Photo by Maggie Vaughn
After serving seven terms in the House of Representatives, Democrat Tammy Baldwin is in the middle of her first term in the Senate, where she’s taken a hands-on approach to tackling some of the biggest issues in the state. Recently and very visibly, she’s been focusing on improving rail safety throughout Wisconsin, where crude oil from the Bakken region of North Dakota passes through on two routes—one through Milwaukee. Baldwin’s also addressing economic issues, including making post-high school education more affordable—especially for nontraditional students—as well as reducing the influence of Wall Street and the elite 1% on Congress and our economy.
We spoke to Baldwin in her Downtown Milwaukee offices soon after the House voted to suspend taking in Iraqi and Syrian refugees until they can be guaranteed not to pose a security risk. As of this writing, the Senate hasn’t acted on the House bill. Baldwin, a member of the Senate’s homeland security committee, is concerned about tightening up our immigration policies but recognizes the hardships faced by these refugees. Since our meeting, Baldwin has joined her fellow Democrats in the Senate to urge Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan to close the loophole that allows individuals on the Federal Terrorist Watchlist to legally purchase firearms. She’s also joining bipartisan efforts to look into ways to strengthen the visa waiver program, which allows residents of certain countries to enter the U.S. without a visa. Here’s an excerpt from our interview.
Shepherd: You were just briefed on the county’s refugee policy and other national security matters related to the House’s Iraq and Syrian refugee bill. One of the issues that was raised is the process that potential refugees must undertake before the United States will accept them. What do you think of it?
Baldwin: It usually takes around two years. Big picture, one of the things I think that has to happen right now and prior to Senate consideration of the bill that passed the House is that the administration needs to do a better job of explaining to the American people what this process involves and how rigorous it is. One of the questions that one of my Senate colleagues asked [in the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee] was, of all the ways to enter the United States, what would result in the greatest scrutiny, the most thorough vetting? And the answer was application for refugee status.
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We also had a lot of discussion of other ways to travel to the United States. Thirty-eight countries participate in something called a visa waiver program, where you only need your passport, you don’t actually need to get a visa to enter the United States. We do that because we have long-term relationships with these countries and there’s lots of tourism, et cetera. These countries include France and England and Germany and many others where there is a long and deep relationship and long-time alliances. So perhaps we should be actually more attuned to some of the other ways that people enter the United States. I suspect that anybody who had nefarious, dangerous, hostile goals is not going to go through the most difficult process. I think in some ways the attention paid to the refugee applications is probably distracting us from tightening our aviation security and homeland security and other important places.
The United States has usually stepped up to take the people who are considered to be the most vulnerable, oftentimes widows, orphans or women and children who are related to already-settled Syrian Americans. Some with citizenship, some without. It’s a population that’s extremely carefully vetted but also a population that seldom poses any risk.
Shepherd: How are things in the Senate these days?
Baldwin: Let’s start with the happy stuff. [laughs] I sit on the Senate Health, Education Labor and Pensions Committee. In that role I’m on the conference committee between the House and the Senate on the Elementary and Secondary Education Reauthorization Act, the replacement for No Child Left Behind, which was enacted in 2001 and has not been replaced or reviewed since. We are trying to get a bill to the president’s desk. We worked in a bipartisan, bicameral process and passed a bill out of the conference committee on a vote of 39-1 and we are, I think, well on our way to finally focusing in on significant improvements to our K-12 education policy. You don’t hear things like that often, 39-1. It was a thoroughly bipartisan process, and on something that is really long overdue. So I think we were feeling encouraged by that progress and hoping that we can apply things like that to the many issues that have devolved to gridlock and show the dysfunction of the Congress of the United States.
Shepherd: So you’re saying that one of the things Republicans and Democrats can agree on is that No Child Left Behind has been—
Baldwin: It’s failed.
Shepherd: A big issue for you is rail safety. You’re calling for more transparency and a heightened awareness of the safety issues posed by our rail transportation system. Why is this issue so important to you?
Baldwin: I have a really long involvement on rail issues generally. Even when I served in the House of Representatives, I received concerns from primarily Wisconsin businesses, who were either getting shoddy service from the rails or were unable to negotiate with regard to the prices they were charged because there wasn’t any competition. If you are along the rail line you are along that rail line and you deal with that rail company. So we had companies saying the rail company doubled the price of shipping our product or they won’t call us back to resolve an issue on timely service and we’re losing business. That had always interested me because it had occurred to me as I looked into all of those complaints that they were operating at least regionally as monopolies and they didn’t have the appropriate oversight. So I basically have been involved in the issue for 15 years.
What has changed is the discovery of oil in the Bakken region of North Dakota and the requirement that railroads convey that product, whether they want to or not, and the fact that most of the routes out of North Dakota come through Wisconsin. So we have a north-south line that is in the western part of the state, right along the Mississippi, that brings Bakken oil to the Gulf Region and then we have the west-to-east rail corridor that actually ends up coming through Milwaukee, run by Canadian Pacific. And so since I’ve been a United States senator the types of concerns I have been hearing have pivoted from complaints about cost and service reliability to, “Oh my goodness we have a hazardous material speeding through our communities, how do we know we’re safe?”
So now I’m doing a lot more than simply looking at the adequacy of their oversight. Now, transparency for communities through which these hazardous trains travel is tantamount. My activities have run the gamut from issues like reducing the volatility of the oil before it’s run through the state—there are things that can be done to do that—to improving the safety of the tanker cars in which the oil is moved by requiring adding of thick jackets and thermal jackets, to greater transparency of the actual infrastructure of the rails and the bridges that in most cases the rail companies own.
Shepherd: It is shocking that the rail companies don’t disclose that information.
Baldwin: It is. Recently we’ve had two train derailments in Wisconsin. One in Alma and one in Watertown, two different rail lines, one is the BNSF and the other is the Canadian Pacific. The one in Alma released 17,000 gallons of ethanol into the Mississippi River and the one in Watertown released crude oil into the soil, about 400 to 500 gallons, as I understand it. And first responders in both cases did heroic work not knowing what they were getting into. I really commend them. But I think that both of those derailments highlighted the need for two safety provisions that I had earlier this summer pushed to be included in the Senate-passed transportation budget bill. One is a requirement that railways give advance warning to first responders of what’s going through their communities and when, if it’s hazardous material. And the second relates to appropriately sharing information about rail bridge infrastructure with communities that are demanding that information.
Right now there’s a Senate-House conference committee meeting to resolve differences between the two versions [of the transportation budget bill]. I have done everything I can to raise the awareness of all of the conferees about this language and the need to keep the Senate language in the final version of the bill. And I am hoping that we will be successful. At this point I don’t know of any specific member of Congress who has any concerns about it. But what’s always interesting is just how powerful the railroad companies are in terms of the political process. So we are remaining vigilant. [Editor's note: Baldwin's rail safety provisions were included in the final transportation budget bill announced on Tuesday.]
Shepherd: You’ve also authored a bill that would offer two years tuition-free at technical and community colleges. Why are you taking this approach?
Baldwin: I’m really proud of Wisconsin’s history of deciding at its founding that every child deserved a free education, K-12. At the time we made that commitment, a high school education prepared the vast majority of our citizens for a productive work life and being able to contribute to their communities and society. Today that is no longer the case. We know that folks with only 12th-grade education will earn less and have far fewer job opportunities than people who have a technical degree or have a community college degree. I think it’s time to expand the scope of that commitment, from K-12 to K-14, if you will, and to make sure that those community college credits are fully transferable to a four-year institution for those who do want to continue on.
To have a debt-free start to your career is important. And as I hear the stories of young people with huge debt burdens from financing their education—they’re taking their first job with obligations to pay $400, $600 a month for student loans, let alone their housing costs and transportation costs—it strikes me as something that is quite a negative impact on those individuals but also on our economy for a long time.
Shepherd: It’s especially difficult for those who start a degree and can’t finish it but they’re still stuck with the debt without the benefits of earning a degree.
Baldwin: Right. That also will require greater steps to be taken with regard to institutional accountability. There are some recent examples of a for-profit private college going bankrupt and students who were halfway through their degree program there having credits that often aren’t transferable, but debt incurred to get those credits and no degree to show for it. There has to be accountability also. There’s basically a three-prong attack in my bill, the America’s College Promise Act, which is the bill to fund two years of community college or technical college. It includes an effort to allow young people to refinance their student loans, for those who have already incurred the debt and are already living with it, to get those interest rates down from sometimes around 8% to today’s lower interest rates. And it includes the accountability measures that I referred to.
These are big goals. I have no illusion that America’s College Promise is going to pass tomorrow, so in the meantime there are some steps that I am taking, especially for people who are perhaps returning to school to retool their skills and get back into the workforce. It may be that nontraditional students are no longer nontraditional students and are becoming the norm. A lot of them are experiencing and encountering difficulties financing that education, in particular, working parents who want to go back and finish a degree or begin a degree face a work penalty where they are unable to access financial aid grants or lower-interest student loans because of the income they make through their work.
Then I think especially in Wisconsin, where we have so many workers who were displaced in the Great Recession, and we’ve had a lot of announcements of layoffs and facility closures, these workers may simply want a short-term set of courses to retool for another job. Those [students] are un-aidable. We really only aid students who are seeking a longer-term degree. So my Career and Technical Education Opportunity Act addresses those shorter-term educational needs to get somebody right back into the economy, oftentimes midcareer folks, and the other bill relates to reducing the work penalty for students.
