This is a good read. Bernie’s consistency over the past decades is part and parcel of his authenticity. It’s not something one can make up retroactively. Nice to see The New York Times doing some actual journalism!
Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories, By Jennifer Steinhauer, March 14, 2016.
Excerpts:
Over one 12-year stretch in the House, Mr. Sanders passed more amendments by roll call vote than any other member of Congress. In the Senate, he secured money for dairy farmers and community health centers, blocked banks from hiring foreign workers and reined in the Federal Reserve, all through measures attached to larger bills.
Mr. Sanders has been pushing basically the same legislative agenda since he was the mayor of Burlington, Vt., in the 1980s, one that favors workers, veterans and college students. But in 2016, he has found that the marriage of his passions and his blunt, fiery oration have come into vogue among many Democrats.
Counter to his reputation as a far-left gadfly, Mr. Sanders has done much of his work with Republican partners, generally people with whom he has little, but sometimes just enough, in common. He worked with Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, to prevent foreign workers from replacing Americans at banks that have had a federal bailout, and with former Representative Ron Paul of Texas, who shared his zeal for monitoring the Federal Reserve.
Mr. Sanders’s most notable partnership with a Republican was also one of his greatest successes. In 2014, Mr. Sanders, as chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, worked out an accord with Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, on a bill to expand veterans’ access to health care after a scandal involving veterans’ hospitals across the country.
The bill did something Republicans wanted: It allowed veterans to go outside the official hospital system to get care under certain circumstances, while it expanded the government services that Mr. Sanders demanded.
“Given how liberal he is, it made the work hard,” Mr. McCain recalled last week. “But he was an honest liberal. I’ve worked with people who tell you they are going to do one thing and then do another, and Bernie did what he said. And he was very effective. ” “The reason he has been so successful is that he built very strong left-right coalitions, ” said Warren Gunnels, a longtime policy adviser who now works on Mr. Sanders’s campaign. “He doesn’t see himself as on the left. He sees himself exclusively as fighting for working people.”
Mr. Sanders got the rest of the Democratic base to listen to words he has been repeating for decades, not so much because his legislation has been in constant step with the nation’s, but rather because much of the nation has come around to the things he has been legislating.
“Bernie has been talking about income inequality since 1981,” Mr. Welch said. “And now that is a message whose time has come.”