Source: United States Senator for Massachusetts Ed Markey
Civilian Climate Corps would mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers through national service programs
“President Biden strongly supports [the Civilian Climate Corps],” said Senator Markey. “Senator Schumer has just worked so closely with Senator Coons and I to ensure that it is included and at its core, it just goes to the question of climate justice because this program will ultimately employ hundreds of thousands of people, 50% of which will come from communities and 50% of the funding will go into communities of color, in order to remediate those historic environmental injustices which have affected Black, brown, immigrant communities disproportionately, and we have the strong support from the White House and from the leadership that it will be included.”
“The [Civilian Climate Corps] is just a part of the broader agenda for how we’re going to make a lasting difference on the impact of climate here in the United States,” said Senator Coons. “By partnering with the 25-year-old AmeriCorps program, that has 75,000 young people already serving in every state and territory and has deep experience in running effective national service programs – and adding to its bold mission to make our country more climate ready, more climate resilient – we’re going to be able to put tens of thousands of new AmeriCorps members out all over the country. Whether they’re combating wildfires or strengthening our wetlands and coastlines, we’re going to be creating good jobs, creating a great pathway to earning a college opportunity, higher pay, and a more inclusive and diverse 21st century CCC.”
Q: Joining me now, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey and Delaware Democratic Senator Chris Coons who serves on the Judiciary Committee. Senator Coons, first to you, this is an amazing report. Your committee has been working on it for months. Should I ask what alarmed you most about it?
Sen. Coons: Well, Andrea, this just lays out in great detail, how close we were to a genuine constitutional crisis that President Trump personally pressed and pressured and threatened the acting attorney general to endorse his false and flawed stolen election theory nine times, and it was only because of this determined effort by a small group at the senior leadership level within the Department of Justice to insist they would resign en masse if he proceeded. That’s the only thing that held Trump back from doing so. We need to work with the Department of Justice to restore the guardrails that protect the Department of Justice from political interference by any future president, and we’ll continue to with the ongoing investigation in the House to make sure that final recommendations that come out are meaningful and actionable.
Q: Now with so much going on, Senator Markey, I also want to ask you about what Senator Schumer says about an agreement on the debt ceiling for the short-term extension until December. What does that really resolve? The same issue will be looming over everyone in December, but at the same time, you’ve got to do a continuing resolution to keep the government open so why not confront it now?
Sen. Markey: Well, we have more time to work it out on a rational basis. Obviously, the Republicans were acting irresponsibly—they were putting the full faith and credit of the United States at risk. Here Mitch McConnell blinked. It gives us time, through December, to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill because it’s time to pass the reconciliation bill that has all of the funding in for childcare, for free community college, to deal with the climate crisis. We can get those bills passed between now and the first week of December, and then come back and resolve that issue but time is better to have the crisis later than now because we are still talking, obviously, for whatever his reasons were, Mitch McConnell blinked. And in the meantime, we can get the good things done for our country without this political cloud that the Republicans were seeking to place over that agenda.
Q: And why not tie this to reconciliation?
Sen. Markey: Because they are completely unrelated. The reconciliation bills are about future spending. They’re about a future vision for our country. What the debt ceiling is about paying for the debts that we have already incurred. And by the way, largely under Republican presence, largely under a House and Senate controlled by the Republicans from John Boehner to Mitch McConnell to Kevin McCarthy, you name it. The litany of Republican participation in the construction of this debt is just totally populated with Republican leadership. We want to pay off those debts largely incurred printed by Republicans, and then separate out the reconciliation bill, which is really the Biden vision for the future.
Q: And, Senator Coons, I want to ask both of you about this Civilian Climate Corps plan, which is a part of the overall plan, to employ young Americans in good paying jobs combatting climate change. How would this work, Senator, to both of you?
Sen. Coons: It’s been great partnering with Senator Markey on this. He’s been a real leader on combating climate, and this is just a part of the broader agenda for how we’re going to make a lasting difference on the impact of climate here in the United States. By partnering with the 25-year-old AmeriCorps program, that has 75,000 young people already serving in every state and territory and has deep experience in running effective national service programs, and adding to it a bold mission to make our country more climate ready, more climate resilient. We’re going to be able to put tens of thousands of new AmeriCorps members out all over the country. Whether they’re combating wildfires or strengthening our wetlands and coastlines, we’re going to be creating good jobs, creating a great pathway to earning a college opportunity, higher pay, and a more inclusive and diverse 21st century CCC.
Q: And, Senator Markey, do you have assurances that this will be included in the final bill?
Sen. Markey: There’s broad bipartisan support for this kind of an approach. President Biden strongly supports it. Senator Schumer has just worked so closely with Senator Coons and I to ensure that it is included and at its core, it just goes to the question of climate justice because this program will ultimately employ hundreds of thousands of people, 50% of which will come from communities and 50% of the funding will go into communities of color, in order to remediate those historic environmental injustices which have affected Black, brown, immigrant communities disproportionately, and we have the strong support from the White House and from the leadership that it will be included.
Q: And finally, Sen. Markey, you have been a voice in the wilderness for at least a decade trying to get regulation on Facebook and other Big Tech. And as a result of the whistleblower testimony, now, do you think there is bipartisan momentum for that to happen?
Sen. Markey: Yep, first Frances Haugan – what a hero. She has just issued a blistering, scalding indictment of Facebook activity right from its inception, so now it’s time for us to pass legislation to have a children’s Bill of Rights, up to age 16 so that the parents can control the information which children are putting online and can just stop it if they want to, so that we can pass legislation to stop this pernicious marketing towards children, just taking advantage of their vulnerability because of their young age, and that we can do the kind of research we need to do to complement what we just found out to see what the mental health impacts are of these online social media websites on the children of our country. I think it’s a crisis, it’s time for us to have to deal with it and I think what Frances Haugan did is going to give us the momentum to get it done this year.
Q: And Senator Coons, as someone who knows Joe Biden so well, how’s he doing and do you think he’ll get these big deals through? Is Manchin going to compromise? Will Sinema compromise?
Sen. Coons: He is focused and optimistic about our chance of getting the Build Back Better agenda resolved and reconciled and moved through the Senate and the House. If we get to the end of this year and President Biden signed into law a 1.2 trillion-dollar infrastructure package that’ll create hundreds of thousands of high-skill, high-wage jobs, and, I hope, more than $2 trillion, Build Back Better agenda that over the next decade will invest in a big tax reform of reducing costs for working families, helping make easier challenges like health care costs, childcare, daycare, elder care and confronts climate? We will have a very strong agenda to run on in the midterms at the end of next year, and President Biden should be optimistic, and I think Senator Markey joins me. We are all optimistic that having cleared this hurdle of McConnell’s obstruction on the debt ceiling. We’ve got a clear path towards hammering out a compromise and getting these bills to President Biden’s desk.
Q: Voices of optimism on Capitol Hill, who knows? Senator Coons and Markey, thank you both so much.