NORTHAMPTON — U.S. Sen. Ed Markey is confident Democrats will win back not only the White House come November, but also the Senate. And if re-elected, he says that justice should be the focus when creating solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The Green New Deal is environmental justice, Medicare for All is health care justice,” Markey said. “We have to make sure we get paid child care for everyone in our country, we have to make sure we have paid sick leave for everyone in our country. We have to have a vision of what we have to do in order to solve this problem, and we have to think big. And that includes criminal justice reform and police reform.”
Markey was speaking to the Daily Hampshire Gazette’s editorial board, where for 45 minutes he made his case for re-election to the seat he has held since 2013. Markey is facing a tough electoral challenge from U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D-Newton, though a University of Massachusetts Amherst/WCVB poll released last week shows the incumbent up by 15 points.
In the wide-ranging discussion, the senator talked about his blue-collar roots as “Markey from Malden,” his record in the U.S. House and later the Senate, the COVID-19 pandemic, mass incarceration and more. He often returned to his role as the co-author, together with New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of the Green New Deal, the ambitious resolution aimed at tackling climate change and income inequality. Markey said the proposal is the ideal response to COVID-19.
“In many ways, the Green New Deal has anticipated where we are today,” he said, adding that the country needs a program that would create millions of new jobs amid the current public health and economic crises.
When asked about the difficulties of enforcing public health measures, such as wearing a mask to fight COVID-19, Markey paused before saying, to himself as much as to the board, that he should file legislation requiring face coverings nationwide. He also touted Medicare for All single-payer health care as an answer to the millions of Americans who have lost their private health insurance plans during the pandemic.
Markey said that when it comes to expensive, progressive legislation, the country’s defense budget is one place to go for the money to pay for those programs.
“We need to invest in education, not annihilation,” he said, adding that he has proposed legislation that would cut $100 billion from the country’s nuclear weapons budget. “We also have to reclaim all of the tax breaks of George Bush and Donald Trump.”
The senator, who served in the U.S. House from 1976 to 2013, noted that change takes time. It took him five years to pass a bill that improved fuel economy standards.
“It’s not easy, but you have to think big, you need a vision, you have to be able to say, ‘This is where we are going,’” he said.
The election comes amid an uprising in the United States against racism and police violence, with many communities calling for police department funding to be reallocated to social services. Markey noted that the United States has nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population despite representing just 5 percent of the global population, and that people of color are disproportionately affected by that over-incarceration.
“If we restructure our budgets in order to look more at preventative … alternative ways of dealing with this issue, then I think we’ll wind up with a safer, more productive society,” he said. “We need more nurses, we need more social workers, we need more job training. … We need community college that is free, we need public universities that are free.”
Voters head to the polls in the Democratic primary election on Sept. 1, though mail-in ballots are already being cast across the state.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.