A Historic Vote on Equal Rights, and Hopes for Gun Control

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Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dobert.

Hello, America.

I'm Amy Klobuchar, and I will beat Donald Trump.

Tuesday night, I was in Concord, New Hampshire at Amy Klobuchar's election night party.

To some people, her third-place showing was the story of the night, though, of course, Bernie Sanders and Pete Budigudge again both won the most votes, with the Vermont senator at the top with close to 26% of the vote.

Now, that is an unusually small share to win in a primary.

It's actually the closest New Hampshire primary ever.

Which means, of course, there are still a lot of names left on the ballots, even though that list is starting to shrink.

So before we get to this week's interview, I wanted to spend a moment on that shrinking list.

Right before I drove to Klobuchar's party, I was in a a bar basement where Colorado Senator Michael Bennett announced he was ending his bid.

While I was standing there next to the Crude d'Eté display, Andrew Yang dropped out.

And with former Massachusetts Governor Duval Patrick also calling it quits, that meant a Democratic field that began as the most diverse ever has become strikingly a monochrome all before a diverse electorate even gets to vote.

Now, I knew Yang was ending his run.

We'd actually sat down together on Monday night, and he'd shared that, barring a big surprise, it was over for him.

He hadn't told most of his staff yet, so they cleared a room and we talked.

I'm sorry I only was able to record this on my iPhone because I didn't have our good microphones, but I wanted to share one moment that really struck me.

Is this hard to quit?

Good question, man.

I mean, I certainly feel like I'm disappointing a lot of people, so that's very, very hard.

Because a lot of people have invested their hopes and dreams for the future and me in this campaign, and it feels very difficult to put down the sword and shield.

But on a personal level, no,

it feels like the right thing to do for both the message and the movement.

And I have been away from my family a whole lot over the last two years and you know like I feel like if I ran a mile right now it would be like you know cause for concern.

So you know there's so there are elements of it where it's like you know it's like you ask like is it hard?

It's like, there's part of me that

is just very excited to be a dad and

run a few miles and generally just like look up at the sky and say, like, I did something I'm really proud of.

This guy who a year ago was nothing and then exploded into this political force, sitting there with him late at night, the end of a long day for him, and talking about the end of the campaign and what was next for him is really an intense moment.

Yang is someone who I was dismissive of, honestly, at the beginning of the race and then came to recognize and appreciate what he was doing to change the conversation about the economy and how people thought about the economy over the course of the last year.

And he really did have an impact and much more of an impact than a lot of the people who ran who are much more significant, at least you'd think they were much more significant.

A lot of what we're trying to do in this race is figure out what the rules of politics are anymore.

Not just what's acceptable, but what works.

And Yang was loose and funny and came across as a normal guy because he actually is a normal guy.

You know, every presidential candidate says, I never thought of running for president.

And that's almost always a lie.

But for him, it was not.

And then this thing that he thought, hey, maybe it'll work and maybe I'll be able to get some people to talk about automation.

Well, it became a phenomenon and developed a following that is really unmatched by anyone except for Bernie Sanders.

So, Nevada next, and then South Carolina at the end of February.

We will see how this continues to develop.

In the meantime, I'm back home briefly in D.C.,

which brings me to this week's interview.

The chair recognizes the gentleman from New York.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent.

I want to take a break from the trail this week and talk to some folks actually trying to

make laws, do stuff.

And you'll notice

without objection.

That's not Nancy Pelosi's voice.

Madam Speaker, this is long overdue legislation to ensure that the Equal Rights Amendment can finally become the 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Madam Speaker there is my guest this week, Jennifer Wexton.

She's a freshman congresswoman from Virginia.

And right before we talked in her office, she was the one who got to hold the gavel.

It was fantastic.

It was

a huge honor.

Yep.

I got to be for the historic vote.

This wins the prize for the coolest thing I've gotten to do as a member of Congress.

Virginia's state government, you may remember, just came under full Democratic control.

Soon after, Virginia became the last state needed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, which would grant constitutional protections on the basis of sex.

The ERA was a big political battle in the 1970s, but it ended when not enough states ratified it by the deadline set by Congress.

Wexton had fought for the ERA when she was a Virginia state senator, so she got to preside over the debate when a bill overturning that deadline passed the House.

The resolution removes the previous deadline Congress set for ratifying the ERA and will therefore ensure that recent ratifications by Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia are given full effect.

Right after the vote happened, I got to sit down with her in her office on Capitol Hill.

Take a listen.

Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton, thanks for being here on the ticket.

Thank you, Isaac.

So you're wearing purple today.

Why are you wearing purple?

For the ERA, which

Virginia became the 38th and final state to ratify, and we in the House just removed the arbitrary deadline from the resolution enabling it.

It's a purple scarf?

Is that

that was what you decided to do?

You didn't have a purple jacket?

Well, actually, you know,

I had my white jacket and Debbie Dingell, Representative Dingell, gave all the freshmen members of Congress a bag full of scarves for all the many days that we have to wear various colors.

So I've got purple, orange, red, pink.

And so I thought it was a little bit of a drink.

So each freshman got a bag of different colored scarves.

Yep, which was an extremely thoughtful gift for her to give us.

That's good.

Why is it purple for the ERA?

What's the significance?

That's just the color to commemorate it.

This is

something that has been cooking for a long time, the Equal Rights Amendment.

It was something you were involved in when you were in the state legislature in Virginia.

There are people who would look at this and say, Why do we need an Equal Rights Amendment?

What is the difference it would make to put that into the Constitution now?

What would you say to them?

Well, most people already think that it's in there.

Right.

And there have been court cases

that say that women don't necessarily have equal protection under the Constitution.

And Justice Scalia famously said that the question isn't whether the Constitution requires discrimination based on sex.

It's whether it prohibits it, and it decidedly does not.

So I think it's time that we get women's equality in the Constitution.

Other than it being something that you believe would be a good thing morally to be there, practically what does it do, do you think, if it were in the Constitution?

Well, we would finally hopefully see equal pay for equal work.

We would finally see the ability to sue people for sexual harassment or sexual assault, you know, things of that nature.

And it's about time that we get treated equally.

You've been through a pretty extensive career, lots of different positions along the way before you got here in 2019.

When you were coming up,

was this something that was an academic thing for you,

the discrimination and the inequality, or was it something that you were dealing with directly in terms of experiences you were having?

You know, my mom was always a working mom.

She was always a career mom.

So it never occurred to me.

She was an economist.

And it never occurred to me that, you know, that I couldn't do whatever I wanted to do.

And it really wasn't out until I got out in the workforce that I saw that, in fact, you know, women were being held back quite a bit.

And I saw that even more when I got involved in public office.

Wow.

When I was first thinking about running for the Virginia State Senate, I went down to Richmond and there were almost no women there then.

There certainly were no women with school-aged children.

And I thought, you know, this is not representative of the people in my community.

And it's about time we have more women who actually represent the people that they're representing.

And did your colleagues take well to that idea?

Well, I think we've seen a big shift just in terms of the people who are stepping up to run and the people who are being elected.

During my election for state senate, my opponent used all the buzzwords that I was shrill and all those kinds of things.

And then he called me on election night to concede.

And

he said, I hope your family understands what's going to happen now.

And I was like, well, yeah, I'm going to be a state senator.

I was so confused.

I didn't know what he meant.

Did he have children, family?

Yes.

This is always the strange thing in covering politics that

when women are running and when women are elected, that sometimes it's not said as directly as what was said to you.

He must have been a little bit of a child.

Well, then I got down to Richmond.

Then I got down to Richmond and like one of my first nights there, I went to a gathering at the governor's mansion and I was just so, you know, enamored of it.

I was just like starstruck.

And I met one of my colleagues from my side of the aisle who fancies himself very progressive.

And he's like, oh, well, who's watching your kids while you're here in Richmond?

And I said, My husband, their father?

Who's watching your kids?

And he's like, oh.

it's like the kind of thing that we when sometimes uh when a father is watching a child it refers to like babysitting them which is not to me

it's actually called parenting yeah

but it

I

have heard and seen that question asked of so many women in politics and never of men.

What does this mean for your family?

What does this mean for your kids?

And I would imagine as a woman who has

had a pretty successful career moving up the ranks in politics, that that kept coming, it must have just driven you crazy.

Absolutely.

But now, you know, and what we've seen in Virginia and in our General Assembly is so amazing.

Like the new women, young women, women like Kathy Tran, who brought her infant daughter up on the floor with her during session, Jennifer Carol Foy, who had twins during her campaign for the House of Delegates.

You know, so now, the more and more women who are getting elected, who have children, young children, it's becoming more normal.

And I gotta say, one of the things that's been so inspiring for me is all the young women and girls who are just so excited to see people in elected office who are representative of them.

There's the

sort of soft bigotry that you were dealing with there.

Has it ever landed on you in a more direct way

instead of people just saying, well, you can't do this, what's happening with your kids, that you've felt that directly?

Well, we get man-splained to a lot.

Do you get man-splained in Congress still?

A lot less.

Maybe you don't want to name names, but what's an example of the man-splaining that's happened?

You know, well, maybe you just don't understand how this issue really affects people.

You know, that sort of thing.

Every woman has experienced that, I think.

But, you know, we do a lot of smiling and nodding and then going about our business and making good policy and legislation and, you know, kicking butt.

There are freshman members of the House who are men

who feel like they get talked down to too.

But there's a particular thing that happens.

There's not quite as much attention in the 116th Congress, that's for sure.

You were in the Virginia State Senate at a time when there was a partisan division of the state government in Virginia.

As of a couple months ago with the elections in November, now it is a fully democratic controlled state,

which is somewhat astounding for Virginia, given Virginia's history.

But now you came to Washington and now you're in a divided government here.

Do you feel like

you're in the wrong spot?

Well, I'm not going to lie, I've had a little bit of FOMO with my friends in the General Assembly, but I also feel like I'm right where I need to be.

And I know that the General Assembly is in good hands.

What does that mean, though, for thinking about how to get something like the Equal Rights Amendment?

So what happened here is that it's not about the Equal Rights Amendment passing Congress.

It's about giving more time for states to pass it so that it can be ratified into the Constitution.

When you look at the fact that there's a Republican Senate here, how do you make the case to them that this shouldn't be a partisan issue, but it's something beyond that, and it should be picked up?

Well, because it's not a partisan issue.

This is something that passed the General Assembly of Virginia with broad bipartisan support.

It's something that will pass the U.S.

Senate if Mitch McConnell allows it to the floor.

And it's something...

Do you feel confident in that?

I do, yes.

And it's something that the vast majority of Americans support.

You got to be Speaker pro tem

for the purposes of this ERA vote.

That was pretty cool.

Right.

And so Nancy Pelosi comes to you and says, all right, Jennifer, you want the gavel?

How's that conversation go?

That, yeah, that's pretty much how it went.

And of course, I was like, hell yes.

And are you going to flex your power in any other ways as the temporary speaker of the house?

Well, I think, you know, once I seated the gavel back, I don't think I have that power anymore.

I'm back to being

back to being just a lowly freshman congresswoman.

Let's take a short break.

When we come back, I talk with Congresswoman Wexon about another big issue, gun violence, and what to do about it.

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This is the ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

So for this second half, Congresswoman Wexton and I discuss guns.

I think about the issue of guns a lot.

To me, it is emblematic of how our political process has been a failure that no other issue, I think, gets at.

I remember being in a different newsroom after the Newtown shooting, and that was such a searing moment for the country.

And an editor who'd been around for a while saying, like, eh, nothing's going to happen.

And...

Saying like, well, I don't know.

It feels like maybe something will happen.

And the cynicism of that person

being borne out,

it should be discomforting for everybody.

It's an issue that

there is widespread agreement on what to do outside of the halls of Congress.

And yet, no matter how many mass shootings there are, nothing actually gets done.

So Wexton comes at this issue with a new idea, something she thinks will work, which is part of why I wanted to talk to her about it.

So let's get back to my interview with Jennifer Wexton.

Let's talk about guns a little bit.

This is an issue that I think in the last few years has become such a dominant one in politics and such an

impenetrable one in terms of legislative solutions.

It's something that you started working on before you were in Congress.

How is it that it becomes something that is a passion for you and is a priority for you?

Gun violence prevention has has always been really important to me.

And I was just by way of my background before I entered elective politics, I was a prosecutor in my home of Loudoun County.

I also was an attorney in mental commitment hearings and a special justice for those hearings, both before and after the Virginia Tech tragedy.

So I got to see up close and personal how Virginia's gun laws really failed.

How did they fail?

Well, the shooter was held on a temporary detention order and then volunteered for additional treatment rather than being involuntarily committed.

And as a result, he was able to buy guns legally without any sort of prohibition.

So that was one tiny little loophole that the Virginia General Assembly fixed after Virginia Tech, but they didn't go any further than that.

And so, you know, just seeing the increase in mass shootings, the increase in suicide by firearm, the increase in guns being used in crimes, and legislators not being willing to do anything about it.

One of the things that prompted me to run for the state Senate was the Virginia legislature's repeal of one of the very few pieces of gun safety legislation we had in Virginia, which was the one handgun a month law.

Virginia had been the destination for traffickers to buy their guns in bulk and then go and distribute them

up and down the 95 corridor and having that one handgun a month law pretty much put a stop to that but they repealed it.

So that was just one of the reasons that I decided to run.

Is it in your mind this

massive increase in mass shootings that we've seen and suicides by gun, is that because of the way the laws have been changed or

is it other things that are happening?

Like when the conversation says, oh, we have to do mental health, and that's where the investment needs to be not on gun laws.

What do you make of that?

Well, I don't disagree that we need more mental health resources and treatment, but it's funny because some of these people who are squawking about having more mental health are the same people who are applauding President Trump's lawsuit to strike down the ACA in its entirety, which is one of the few protections that we have for mental health parity in health coverage.

So that just doesn't ring true to me.

So yes, mental health is an issue, but these are the same people who often are objecting to things like extreme risk protective orders.

You know, that's something that I really started to take an interest in when I was in the state legislature.

And that actually came to me from a police detective because every unattended death in my home county, and I would imagine it's the same across the country, is investigated as a homicide unless and until they can rule it out.

You know, so every time someone blows their brains out and commits suicide with a gun, it's our law enforcement officers who have to respond.

And that's hard on them.

And a lot of times

it's somebody who had previously had brushes with law enforcement or first responders because of a mental breakdown.

But now there's nothing to stop them from getting those guns and killing themselves.

But when you hear people say this is a mental health problem, it's not a guns problem at all.

Well, the access to the easy access to firearms in this country is something that's uniquely American.

And as a result, it shows in the data about deaths by firearms.

Yeah, I've had this conversation with people who say, well, you know, it's about our violent culture and the video games.

And, you know,

they play more video games in other countries.

And then the movies are the same movies.

Our culture now is globally pretty similar.

And it's not like you see these kinds of mass shootings going on in, let's say, South Korea, where there's a lot of violent video games,

or Germany, where

there are a lot of the same movies that we're watching.

Right.

Easy access to firearms is the differentiating factor.

But there is not a willingness or an appetite among,

it seems like, many people in politics, certainly among many Republicans in politics, to take a real look at.

the gun laws.

Well, there hadn't been, but that's changing.

That's changing.

And we've seen that in Virginia.

I mean, Virginia, the NRA is there.

We've got the Citizens Defense League, which is, they're the ones who think that the NRA is too squishy on

gun control.

And we've seen it, you know, in Richmond.

And I can talk about

what I've seen and just the progression that I saw, because every year on Martin Luther King Day in the General Assembly was Gun Lobby Day.

And that's wrong on so many levels, just as an...

What does gun?

Does that mean showing up with guns?

I mean, that's what happened in Richmond this time around, right?

Yeah.

And so people would come, the NRA folks would come, the CDL folks, people who think that the answer to gun violence is more guns in the hands of more people in more places.

They would come and lobby for their legislation

and descend on Richmond.

And every single gun violence prevention law that we would put up in

the Senate Courts of Justice Committee

that day would be killed one bill after another with the Republican majority.

But then we started to see the gun safety advocates coming out.

And at first, you know, the only person who was there was really Lori Haas from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

And her daughter was a Virginia Tech survivor, and she had become an advocate after that.

within a couple years, you know, we saw the advocates from Moms Demand coming down in their red shirts.

And every year there were more and more of them.

And then Parkland happened.

And, you know, and there were even more people coming.

Students Demand, the the March for Our Lives, all of these groups started coming down.

And they started voting.

They started making this an issue that they voted on.

Universal background checks is something that your colleagues in the House on the Democratic side would like to see happen.

But that's not even the kind of bill that you've now put forward here.

Yours is a more targeted approach.

Can you walk through how you got to this bill?

The Gun Violence Prevention Through Financial Intelligence Bill?

Yeah.

Okay.

Has a very long name.

Sure, it does.

Well, that's, yeah, that's how things, unless you can come up with letters like, you know, the first letter making it work with something.

But,

well, you know, the people of the 10th district elected me to find solutions to problems that are facing our district and our country.

And I think, I hope we can all agree that these mass shootings and acts of domestic terror are something we should try to fix.

And I serve on the Financial Services Committee.

here in Congress.

So this is a way that I'm trying to bring those areas together because we already have the tools to track things like money laundering, like human smuggling, like fentanyl trafficking.

And

in eight of the 13 mass shootings up until 2018, in which 10 or more people were murdered, the shooters financed their amassing these arsenals on credit cards.

In particular, the pulse shooter.

His average monthly credit card bill had been about $1,500, but in the days leading up to the shooting, he opened six new credit card accounts and he charged over $25,000 worth of guns, ammunition, and tactical gear.

So if there's a way that we can find out who these people are before they act, I think that's worth looking into.

So what my bill would do is have the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network assemble stakeholders in this area.

So that would be FinCEN, as it's called, the FBI, the ATF,

the retailers, the credit card companies, the banks, to determine do we have the ability to gather that data?

If we don't, what are the missing links?

And most important, what might those flags and commonalities be that might allow us to be able to stop these shootings before they take place?

I mean, I get credit card alerts on my phone sometimes when there's a Starbucks purchase or something in a city that they're not expecting me to be in.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's that's not $25,000 and not firearms or tactical gear.

The interesting thing is that the pulse shooter actually googled searches like, you know, can the credit card companies stop me from buying guns?

You know, does the FBI track gun purchases?

Things like that.

So

he thought people might be looking, but nobody was.

I'm going to ask you a question as a mother, even though what we were talking about earlier.

But when you think about kids who are in preschool walk through lockdown drills,

as someone who cares about children, cares about your own children,

what does that mean for us as a society?

It means we need to do better.

We need to do better for our kids.

And you're exactly right.

That's what it came down to for so many of us and so many

parents and voters in my district.

The woman who started our Loudoun chapter of Mom's Demand, she said that it was when her son came home from his first week of kindergarten.

He said, mommy, mommy, when the teacher locks the door, my place to hide is behind the backpacks.

Like a backpack is going to stop around from an AR-15.

And that's when she said, we need to do better for our kids, and I'm going to do everything I can to make it happen.

It just feels like the idea of gun legislation has entered this realm of the impossible.

You know, as someone someone who covered

the aftermath, the political aftermath, the legislative aftermath of the Newtown shooting, when it was, okay, now something's going to change.

And that process in the Senate that was, on the one hand, this long and drawn out and dramatic process.

And also, we kind of knew all along that it was not looking like it would pass.

And then after Parkland, when

different president, different Congress at that point said

the president had that meeting at the White House and he said, well, everybody else has failed on this and this President Trump at that point, but I'm going to do something about it and everybody's been scared of the NRA and I'm not.

And then you see the shift within a day or two.

And it just...

We keep running up against this where there's another mass shooting, there's another outcry of,

oh, what are we going to do?

Thoughts and prayers.

It's not enough to have thoughts and prayers.

And then things settle down again.

And then, who knows, we could look at our phones in an hour or two, and there could be another mass shooting at this point, right?

Well, people said that about Virginia, too.

Yeah.

And look what happened there.

And, you know, this is an issue that I didn't run away from in my election.

I ran on this issue.

And so did Jason Crowe from Colorado.

So did Lucy McBath from Georgia.

You know, so did many of us.

And

we're not going away and we're keeping this an issue.

And also, there's a whole new generation of kids who grew up you know having to deal with lockdown drills their entire lives and they they don't they they need us to do better too and they want us to do better and they're voting based on this issue so at some point if we can't change their minds we're gonna have to change their seats

I want to bring us to a little politics before we end here I have spent the last couple weeks in Iowa and New Hampshire It's been a little bit of a mess.

Nevada and South Carolina are in my future, and then on to the Super Tuesday states.

Virginia's primary doesn't come up for a couple weeks still, but I wonder.

Super Tuesday.

Right.

So at the beginning of March.

If Virginia were the first state, how do you think this race would have been different?

Well, Virginia is certainly more representative of the country than either of the first two.

Demographically,

economically.

Right.

Population.

Geographically.

Geographically as well.

Yeah.

Well, for one thing, we have paper ballots and

we have very well-run elections.

We have elections every year, so we have a lot of good practice about it.

So we would not have had the caucus problem.

Yeah, the caucus problem was a weird one, standing at a caucus site.

There was a reporter there, an Israeli reporter, who said to me, this is like the Middle Ages.

I don't understand

that.

All right, Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton.

Thanks for being here on the ticket.

Thank you.

That'll do it for this week of The Ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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