2020: A Vision of the Future: Beto O’Rourke
By Gaurav Varma
Regular Witherly Heights contributor and political enthusiast Gaurav Varma presents his opinions on the Democratic candidates who have announced their candidacy for president of the United States in the 2020 election cycle.
Beto O’Rourke is not who we thought he was. The former El Paso congressman rose to fame during his 2018 campaign to take Ted Cruz’s senate seat. He ran on Medicare for all and did not take corporate PAC money. He was a progressive who proved it is possible for a Democrat to win a statewide race in Texas of all places. However, ever since speculation about a 2020 run from O’Rourke started to build, we have started to learn about Beto’s real record and what he has actually believed in during his time in public office. It’s not pretty.
The list of positives to Beto’s name is short but still worth at least mentioning. Beto led on the issue of corporate PAC money, pledging not to take it before candidates like Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand hopped on the bandwagon. He is strongly in favor of legalizing marijuana and ending the disastrous war on drugs. During the Obama administration, he voted to curtail the NSA’s surveillance powers. Finally, he has opposed military intervention in Syria and stated that President Obama needed congressional authorization to engage with ISIS.
But that is where the praise stops, because the rest of Beto’s record is not flattering. In 2015, he supported fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This vote had Congress forfeit its ability to negotiate TPP; instead, it gave President Obama complete authority in creating the agreement. This was a move opposed by labor unions, and it even prompted the Texas AFL-CIO to not initially endorse Beto in his Senate battle against Cruz, a man who is no friend of unions.
It gets worse. Just last year, Beto voted for a resolution that weakened the Volcker Rule. The Volcker Rule is a modern form of the Glass-Steagall law, which was passed in 1933 by FDR and repealed in 1999 by Bill Clinton. Essentially, it blocks banks from speculating with depositors’ money, a key regulation that prevented banks from losing their clients’ savings during stock market crashes. Beto helped weaken the rule by allowing banks with less than ten billion dollars in assets to violate it. It also transferred the authority to enforce the Volcker Rule from the FDIC to the Federal Reserve, a change that makes it easier for the Trump Administration to further deregulate banks.
There’s more. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was one of the Obama Administration’s biggest achievements. By mid-2016, the agency had returned almost twelve billion dollars to consumers who were victimized by deceptive corporate practices. Beto voted to weaken it. Twice. The first vote was for a bill opposed by both the Obama Administration and the NAACP. The legislation was co-sponsored by O’Rourke, and it attempted to stop the CFPB from going after auto lenders that were discriminating in their business practices. The second vote was also opposed by Obama, and it was against the CFPB’s ability to make mortgage lenders more transparent. This issue, perhaps more than all the others, shows where Beto stands in the 2020 field. Of all the candidates, Elizabeth Warren is the person most responsible for creating the CFPB. Beto O’Rourke is the person most responsible for tearing it down.
Beto has said many of the right things about climate change, but he voted to allow crude oil exports, offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and more natural gas exports. He also broke his pledge in 2018 not to accept any money from the fossil fuel industry. In fact, in that year he was the second highest recipient of oil and gas money according to Open Secrets. The only person he trailed was Cruz himself.
Beto has even done poorly on health care, an issue he made central in his 2018 senate run. He called for a Medicare for all system but has since backed off on the issue. He did not recently sign on to a House proposal for Medicare for all and he has taken to calling his solution “universal, guaranteed, high-quality health care for all.”
Just as bad as his position on single-payer health care is his vote to end an advisory board formed by the Affordable Care Act to reduce Medicare spending. This board was not allowed to propose cutting benefits or restricting access to care in any way, but Republicans smeared it as an a attempt to create “death panels” that would decide who lives and dies depending on how expensive it would be to the government to keep them alive. Beto crossed party lines to side with Republicans in what PolitiFact called their 2019 “Lie of the Year.”
Beto O’Rourke would have made an excellent Texas senator, but as a presidential candidate he is woefully inadequate. The Democratic Party is ready for populism, democratic socialism, and environmental justice, not a candidate who voted with Trump thirty percent of the time.
[Sources: youtube.com, texastribune.com, splinternews.com, nytimes.com, seekingalpha.com, theweek.com, theguardian.com, fiftythirthyeight.com, readsludge.com, opensecrets.org, politifact.com]