WeeklySenator.org is on hiatus. Weekly Senator is the first voter donation platform to offer its members multiple recipient weekly funding. Thank you for supporting this experiment in voter eduction and crowdfunding.
Chris Van Hollen
Maryland
Senator since 2011
2022 midterms
“Last night’s ruling by SCOTUS is devastating. We’ve got to act. Congress must step up now to codify the reproductive rights guaranteed to women by Roe v. Wade – and we can’t let the filibuster stand in the way. The health of millions of women is at stake.”
Once the divisions ruptured, and the core was exposed, no one could have predicted how deep and dark and caustic the next four years would feel underneath a Donald J. Trump presidency. Not one congressperson navigated the next four years without encountering frustration, fatigue, and toxicity. The public called into question the constitutions of their friends and family. Amidst the chaos, something else would be made vulnerable, a shift not perceptible enough to pin down. Some will pinpoint the Capitol breach on January 6th; others will not. Most will express the feeling of having barely escaped. A few might say they expected worse. None will deny wondering if America’s two-party system had all but buckled under the weight of its categorical binary, if the physics of our democracy had finally just encountered its first seismic failure.
This ought not be a reason to despair. An honest questioning of the self-political and otherwise brought Stacey Abrams to ask, “What makes the modern Democrat?” So much good has come from just that. Democrats need only travel a little way north of Georgia to find more proof of home-grown Democratic sensibility, stopping at the mid-Atlantic’s mouth: there, at the humbly blue state of Maryland.
Maryland voters talk about their local state representatives the way they talk about Chris Van Hollen, a man who’s well-liked and easily understood. He was once a local representative and now that he’s a junior senator, he’s regarded without much controversy.
Van Hollen speaks with an approachable but eclectic mix of worldly and down-to-earth energy, an energy apt to characterize most of Maryland’s population as well. Born in Pakistan to parents who worked for the State Department, he spent much of his upbringing traveling with his family throughout South Asia. He earned a degree in philosophy at Swarthmore College, a master’s in public policy from Harvard University, and a law degree from Georgetown. During his master’s, Van Hollen acquainted himself with Maryland politics for the first time, working as a legislative assistant for Republican Senator Charles Mathias. Five years later, he’d go on to serve in the Maryland General Assembly, moving his way from its House to the Senate. In 2002, Van Hollen would be elected to the United States House of Representatives. He beat his Republican opponent, Connie Morella, who had previously won eight times in that district. Even though she was a Republican, she supported liberal causes like gay rights, pro-choice, gun control, and environmental protections. As a result of Morella’s centeredness, Van Hollen adopted more progressive platforms early on in his career, which narrowly had him beat out Morella. He might have lost his race had the district not just been redrawn to include the neighboring Prince George, a predominantly Black and Democratic county.
Van Hollen established himself as one of the nation’s leading advocates for improved public education and gun control. At the time, his proposals called on radical bipartisan support and would never develop to the degree that Van Hollen intended. However, Van Hollen’s work on education would eventually pave the way for Republicans to fund their own version of education reform, the No Child Left Behind act.
Van Hollen spent most of his time in the lower chamber working with the familiar officials on ambitious local-interest projects, like transportation and gun-control legislation. Even his interest in correcting climate change came out of a local movement to conserve the Chesapeake Bay watershed. By the time Van Hollen was elected to the Senate in 2016, his set of progressive politics had been practiced and refined.
On January 6th, Van Hollen arrived in the Senate after the Capitol had already been breached. Capitol Police directed him to take shelter in his office. Later when reflecting on that day, Van Hollen said, “I never thought we would live to see the day that violent mobs seized control of the Capitol. I cry for our country.”
—Jacy Bryla
Jacy Bryla is an editor and writer from California and Florida. In 2019, she graduated from The New School with an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction. She’s managing editor for the prose column for LIT Magazine and was a contributing editor for Issue 33. Her interests and work span myriad disciplines, from the likes of audio journalism and oral history to hybrid fiction and critical essay.
Voting Record
Van Hollen falls on the slightly more progressive side of the Democratic senatorial camp, and his voting record reflects that. His proposed legislation and co-sponsorships read as thoughtful, often finding balance in broadening the specific needs of his constituents outwards to the rest of the Democratic party. He’s voted in alignment with his campaign pledges on education, healthcare, and domestic economic policy.
Van Hollen breaks from the Democratic voting block infrequently. The few times he has departed from the majority are around confirmations for Trump appointees, those few being for William Cooper for the general counsel for the Department of Energy, Randal Quarles to member of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve, and John Rakolta for ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. It may have simply been that these nominations were uncontroversial. The supposed trend to deny all three nominees might come from the block’s uneasiness around each of these men having led prominent private companies.
It should be noted, however, that Van Hollen supports legislation that seeks to limit corporate interference in governmental affairs, so much so he received an 8 percent rating from The Club for Growth. The club purports to be a scorecard measuring a senators’ record on issues “that would raise taxes, increase harmful regulations, and grow our already massive government…” Or in other words, get in the way of free-market small-government purists.
Policy Positions
Economy
Van Hollen’s approach to the economy stems from a fairly simple philosophy that seeks to rectify inequities with the creation of higher-paying jobs and increasing the working class’s purchasing power. Van Hollen specifically campaigned on raising the minimum wage, closing the pay gap between genders, as well as strengthening the bargaining power of unions. Since taking office, introducing and passing major legislation has proved difficult for the Democratic party under the Trump Administration. Meanwhile, Van Hollen has not been shy around his designs to regulate corporations as a countermeasure against outsourced labor and corporate greed. In fact, Van Hollen’s first Senate proposal was the CEO-Employee Paycheck Fairness act, which would have required corporations to offer all of their employees raises if the corporations were to offer bonuses to CEO and executive level management.
Healthcare
Akin to his economic philosophy, Van Hollen believes that building up the health of the nation must come from a multifaceted solution that enriches public health systems and promotes other federal policies that prevent people from tending to their medical needs. Van Hollen has expressed that he’d vote to move to a Medicare For All system out of a repaired Obamacare first. His concern around focusing on Obamacare first stems from a fear that instability in the current market will hike up costs and misrepresent to the public the benefits of a single-payer system. What separates Van Hollen from his senatorial cohort are specific proposals to regulate prescription drug costs, going so far as to name Medicare as the regulatory body that would negotiate down and stabilize all prescription drug costs, even for those with private insurance. Another element of Van Hollen’s health platform includes an attempt to federalize paid sick leave. Unfortunately, the culture of employees feeling like they must show up to work while they’re sick contributed to the rapid spread of coronavirus and led to more excess morbidity and mortality in the United States. Individuals not offered paid sick leave by their employers tend to belong to racial or class groups already subject to higher rates of poverty and illness. A federalized paid leave program would be the first step in addressing these vulnerability groups, divorcing the worth of one’s health from the amount of one’s pay. Van Hollen also believes that health can be successfully managed through preventative measures and wants to establish larger budgets for the NIH and other public health organizations. According to Van Hollen, public health has gone on far too long with too few resources and too much responsibility, saddled with the expectation of conducting vital research meanwhile managing endemic illness such as addiction and HIV.
Education
Education constitutes a primary issue for Van Hollen’s political career as well as his 2016 campaign, when he pledged to prioritize public education in the legislative and national discourses. His platform at the time included a rather progressive and intersectional interpretation of the relationship between poverty and educational access. Putting it succinctly, Van Hollen has said that “one of the greatest obstacles to escaping poverty is the staggering cost of higher education.” Since being elected, Van Hollen has expressed alarm around the unchecked, crushing cost of higher education. He likewise hopes to undertake a set of creative reforms to address inequities in K-12 schooling, citing the lack of emphasis placed on the upstream effects of institutional failures in early education. Education reform cannot wait. There need not be a stalemate in proposing any solution that might immediately alleviate or eliminate student loan debt. Just this year, Van Hollen reintroduced the PACT Act, legislation that responsibly commits Congress to fully funding Title 1 and IDEA, a program made to address education disparities for individuals with disabilities.
Endorsements
League of Conservation Voters
NARAL Pro-Choice America
Maryland State Education Association
Veterans and Military Families for Progress
Capital Gazette
The Baltimore Sun
Sierra Club
Brian Frosh,
:
Maryland Attorney General“I’ve known Chris for over 20 years, and he is, without a doubt, an extraordinarily gifted and effective legislator. He is passionate, hardworking, and smart — exactly who Maryland needs in the Senate.”
Joanne Benson,
:
State Senator Prince George County“Chris understands Prince George’s County — and not only does he understand, but he has the good sense to find the resources to deliver. I want you to support a person who has a track record of getting things done and who has the ability to win friends and influence people.”
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend,
:
Former Maryland Lieutenant Governor“I’ve known Chris Van Hollen for a long time — and to know Chris is to know that he puts the people of Maryland first. Retirement security is an issue on the minds of every Marylander — workers and small business owners, old and young. Chris’s plan to improve the tax code so it rewards retirement savings, as well as his work to strengthen Social Security and protect Medicare, are critical to our nation’s success. He also fights every single day to improve our schools, create good paying jobs, and ensure women have equal pay and equal access.”
State: Maryland
So much to say and what of it: That’s the way of Maryland, tending to only make sense to natives, and reading a bit dialectical to everyone else.
Let’s take Baltimore for example. Baltimore remains the state’s largest city despite becoming 40 percent less populated over the past five decades. Generally, a state’s most populous city is its center of commerce. In the case of Baltimore and Maryland, this proposition is outright antithetical.
If you’ve watched The Wire, you might recall the city’s recession and the slow shuttering of the Chesapeake Ports. Redlining and disinvestments in majority Black neighborhoods showed up as early as the 1940s; and these racist tactics employed by white developers account for much of Baltimore’s downward economic spiral. Everything else that followed was simply made worse.
Maryland’s suburban economy is just as unintuitive and precarious as Baltimore’s anti-economy. The state retains much of its wealth in the smaller cities that track alongside the Capital Beltway, I-95, and Maryland’s “Fall Line.” Suburban communities such as Silver Springs and Germantown primarily consist of D.C. commuters and their families, who traffic their D.C. wealth into Maryland property tax. For decades these communities worked to localize and fortify their wealth, lining the state’s pockets along the way.
Now, with rents soaring around the nation’s capital, the new D.C. professionals have started to take up residence in Maryland once again. However, this cohort acts differently than their predecessors did. They yearn for urban amenities and scoff at high buy-ins for starter suburban homes, which makes wondering about how this new group fits in feel a lot like a riddle.
What’s likely to happen is that Maryland’s Democratic coalition will strengthen even more. As if in defiance of its history of contradiction and change, Maryland continues to prove it is reliably blue.