In 2016, into this tangle of worry and anger, came a showman who made big promises. A man who swore he would drain the swamp, then surrounded himself with the lobbyists and billionaires who run the swamp and feed off government favors. A man who talked the talk of populism but offered the very worst of trickle-down economics. A man who said he knew how the corrupt system worked because he had worked it for himself many times. A man who vowed to make America great again and followed up with attacks on immigrants, minorities, and women. A man who was always on the hunt for his next big con.
In the months ahead, it would become clear that this man was even more divisive and dishonest than his presidential campaign revealed. But on election night, I stared at the television as it sank in that this man was about to become the next president of the United States.
The election results kept rolling in, and I knew that plenty of people would be eager to describe the special appeal of Donald Trump and explain all the reasons why he won. But we need more than an explanation of just one election; we also need to understand how and why our country has gone so thoroughly wrong. We need a plan to put us back on track—and then we need to get to work and make it happen.
We need to live our values, to be the kind of nation that invests in opportunity, not just for some of us, but for all of us. We need to take our democracy back from those who would pervert it for their own benefit. We need to build the America of our best dreams.
Sitting on the couch with Bruce, I watched Donald Trump say that his presidency would be “a beautiful thing.” No, I thought, it won’t be anything like beautiful. Worse, the man who would soon move into the White House had the capacity to bear down on a middle class that was already on the ropes and deliver the knockout punch.
If ever there was a time to fight, this was it.
I was ready to go.
It was a Thursday morning in March 2013. I’d been in the Senate for two and a half months, and this was our first hearing on the minimum wage. For close to four years, the federal minimum wage had been frozen at $7.25 an hour. The rate was already low by historic standards, and a lot of workers were sinking. Minimum wage is just that—the minimum.
When I am home in Massachusetts, I make a point of speaking with as many Bay Staters as I can. This includes the people who do the service work in big buildings. These are the workers who stock the office kitchens, keep the buildings clean, provide security. I’ve been struck by how many of them hold down two or three jobs just to stay afloat. Women who take the T into Boston, work a full shift cleaning buildings, then stay to work a morning shift at one of the counters at South Station. Men who push wheelchairs and haul bags at Logan Airport all day, then drive cabs or work security in the evening. And I meet them outside Boston too. Mothers and fathers in New Bedford and Fall River, in Worcester and Springfield, who work at fast-food places in town or on the highway, piecing together a living from whatever jobs they can find. A woman up on the North Shore told me she sleeps in her car in the parking lot in the hours between when one job ends and the other begins. She said she’s so tired that when she drives to her mother’s house to pick up her baby daughter, she falls asleep on the couch the minute she gets there. Low-wage workers—in Massachusetts and in all the other states too—are among the hardest working people in America.
I’m pretty hard-core about this issue. The way I see it, no one in this country should work full-time and still live in poverty—period. But at $7.25 an hour, a mom working a forty-hour-a-week minimum-wage job cannot keep herself and her baby above the poverty line. This is wrong—and this was something the U.S. Congress could make better if we’d just raise the minimum wage. We could fix this now.
Ten weeks on the job, and it still gave me a thrill to walk into the Senate hearing rooms, notebook tucked under my arm. This room was like a stage set: high ceilings, heavy paneling, and dark blue carpets. The lights were mounted on the walls, giant art deco torches that looked like they were illuminating an ancient temple. The room was so vast that everyone had to use microphones just to hear each other.
Senators were seated on a raised platform, assigned places around a giant, wood-paneled horseshoe-shaped dais. Our chairs were huge, high-backed leather affairs, sort of ancient king meets modern CEO. Witnesses sat at a low table in the open part of the U, with the audience behind them. The room’s design is intended to evoke the grandeur and solemnity of the Senate, a not-very-subtle reminder of the power of this body.
In keeping with the Senate’s rigid deference to seniority and my junior status, my chair was the farthest from center stage, out on one end of the horseshoe. I didn’t care. I was aware that this was pretty routine stuff for most senators. And okay, I understood that this committee wasn’t going to do a movie moment and suddenly jump up and demand in the name of working people everywhere that Congress increase the minimum wage.
I knew that, but I also knew that the move to raise the minimum wage was gaining traction around the country. And I knew that this hearing was a pretty good platform to move that fight forward. After all, this committee really did have the power to recommend a raise for thirty million Americans, and even if we weren’t going to do it today, I wanted to make sure we made some progress. If you don’t fight, you can’t win.
Committee hearing on the minimum wage. That’s me at the far right end of the horseshoe.
I also understood that for more than forty years, workers’ pay hadn’t kept pace with inflation. Productivity had gone up. Profits had gone up. Executives had gotten raises. Couldn’t we at last come together to make sure that the people who did some of the hardest, dirtiest work in the nation got at least a chance to build a little security?
And couldn’t we also give this whole “bipartisan” thing another try? Since the 1930s, Republicans had joined Democrats to support periodic increases to the minimum wage, and now, after four years of holding steady, I thought we might come together for some kind of increase. Okay, it probably wouldn’t be as much as I wanted, but couldn’t we at least do something?
No. The Republicans were locked in: they would block any efforts to increase the minimum wage by even a few nickels.
The hearing produced some sharp back-and-forth about the impact that raising the minimum wage might have on jobs. The data are clear: study after study shows that there are no large adverse effects on jobs when the minimum wage goes up—and one of the country’s leading experts was sitting right in front of us testifying to exactly that point. I battled a couple of the other witnesses, and I got in my licks about how far the real minimum wage had fallen, but after about an hour and a half, the hearing began winding down.
I gathered up my papers, ready to leave as soon as the gavel fell. Lamar Alexander, the senator from Tennessee and the most senior Republican on the committee, was asking his last questions when a witness interrupted him to point out that Congress was responsible for setting