Photo: Eric England
U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, who was first elected to Congress in 1983 and has represented Nashville since 2003, says it has never been “less fun” or “more necessary” to serve in public office. The Blue Dog Democrat was often frustrated by the state of things in Washington, D.C., during the Obama years, and since Donald Trump took office, he has frequently seemed to be at his wit’s end. His style — cautious, deliberative, wonky — is the opposite of how D.C. works now.
In Cooper’s view, the best way to change that is through the voters. So he’s launching a new voter registration effort along with Republican state Sen. Steve Dickerson. The initiative, Project Register, is aimed at raising awareness about Tennessee’s new online registration system. Cooper stopped by the Scene’s offices on Monday for a chat about the project, some items that are currently dominating the news, and some things he believes should be.
So tell me more about Project Register and what that entails.
We were trying to figure out a way to reach Tennessee adults. Because it’s not just enough to get kids motivated. They need, really, the example of their parents, grandparents. A lot of those folks think they vote, but really haven’t been voting much. In fact, if you look at neighboring states like Kentucky, Kentucky is often 12th, or Louisiana is, like, 24th or something. Why is Tennessee 40th or 50th? We can do better than this.
Now, it’s true at the presidential level that we’ve not been a swing state, but hey, Kentucky and Louisiana aren’t either.
Some states have gone to automatic registration. I assume you support that?
Absolutely. I’m for whatever makes voting easier. Now, we don’t want any fraud, so we don’t want to encourage that. But there are ways to make it very easy. Oregon and Washington state both have mail-in ballots, which are super easy. We could do so much more, and I think we’re on a path to do that now that we have online [registration] finally.
A lot of important issues have been obscured by the constant Trump reality show. One that’s come up recently is immigration. There have been DREAM Act demonstrations here and in Washington, D.C. What do you think the prospects are of there being some kind of deal around that, and what are you doing to try to make that happen?
On Saturday I went by Casa Azafrán because they had some Dreamers there. They gave me another load of postcards, so I’m going to save them the postage and also respond to their genuine plight. These are awesome people. We need them in this country. They should not be punished. And the deadline is ticking. We’ve got probably until March, but really, why keep them in limbo all this extra time? We should solve this by Christmas.
I understand some folks are starting to lose their status in various ways already.
It’s very scary. Very upsetting.
The good news on immigration is the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill several years ago. Both [Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker] voted for it. It passed with, like, 70 votes. But the House of Representatives was not even allowed to bring it up. So this is terrible. [We’ve got a] good bipartisan solution, and we can’t even talk about it. This is one reason we’re pushing registration, because registration means you’ve got skin in the game. These issues aren’t things that happen to other people, they’re not things that happen to immigrants, they’re not things that happen to people out of state. These issues happen to us here at home. So by registering, you have skin in the game, and you’re going to pay a lot more attention. The news will mean more to you.
But it’s really scary right now. Congress doesn’t seem to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. So in the next two weeks we’ll be focusing on keeping the government open, which should be obvious. Now that we have unified government, Republicans totally in charge, they can’t even keep their own government open?
Another thing we’re finding out is that some folks in Congress have a hard time keeping their hands to themselves. You’ve sponsored a bill that would out members who have used taxpayer funds to secretly settle harassment claims. What has the response been like to that, given that it involves people in the building?
This should be an easy issue for Congress to vote on favorably. We should be leading by example, not embarrassing ourselves with these repeated scandals. There have been, apparently, secret funds, and people didn’t know about these funds. Now it turns out there wasn’t one, there wasn’t two, now there are three or more paying off settlements. At a bare minimum, that needs to be disclosed. Ideally, members should refund the money they’ve taken wrongly from taxpayers. But the most important issue is: Stop the abuse of women and anybody who’s in a less-powerful position. You should not use power to abuse people. But that has been happening on a fairly widespread basis.
One of the bizarre things about this whole discussion is that the president himself has been accused by more than a dozen women of varying things, from harassment to assault. We’ve now seen several members of Congress resign over various allegations. Do you think the president should resign or be pressured to address these allegations more forthcomingly?
Well, when you’re talking about presidents, you have to make it plural, not singular. There have been abusers in both parties. Bill Clinton was certainly one. If you go back further than that, there’s misbehavior from previous presidents. The Trump matters are deeply disturbing. They should be dealt with. It’s a challenge, though, when you have a president in office, because it doesn’t help anybody in America if we have a crippled president. Now, he does a lot to destroy his own reputation and his own party, but it’s a little bit different than handling a brand-new election like we have in Alabama right now, where there’s an opportunity not to put a serial abuser in the U.S. Senate. ...
So I think there’s an opportunity here for the Mueller investigation and other things to find what the president did or didn’t do, to have congressional investigations proceed. But in the meantime, I think it doesn’t do Democrats a lot of good, since a lot of Democrats were not as vigilant regarding Bill Clinton as they needed to be.
Beyond the issues that we’ve talked about that are on the table, is there something that, when you go home at night, you think, ‘I wish we were talking about this’? Something that’s outside what’s considered possible right now, but you wish we were leaning into more?
There are lots of issues like that. Unfortunately, given my nerd status, some of them are considered so boring that nobody wants to talk about them. This debt is killing us, and nobody is paying attention to it. We’ve had far more discussions of our debt issues when the debt was actually a tiny problem, and now that it’s so huge, it’s almost impolite to bring it up.
