‘When Is It Time to Go?’ A Departing Senator’s Advice for Democrats
The glass cabinet in the waiting room is empty, framed photos that used to hang on the wall have been carted away, and, except for the few remaining staffers speaking in low voices and the sound of packing tape fastening cardboard boxes, California Sen. Laphonza Butler’s office is quiet.
It’s a wonder that there is much to pack at all. Butler only moved into this space on the ground floor of the Hart Senate building — the same office her friend, Vice President Kamala Harris, used to work out of when she was the junior senator from California — 14 months ago.
Fourteen months is a vanishingly short amount of time to spend in a body that moves as glacially as the U.S. Senate, where the average tenure is 11 years, where one current member has worked for more than 4 decades, and where it takes roughly 7 years for a piece of legislation to make it to the president’s desk.
“There is a thoughtfulness — some might even call it a slowness — to the to the pace of the Senate,” Butler says. “But it does allow for relationships to develop over time, for trust to really take hold, and for common ground to emerge to find complicated solutions to what are really complicated challenges across the country.”
Butler says she has been surprised by the collegiality, or as she puts it, how different some members are in person from the characters they play on cable news. It is a wise parting narrative for Butler to adopt, considering that her hopes that any of the bills she introduced this session will advance in the newly-Republican-controlled Senate will rely almost exclusively on their GOP co-sponsors.
The night before we met, Butler presided over the Senate chamber for the last time, and later this week she will deliver a farewell address from the floor in which she will invoke Kendrick Lamar’s “historic rap battle” with Drake, inverting Lamar’s lyrics in a invitation to abandon partisan resentments: “Because, indeed, ‘they’ are exactly like us.”
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Speaking with her, the thing that is clear is that Butler has undertaken a process that her predecessor, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, never did: She has recognized that it’s time to leave.
Feinstein, a legend in her native California, died in office at age 90, so infirm that in her last year she missed dozens of votes and held up the work of the Senate Judiciary Committee at a critical moment when Democrats had control of the chamber and the opportunity to stock the federal bench.
Decisions like hers — like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s refusal to retire while President Barack Obama was still in office, and President Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence on running for another term despite his advanced age — have forced Democrats into their current beleaguered crouch: cast out of the White House, stuck in the minority in the House and Senate, and with a super minority on the Supreme Court that could take decades to break.
In the U.S. House, minority leader Hakeem Jeffries appears to be working to quietly shuffle the oldest members out of leadership positions: 76-year-old Raul Grijalva, 77-year-old Jerry Nadler, and 74-year-old Gerry Connolly are all facing challenges to their leadership positions on key committees. But the party more broadly will, at some point, need to reckon with the age issue that, more than any other, has put them in this position.
Butler, who was appointed to the Senate by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, has some parting thoughts about that. As the former president of EMILY’s List, the most powerful political action committee working to elect Democratic women, and the one-time head of SEIU California, the largest union in the largest state in the country, Butler had both the resources and relationships to mount a credible bid for a full term in office. She chose not to run. (Incoming Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff will be sworn in on Monday.)
It was remembering her decision to leave SEIU, Butler says, that helped clarify the decision in her mind. “I don’t believe that power belongs to one person. I truly believe, when you’re an organizer in the labor movement, the real power of the union is the workers themselves — not the person who’s the president,” she says.
“When is it time to go?” she asks. “I think it has to start with: ‘Whose power is it?’ Are you running for yourself, or are you serving the power of the people who elected you? Who trusted you. And if at any point in time you were no longer able to exercise fully the power that they — not you, but they — have, it’s probably time to have that conversation right with yourself, with your family, with your colleagues.”
The way Butler describes herself — “the granddaughter of a sharecropper, who becomes the president of the largest union in the largest state, then the nation’s third black woman in the Senate” — it sounds like she still might have a media consultant or two on speed dial in case another political opportunity arises in the future.
But she maintains that, for now, she really does not have any plans. “My life so far has taught me that there’s nothing I can’t do,” she says. “I do want to take a moment to appreciate the gravity of what this moment is and what my life has been, and then figure out how I take all of that and think about what is the next step.”
She’ll at least have some company as she contemplates: Her friend Kamala Harris, who will also be looking for her next steps. The pair first met when Harris was running her first statewide race for attorney general, and seeking the backing of the SEIU. At EMILY’s List, Butler championed Harris and helped put her in a position to consolidate support behind her bid for president when Joe Biden withdrew.
Come January, they’ll both be unemployed — although Butler prefers a different term. “I talked to the vice president about the most recent set of transitions that I’ve made, and she’s talked to me about the recent set of transitions that she had been contemplating. We have been really supportive of each other in our moments of transition, and I would expect that that support would continue from this moment forward.”