The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 22 episode of
Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch this interview here.
Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic’s Right Now. I’m honored to be joined today by Congressman Greg Casar of the great state of Texas. Thanks for joining me, Congressman.
Congressmen Greg Casar: Thanks so much for having me, Perry.
Perry Bacon: Let me start with a couple items, the things that happened on the news last couple days. So, the story involved just a couple things. I’m gonna start with two things. There are many things. I want your reaction to the news MSNBC broke about border czar Tom Homan, and it appears that DOJ was investigating him. And then it stopped and it sounds like the things he was doing that potentially were illegally were going on in Texas, and of course he’s been kind of the person cheering on this heinous deportation policy and these aggressive ICE raids. So talk about your reaction to that.
Casar: I mean, we’ve always known that Tom Homan was bad news, creepy, and just a hateful guy, but now it’s really clear that he’s also deeply corrupt. The MSNBC report is that Mr. Homan took fifty thousand dollars, allegedly, in order to steer contracts to basically the highest bidder, to basically take money in order to just funnel federal money to them in the upcoming job he was gonna have in the administration.
And I think this shows us two things. One, that we, you know, are living through the most corrupt administration in American history with the Trump administration. That’s number one. And number two, there are individuals and big corporations that are profiting handsomely off of these disappearances of everyday people from our streets.
Of course, this is horrible for the values of our country, horrible for our feelings of safety, for there to be everyday folks that are just being pulled off of the street, families separated, folks sent to prisons and El Salvador detention centers. It’s already bad, but it’s also really important to remember that there’s someone who is making enormous amounts of profit off of that suffering. And we can’t forget that—that [there are] these private detention centers, and then people like Tom Homan, who allegedly were taking bribes in order to steer money to those corporations.
Remember, every time that Trump goes out there and says he’s here to keep people safe, or is there to get the bad guys, that he’s lying to you, and that basically there are folks making money off of the suffering that the Trump administration is putting on the American people right now.
Bacon: Let me ask one other thing that’s happening in the news, which is Jimmy Kimmel still off the air. Is that, in your view, an example of corporate censorship and excessive corporate power, or is that state censorship, or a little bit of both? I’m just curious what you think.
Casar: It’s the combination of both, and that’s how you lose democracy in country after country around the world, where billionaires pour money in to get someone like Donald Trump elected and then do his bidding to shut down the conversation. And so these billionaires have been buying up companies, buying up our media. They want to be able to buy up more. And so what do they go do? They go kiss up to the dear leader, they go do whatever it takes in order to be in favor with the person that’s trying to erode democracy and erode our free speech. This isn’t just about Jimmy Kimmel. This isn’t about any one TV host. This is about whether or not the American people are allowed to speak out against the billionaire takeover of our economy and our government. I mean, really, what we are fighting in the Trump administration is the unholy alliance of right-wing authoritarians with Big Money. And that unholy alliance needs to be broken.
And part of how we have to do that is to break the alliance of Big Money off of the Democratic Party so that we have an actually pro-worker, anti-billionaire party in the Democratic Party that actually is inspiring to people and able to break that unholy alliance on the right-wing side.
And to do that, that means we stop being allied in any way with these for-profit prisons that Tom Homan is allied to, we stop being allied with Big Tech. We don’t need—you know, it doesn’t matter to me whether Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or, you know, the Disney Corporation, if any of these guys sometimes vote for Democrats, it shouldn’t matter.
They are too big, they have too much money, they’re too self-interested, and we should be on the side of their workers, not on the side of their CEOs, whether they’re our donors or not, because they’re not on the side of the people. That’s been proven when the chips fall right now.
So we need a full-on investigation of Tom Homan. We need to find out also and investigate those big companies that maybe were going to profit from those contracts. We need those videos to come out. Similarly, we should be investigating who made the decisions at places like Disney or ABC to censor anyone, because we’ve got to hold the Trump administration accountable but also the corporations that think that auctioning off our First Amendment rights to the highest bidder, or our Fourteenth Amendment rights to the highest bidder, is good politics. It’s not good politics.
Bacon: Let me ask, with this government funding bill coming up, your House members, with due respect, don’t have a lot of agency here, but the senators certainly do. So what should the bottom-line demands be? That Democratic senators should not vote for this government funding bill unless x policy is going to be in there or included? What is the x to you?
Casar: Well, right now, Leader Schumer has laid out a stance that I think is an important and strong stance, which is we are not going to rubber-stamp Trump’s assault on our economy and especially on our health care. Right now, as it stands, the Trump administration and his Republican lackeys in the House and Senate are going to strip fifteen million Americans off of their Medicaid, are going to jack up the [costs for] the twenty million people on Obamacare by nearly 100 percent, going to close clinics and hospitals across the country. This is not just politics. This is a life and death issue, whether you vote or not. And so I think it’s right for the Democratic leadership to say, There’s a line in the sand here; we’re not going to just rubber-stamp these assaults both on our democracy and our economy, but especially, folks, on health care, and this makes this different than where we were back in March. Back in March, I was publicly critical of Leader Schumer saying they were just going to let the funding bill go through without a demand. They’ve posed a strong demand, and I hope they stick to those demands.
Bacon: OK. You mentioned in an answer earlier; you used the phrase “the alliance of Big Money and the Democratic Party.” Talk about—I think there is that—if you look at it, Donald Trump had the most big billion—, you know, gazillionaires giving money. But Kamala Harris had a few too. I think currently Michael Bloomberg gives a fair amount of money to liberal causes. What does it mean to get the big money out of the Democratic Party?
Casar: In my view, we need to pass this new bill called Ban Super PACS; my colleague [Representative] Summer Lee is a part of that effort, where we would just basically get rid of Super PACs as we know them by making sure that they can’t take donations any bigger than any candidate can. Of course, we’ve got to keep our eyes on the horizon of ending Citizens United and ending unlimited spending in our elections because look, I’ll take you a step back here. When we lost this last presidential election, a bunch of us House Democrats were put into rooms, strategy sessions, postmortems for days and for weeks, shortly after this election loss. I’ll tell you, there are people I appreciate and respect, high-up leaders in the Democratic Party who said, Let’s not go after Elon Musk. He’s got too much money and too much power. And oftentimes as Democrats, we are told to wait our turn or ask for permission. We said, Hell no. We’re not asking for permission anymore.
We’re gonna make a central rallying cry of this pushback against Trump 2.0. Firing Elon Musk, and people said we were never gonna get rid of him. We pushed to fire him. People said we were gonna lose this big Wisconsin Supreme Court election race because we’d talked too much about Elon Musk. Elon spent a historic amount of money in that race. We won that election with historic numbers because we were able to point out that because Elon Musk was spending so much money in this election, that’s why people needed to go out and vote. And I think we need to have that kind of a transformation in the Democratic Party, where we use their big money against them instead of being scared of their big money.
Bacon: You’ve been involved with this Fighting Oligarchy tour, and I guess some members of the Democratic Party have said people don’t know what oligarchs are or what that phrase means; that’s too complicated. Others have said, you know, Americans celebrate wealth. They celebrate success at least, and the wealthy are often pretty good at innovating at creating companies or creating things like this. So why do you think fighting oligarchy, taking on the billionaires, is a useful message for the Democratic Party?
Casar: Well, look, I have had some colleagues that have said, Don’t call ’em oligarchs. Let’s call ’em fat cats.
Bacon: Right, right.
Casar: Fine with me, whatever you wanna call it. If the debate between the left part of the party and the center part of the party is whether to call them oligarchs or fat cats, I think Bernie Sanders has won that argument. OK. And further won that argument when recently I went to Tucson, Arizona. That is hundreds of miles from where I am here in the heart of Texas right now. Yeah, we were going to go have the rally—myself, Senator Sanders, and AOC—at Catalina High School.
It’s a big high school, 3,000-person gym. We were excited that we might max out the capacity on this 3,000-person gym in Tucson, you know, which is a city but not one of the bigger cities in the country. My cab driver was about five blocks away from the high school, and he said, Is there a big concert going on? Why are there all these people out here? I said, you can let me out here. And he said, no. The high school is five blocks away. There was a line of five blocks of people. We couldn’t have it in the gym. Twenty-five thousand people showed up. It took over the entire football field. The biggest rally in Arizona history happened that day because people inherently understand that when big money takes over your government, they don’t just screw over your government, they screw over everyday parts of your life. I think that’s the message that has become so clear in the Trump era.
Senator Sanders used to, you know, have that message and sometimes felt like a loner. But there were people at that rally that said, Man, I think maybe he was right this entire time, as you watch the richest people on earth run the Cabinet meetings. And so I think that this is the message that is starting to connect with people. And if the argument between our party is what to call it, I don’t think it matters that much what you call it, you know, in your magazine or a newspaper. What everyday people understand is you should have a say over your own life and your own government—not somebody with infinite money having ten million times your say and you barely get a say.
Bacon: Um, OK. A law is one thing, and Republicans will block that, but is it, would you agree with the idea that the DNC and individual democratic candidates should not take, should not have super PACs and should not take big, massive amounts of money from an individual?
Casar: So what we are pushing and proposing is that within our Democratic primaries we get rid of super PACs against one another. And that is something that we have asked for from the DNC candidates. I know Chairman Ken Martin is actually looking closely into it. Of course, we’ve gotta be ready to fight fire with fire here. If a Democrat is going up against a Republican and the Republican has a super PAC, I don’t want super PACs, but I also don’t think Republicans winning all those elections fixes the problem either. So we’ve gotta ban super PACs for both sides. We should start getting rid of it in our intraparty elections and then win the elections against Republicans to ban them everywhere. Same point on redistricting and gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is bad. It should be banned nationwide. But we cannot continue to unilaterally disarm, where Democrats have very strict rules and Republicans run over the Voting Rights Act. We should ban gerrymandering nationwide, just like we should ban super PACs nationwide.
Bacon: Lemme shift. The great—you know, we’re at The New Republic. There’s a great story in The American Prospect recently about you, actually, and it sort of profiled you in some detail. I thought it was really interesting. You are trying to, in some ways—I don’t wanna paraphrase David Dayen’s piece or your words—but it sounds like you’re trying to make one view of progressive politics, as you’re the progressive podcast chair, is that progressive politics is really for blue districts and blue states. And we’re trying to make the left parts of the country as left as possible. But it sounds like your view is progressive politics—some progressive politics and policies—can work everywhere. So talk about how you’re trying to get progressive ideas into red and purple districts.
Casar: Look, there are progressive ideas where we know we still have to convince the majority of the country, and we can’t abandon those ideas and those ideals. But then there are also progressive ideas that are deeply held by 70, 80, 90 percent of the country—where actually these progressive ideas are more popular than Democrats and Republicans sometimes combined. Think about how raising the minimum wage passed overwhelmingly at the ballot box in red states that Trump won. Think about how things like paid family leave and parental leave pass overwhelmingly in red areas or how progressives were always on the front end of banning stock trading by politicians. The progressive movement, too often I think, we want to prove that we are right and that we’re different, and we’re willing to fight for ideals far before they’re popular. That’s great. But in this moment, we should also talk about the things that are overwhelmingly popular that we believe.
When I have traveled—and I’ve traveled to many Republican-held districts and held town halls because their members of Congress won’t hold them—and there are conservatives in the room, and I talk about making sure Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have to pay the same rate into Social Security as a custodian does, the room lights up. People stand up on their feet and clap, and people say, even if I might disagree with you on this social issue or that one, saving Social Security for generations to come, pulling every senior in this country out of poverty all at once by making sure the ultrarich pay their fair share—that’s a progressive idea, and it’s one the entire Democratic Party should be leading on. I don’t have to have my name on it. If I can make sure that policy is popular and front and center for the Democratic Party, then I hope we can have a winning party again.
Bacon: You named raising taxes on the wealthy, paid family leave, and raising minimum wage. I think Kamala Harris was for all those things and was talking about them in 2024. Are there ideas we’re talking about that are maybe popular and populist that maybe the average Democrat does not talk about right now?
Casar: Well, two things. One, while Kamala Harris did talk about them—and I appreciate it deeply—it was not the first thing when you asked voters, when they thought of the Democrats, what they identified as the first thing that the Democrats were for, and that has to change.
And in part how we change that is by naming a villain, right? Donald Trump oftentimes would say, your housing is too expensive, and he would blame it on a Venezuelan asylum-seeker. Or he’d say health care is messed up, and he would blame it on, I don’t know, LGBT youth that were struggling. But your housing costs didn’t go up because of an asylum-seeker. They went up because of hedge funds that are big-time right-wing donors jacking up the costs in your neighborhood.
So we have to be willing to pick an enemy so that, I think, people will believe us when we talk about what we believe in. And then I do think—just like we were talking about the media at the beginning of this interview—I do think that there needs to be a new vanguard of policies, one of which needs to be, I think, antitrust and breaking up some of these big companies that are jacking up your costs and pushing down your wages. Some of what we need to be talking about is taking on AI and Big Tech. I have the first bill in Congress to ban the use of AI to jack up your prices and jack down your wages.
So those—for folks watching, you may not know this, this could be happening to us right now—but if you go and google, for example, a family obituary, it should be really scary to each of us that all these corporations know that you have googled that, and an airline company could start charging you more to fly than somebody else because they know you’re desperate to get to a funeral.
And so we’ve gotta start taking on some of these corporate practices, and that hasn’t traditionally been the mainstream view of the Democratic Party, at least here in the last couple of decades. We are developing, at the Progressive Caucus, a slate of battleship bills—new progressive populist ideas to hold billionaires accountable, cut down on costs, and raise wages for workers. And we’ll be developing that slate of ideas and hopefully releasing them, if not at the end of the year, at the very beginning of next year.
Bacon: Last question. I agree with, well, what you just said. What about people who of victims of police brutality, transgender kids, immigrants who maybe are not legal here? What about the—a lot of the people who Donald Trump is targeting don’t get to vote? Maybe their causes don’t poll well. I guess I don’t want to hear the Progressive Caucus chair kind of say, uh, well, that stuff doesn’t go well, so we’re done with that. Like, I agree that maybe everybody—
Casar: Yeah, let’s, let’s talk about that.
Bacon: That’s not what you said. I’m just making sure.
Casar: Yeah, let’s, let’s talk about that. That’s very important to talk about. Very important to talk about. Look, there are too many people that have said that the way we win is we throw immigrants under the bus or throw trans folks under the bus or adjust our position somewhat to the right on those issues and hope people believe us. That’s just not right, and it won’t work.
I think what I’m talking about here is actually the answer to that question, which is to say, look, I’m for the rights of immigrants. I’m for LGBTQ equality. But even to those voters that we need to win, that may disagree with me some on those issues, I want to make sure the Democratic Party wins on the economy and on the day-to-day issues that matter in a voter’s life the most.
Because when I was on the City Council here representing an overwhelmingly Latino and Black working-class area, there were so many people who said, Greg, I may not agree with you 100 percent on abortion rights. I may not agree with you 100 percent on some social issues. But you made sure that we got our wages doubled amongst many city jobs. You made sure that you put a park in the part of town that has never been invested in. And so I’m for you. And I think that is the real unifying answer for us.
As a labor organizer I had to, before I was in elected office, go organize on construction sites—oftentimes 200 guys with 200 different opinions on a construction site. But the way you could get everybody together was: Everybody deserved a raise. And if we go and win, then you have an opportunity to work on all the other issues.
The Democratic Party needs to win elections, and that is going to be critical for us to make sure we take care of the vulnerable folks that Trump is targeting and scapegoating every single day.
Bacon: And with that, I think it was a great answer, congressman, thank you for joining me. I’ve admired your work. I’m glad you’re there, and thanks for taking the time to be with us today.
Casar: Thank you very much.
Bacon: Bye-bye.