, who as a House member voted against giving George W. Bush authority to start a war with Iraq, is today a leader in the effort to re-establish Congress’s constitutional authority and responsibility in declaring wars
Congress passes its first-ever War Powers Resolution
In April, 2019, Congress made history by passing a War Powers Resolution directing the administration to end U.S. military involvement in Yemen’s civil war. This Daily Beast article details the parliamentary hurdles Sanders and fellow CPC member Rep. Ro Khanna had to overcome to get the resolution to the Senate floor in spite of Mitch McConnell’s opposition.
Vox summarizes:
Passing the War Powers Resolution through Congress, an effort led by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Mike Lee (R-UT) in the Senate and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) in the House, took immense political capital. It was the result of progressive antiwar activism and a rare bipartisan coalition of progressive and conservative lawmakers to claw back war-approving authority from the president. The final resolution passed in the Senate with the support of seven Republicans, and in the House with the support of 16 Republicans, including some of Trump’s closest conservative allies.
In a USA Today op/ed, Sanders and his Senate partner in this effort, Republican Mike Lee, explain what is at stake:
The passage of this resolution has implications far beyond Yemen and opens a much broader and extremely important debate about how and when the United States uses our military, and who must authorize that use.
Yemen is now experiencing the worst humanitarian disaster in the world because of the four-year-old Saudi-led intervention into Yemen's civil war. According to the United Nations, Yemen is at risk of the most severe famine in 100 years, with some 14 million people facing starvation. In one of the poorest countries on earth, because of this war, according to the Save the Children organization, an estimated 85,000 children have already starved to death over the last several years, and millions more face death if the war continues.
...
As far as the people of Yemen are concerned, when they see “Made in USA” on the bombs that are destroying their country, it tells them that the U.S.A. is to blame.
This week Congress said clearly: No more.
Donald Trump, who has more respect for the murderous Saudi regime than the United States Congress, vetoed the resolution. Still, this resolution was significant: it was a rare bipartisan rebuke of administration policy and it put a spotlight on an international crisis and the need for our government to stop abetting the perpetrators. Passing this resolution is another example of Sanders’s adeptness at working with members of both parties in both houses of Congress.
VIII.
Bernie Sanders is a leader in helping to bring policies like the $15 minimum wage and Medicare for All — once considered to be on the progressive fringe — into the political mainstream
It doesn’t seem like it should require a class-action lawsuit being filed by its workers — and being repeatedly called out by Bernie Sanders — for Amazon, America’s second-largest employer, to decide to pay its workers a living wage.
But Sanders hasn’t forgotten what he learned at the University of Chicago — that you have to shine a light on injustices to make the powers-that-be change their act. Newsweek:
The hourly $15 minimum wage will benefit more than 250,000 Amazon employees, as well as over 100,000 additional employees who will be hired this holiday season, Amazon said.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
The move comes after heavy criticism from U.S. senator Bernie Sanders, who has spoken out against Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos. Sanders introduced a bill last month—the Stop BEZOS [Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies] Act...
“We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead,” read a short statement attributed to Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man. ...
According to The Sacramento Bee, Amazon employees filed a class-action lawsuit in November last year, claiming they had been denied breaks and wages, including for working overtime. The firm has been hit with negative reports from warehouse employees in recent months, including claims from some staff that they have resorted to urinating in bottles because work demands are so heavy.
Sanders has been one of Amazon’s most vocal critics. In September, after it emerged that the business hit a landmark market valuation, the politician tweeted: “Amazon is worth $1 TRILLION. Jeff Bezos is worth $155 BILLION. Thousands of Amazon workers have to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing to survive. That is what a rigged economy looks like.”
Not me, us
In typical fashion, Sanders minimized whatever role his own advocacy may have played in Amazon’s change of heart. Huffington Post:
Sanders declined to take responsibility for the change, saying it was the workers who deserved credit for the raises.
“I think the workers have stood up and fought back,” he told HuffPost. “What we have done is call attention to the fact that it is a disgrace that the wealthiest person in this country and in this world are paying wages so low that workers are forced to go on food stamps and Medicaid.”
Audience member holds a placard as Bernie Sanders discusses his Medicare for All plan on Capitol Hill, Sept. 2017
It’s just common sense that workers should be paid a living wage. And it’s just common sense, too, that America is capable of creating a federal health insurance program that covers not just some citizens but all citizens. Indeed, even in Sanders’s parents’ generation, Harry Truman proposed a universal federal health insurance program. Shortly after he became president in 1945, Truman said this about his proposal:
[Americans] will not be frightened [of] health insurance because some people have misnamed it ‘socialized medicine.’ I repeat — what I am recommending is not socialized medicine. Socialized medicine means that all doctors work as employees of government. The American people want no such system. No such system is here proposed.
President Truman underestimated the power of conservative fearmongering and couldn’t have known how powerful and entrenched the health insurance industry would eventually become — so much so that even health care reformers in his own party would contrive ways to preserve the industry, no matter its deficiencies and inequities compared to a single-payer system.
Bernie Sanders has been one of American politics’ strongest advocates for single-payer. At long last, we are seeing this commonsense idea starting to overcome conservative fearmongering and corporate clout. Last cycle, Democrats had one presidential candidate — Bernie Sanders — who was an outspoken advocate for a single-payer system; this cycle, we have many Democratic presidential candidates who support Sanders’s Medicare for All bill, and hearings on a similar Medicare for All bill have begun in the U.S. House.
Update: I’ve edited the section on the CORE sit-in at the University of Chicago, based on details in an article by historian Rick Perlstein.
