Directing foreign policy critique at non-traditional targets
Speaking Security Newsletter | Advisory Note for Organizers and Candidates, n°38 | 24 August 2020
Traditional congressional targets for foreign policy criticism are members who sit on the big important foreign policy committees, namely, Armed Services, Appropriations (Defense subcommittee), and Foreign Affairs (“Foreign Relations” in the Senate).
Here, I take down Richard Neal (D, MA-01), Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, from a foreign policy angle using a few different approaches. No particular order to this thing.
1. Ways & Means Committee’s impact on foreign policy
All legislation raising government revenue must start in the House. Ways and Means is the committee responsible for writing/amending the tax code. As the committee’s chair, Neal occupies a powerful position. He presides over runaway military spending but subjects social programs to austerity measures. A very recent example:
Value of the Fiscal Year 2021 House appropriations bill: $1.3 trillion
Total appropriations for labor, health and human services; education; commerce, justice and science; energy and water; financial services and general government; transportation; housing and urban development: $605.4 billion
Total appropriations for defense: $694.6 billion
2. Perpetuating inequality
Aside from actually voting for the above appropriations bill, Neal has actively entrenched the defense v. non-defense spending disparity as a voting member of Congress. Although he supported a more austerity-driven iteration of the PAYGO rule that denies funding to social programs, Neal voted for Trump’s last three military budgets.
Neal voted against an amendment to reduce DOD spending by just 1 percent (excluding DOD funds for personnel and health programs) for the FY2018 defense bill. In doing so, Neal effectively voted against funding for actual priorities and the economic benefits these priorities bring about. For example, converting one percent of the FY18 defense budget to healthcare would have created 44,540 jobs. This is no small matter: $1 million in public funds invested in defense produces 6.9 jobs; an equal investment in healthcare nets 14.3 jobs.
That same year he accepted $104,650 in defense industry campaign contributions (data via Open Secrets).
3. By corporations, for corporations
In a debate with primary challenger Alex Morse, Neal said the massive amount of money he accepts from corporations is about putting minorities in office and defeating Republicans.
Aside from this being wrong in about nine different ways, campaign financing is a highly effective instrument for private corporations to wield influence over public policy. Neal himself provides a case study for how this works.
Before voting on the recent defense bill, Neal accepted over $60,000 in defense industry contributions in the 2020 election cycle alone (over his career, more than $400,000). Like other top recipients of war industry cash, Neal voted for Trump’s latest military budget:
Neal’s complacency with (and outright support of) ever-increasing sums of public funds being dumped into defense is matched by his tacit support of ever-increasing health insurance premiums (Neal doesn’t support Medicare For All):
4. Green New Deal can help free us from endless military escalation with ‘rival’ states
Explained in more detail here. Basically: cooperating with China and Russia on climate is a better use of time than a strategy/spending posture reflecting a new Cold War. This will require the US to first enact Green New Deal itself before taking it global. Neal is the only member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation not to sign on in support of the GND resolution.
5. Neoconservatism by proxy
Primaries for Progress reported that Neal has been backed by Democratic Majority for Israel, noting that the PAC is “best known for spending a fuckton of money unsuccessfully attempting to sink Jamaal Bowman in New York.”
The hybrid PAC was established last year to “defend Israel’s legitimacy” and now ranks as a top-20 political contributor among pro-Israel groups.
It is also an example of Democratic support for neoconservative pro-Israel initiatives. The interest group spent $1.4 million on attack ads savaging the Bernie Sanders campaign, likely because Sanders had a foreign policy platform that was the most significant departure from neoconservatism’s inherent militarism. Democratic Majority for Israel endorsed Joe Biden, who has a platform and track record that align closely with the neoconservative tradition. Following Super Tuesday, the PAC used its resources to back incumbents with regressive foreign policy records such as Henry Cuellar and Eliot Engel.
Most Democratic voters support reducing aid to Israel due to its flagrant and continuing human rights violations. But by voting for the anti-BDS bill, Neal signaled that he may not care what we think.
6. Does this guy give even a single, solitary shit?
Neal became Chair of the Ways and Means Committee for the 116th Congress (Jan 2019 - Jan 2021). One of the main things committee chairs are supposed to do is regularly call hearings. Neal doesn’t, which is why he has an “F” grade from a congressional oversight index. He also didn’t bother to put together foreign policy platform for his campaign’s website. (The foreign policy platform of his primary opponent, Alex Morse, here.)
Conclusion
Far from being irrelevant to foreign policy, Neal is a key figure who is sustaining the unsustainable status quo, marked by warfare abroad and class warfare at home:
Neal uses his (powerful) gatekeeper role as Ways & Means Chair to reinforce the establishment’s deficit double-standard, where military spending gets a blank check (no war since Vietnam has been offset by a corresponding tax increase) while for M4A or GND we get asked “How Do You Pay For It?”
Neal’s supporting votes on Trump’s last three defense budgets enable Trump’s militarized foreign policy and are tacit endorsements of worsening inequality (social spending reduces inequality, military spending does the opposite).
Neal’s campaign financing model means he will never be sufficiently responsive to working-class needs. When less than one percent of your campaign’s funds come from small individual contributions, your policies will remain primarily for the One Percent.
Fuller, better-written analyses like this by your favorite think tank, here (on Steny Hoyer) and here (Speaker Pelosi).
Thanks for your time,
Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)
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