Although her Design District office is right above mine, I’ve rarely seen Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson since she and her staff moved into our building. That’s because when she’s in town, she’s in her office long before I get in — and she stays later than I do.
Most observers expected the long-term congresswoman, now 81, to retire at the end of her current term. But Johnson said she has too much to do to step down now — and plenty of energy to campaign and serve for another two years. Her young staff has trouble keeping up with her.
Johnson said she has only met Donald Trump once since he was elected president: She shook his hand at a reception and congratulated him on his win. He replied, “I know you didn’t expect me to be elected. Neither did I.”
Johnson said she’s still trying to figure out what the president stands for, but is in disbelief that he couldn’t simply disavow Nazis. “It’s like reliving the past,” she said. “A past you had not really thought of experiencing again.”
She also weighed in on the fate of the two Confederate monuments in Dallas, noting that she told Mayor Mike Rawlings he was proceeding in the right direction by having a task force address the issue to come up with the best solution. “It’s not the responsibility of taxpayers to pay for relics where a good percent of the people were abused,” she said.
Johnson speculated that a museum or private land were appropriate places for such monuments, but worried the public would still have to maintain a museum and any private property that would offer sanctuary to the monuments would also be Klan rallying point or become an attraction for white supremacists.
She contrasted honoring Confederate leaders to her campaign to honor her hometown World War II hero, Dorie Miller. Miller, from Waco, was on the U.S.S. West Virginia in Pearl Harbor. After his ship was torpedoed, he grabbed a machine gun and shot down a number of Japanese aircraft. He was recognized as one of the first American heroes of World War II, but was never awarded the Medal of Honor — because he was black.
Fixing healthcare
Beyond Confederate monuments and Trump, Johnson prefers to concentrate on the issues most important to her and her constituents. Improving healthcare, expanding the number of people covered and fixing those provisions of the Affordable Care Act that need to be fixed are among her legislative priorities. That’s not surprising from someone whose career began in nursing and who, as a state senator, wrote Texas’ first AIDS legislation.
Johnson said she isn’t surprised Republicans couldn’t repeal the Affordable Care Act.
The Freedom Caucus just wants to repeal the healthcare law, and other Republicans want to change it or replace it with something new, she explained. And the farther they get from repeal to change, the more votes Republicans lose from the Freedom Caucus. And on the flip side, the more the new law changes the ACA — by eliminating protections for those with pre-existing conditions or keeping a child on a policy until age 26 — the more they lose votes from the other side.
While Johnson supports the ACA, she said it does need to be amended.
“Social Security may be the best piece of legislation ever passed, but it was amended,” she said. “Even the Constitution has been amended. In a democracy, things are likely to change.”
The solution, Johnson said, is to come up with a bipartisan fix, one that she said she could write with a Republican from a neighboring district. But the current polarized Congress wouldn’t accept that sort of solution.
“We’ve got to address prescription costs,” she said. That’s a problem nationwide, but here in Texas, “We have the largest number of working people who can’t afford healthcare in the country.”
She blames the insurance industry for many of the problems with the ACA, declaring that “Healthcare was never meant to be a cash cow.”
Johnson said she would love to sit down with “sensible people who would come to the table” with reasonable fixes that would bring down costs and fix some of the problems with the current law. She said some people in her party are worried that Trump would get credit for fixing healthcare. But she tells them it doesn’t matter who gets the credit, as long as healthcare gets fixed.
“When we get away from who gets the credit, we get things done,” she said.
Redistricting and Pete Sessions
While Texas’ redistricting battle rages on in the courts, Johnson doesn’t think the boundaries of her district will change much, and she hopes to continue representing most of Oak Lawn. Republican Rep. Pete Sessions wants his district to move into more of Oak Lawn and even downtown, but Johnson said she isn’t sure why, since those areas aren’t likely to vote for him even though, he has told her, he’s confident they will.
Johnson said she believes the main reason Sessions wanted Oak Lawn Avenue, in particular, moved into his district was so he could stop her campaign to rename the post office at 2525 Oak Lawn Ave. after Dallas LGBT rights pioneer Bill Nelson.
Johnson was also dismissive of the “bathroom bills” that right-wingers refused to let die in the most recent session of the Texas Legislature, and the special session that followed.
“I had people tell me from all over the country if the bathroom bill passes, they’re not coming” to Texas she said. But Johnson is more practical than that. While acknowledging all the gains made over the past decade, she said, she thought it would be harder to pass hate crime legislation today than it was 25 years ago.
Looking ahead
As ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Johnson sees many exciting things coming in the future.
“Old fashioned jobs aren’t coming back,” she said, referring to things like Trump’s promise to revive the coal mining industry. If people who’ve lost jobs to automation hope to find new opportunities, she said, they must upgrade their skills.
On her committee, Johnson said they’re trying to keep ahead of innovations like driverless vehicles. She explained that the hourly wage for truck drivers plus their healthcare and insurance on their vehicles mean driverless trucks will be on the road “as soon as they can figure out a way to convert those vehicles.”
Even service jobs are being replaced with automation: “The new Aloft Hotel on Mockingbird is using robots for room service,” she said.
As UT Southwestern continues to expand, Johnson said, it will be mandatory to provide transportation between buildings that may be a mile apart. Toyota may be interested in furnishing a demonstration project using driverless vehicles around the campus.
And that brings Johnson back to one of her interests — mental health: A new facility at UT that she said would be to mental health what M.D. Anderson in Houston is to cancer care and research.
Johnson said the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology is the “door to the future,” and she is concerned that both NASA and the National Science Foundation be funded at functioning levels to continue their research.
While Trump was supposed to hold a press conference dealing with maintaining infrastructure last week, he instead used the opportunity to defend Nazis. But infrastructure funding is a major concern for Johnson concern of hers. And, “We’re talking and not doing anything about it,” she said.
In the next Congress, Johnson hopes at least one more Democrat from Dallas goes to Washington, whether district lines are redrawn or not. To prepare for that election, about half a dozen candidates in neighboring districts have already come to her for advice.
“Go to a map,” the congresswoman who’s been elected to her seat 13 times told her potential colleagues. “Where you have strength, concentrate on that.”
That’s the strategy she’s been using for years.
SOURCE: Dallas Voice print edition August 25, 2017, David Taffet.
