How House Dems plan to punch back against MAGA attacks on DEI

By Michael Jones

When Maxine Waters became the first Black person and the first woman to chair the House Financial Services Committee in 2019, she did something unprecedented: The California Democrat created the first-ever Subcommittee on Diversity and Inclusion to lead the charge for more diversity in industry workforces, corporate boardrooms and beyond.

The panel’s formation came less than 18 months before George Floyd’s killing, which sparked a short-lived season of solidarity that saw corporations announce billions of dollars for initiatives to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Since then, the country has experienced rapid corporate and social backsliding—a decline that aligns with the erosion of the norms and institutions that sustain American democracy.

For Waters, Exhibit A is her predecessor Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.). After Republicans won the majority in Congress last year, he eliminated the subcommittee’s focus on diversity and inclusion and broadened it to include digital financing, including cryptocurrency.

“Our efforts were always driven by the evidence, which clearly shows that companies with more diverse executive teams perform better financially than teams that are not,” she said during a roundtable discussion I was invited to this week in the Rayburn House Office Building at the US Capitol on countering attacks from the MAGA right on DEI. “[McHenry’s] decision was just the start of an all-out attack on DEI in our committee. And, of course, it is not just in our committee where we’re seeing this kind of backlash.”

McHenry told a conservative outlet last year upon assuming the Financial Services gavel that House Republicans eliminated the subcommittee’s diversity mandate because Democrats used it to “name and share companies until they parroted their work social agenda” and that the digital asset subcommittee would enable the GOP to address the most pressing issues for the US financial system and the American people.

But Waters is spot on when you consider McHenry’s decision within the context of the past few years.

Former President Donald Trump and right-wing extremists were relentless in their attacks against government training on racism and sexism. I’m sure you read the headlines—one from this very column, in fact— that emerged from the bans on books centering people of color and LGBTQ+ characters. The attacks on DEI were a predictable devolution.

The far-right introduced more than 60 bills last year to limit DEI in higher education in half the states and Congress—eight of them became law. Trump-aligned politicians have advocated for unlawful policies that prevent students and faculty from discussing race, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

It wasn’t just Floyd’s killings that ignited the backlash against racial justice movements. Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor were also killed that year. And following the aforementioned commitments from workplaces, schools, and other institutions to expand DEI efforts, far-right activists and right-wing think tanks, with the support of the conservative media establishment, decided to revolt.

Instead of acknowledging that equity enables qualified prior from underrepresented backgrounds to have a fair chance at success, these bad actors promoted bunk concepts like “reverse racism” while exploiting white rage for political gain.

The Waters roundtable was a step toward preparing House Democrats to respond to these harmful attacks.

Committee members heard from an all-women panel, a nod to Women’s History Month—including Arian Simone, co-founder and CEO of the Fearless Fund, the first Black-woman-run venture capital firm solely dedicated to funding women, which is currently being sued for its grant program. The lawmakers said the panelists’ experiences would inform the policy priorities of the committee when Democrats returned the majority.

The panel came a day before Equal Pay Day, the observance of how far into the year women must work to earn what men did in 2023. Prepare for these numbers to enrage you: Women still earn 84 cents for every dollar a man makes. The gap is wider for moms (75 cents), Black women (69 cents), American Indian and Alaska Native Women (59 cents) and Latinas (57 cents).

This gap represents almost $400,000 in lost wages for a woman who works full-time, year-round. In other words, women have less savings for retirement, receive fewer Social Security and pension benefits and are at higher risk of living in poverty as seniors.

The gender wage gap is also an example of how inequities are just bad for the economy.

Let’s say it was eliminated for just one year, a working woman would be able to pay for almost a full year of child care, nearly eight additional months of rent, and more than five additional months of mortgage and utility payments. That’s not all: Women could afford multiple semesters of tuition and fees at a four-year public university, more than six more months of health insurance premiums, enough to last an extra year and the resources to pay off student debt in just under five years.

These data points explain why during every Congress since 1997 Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) has reintroduced the Paycheck Fairness Act—a bill every Congress that would mandate better data collection or pay nationwide, protect employees against retaliation for discussing their wages or salaries, and remove obstacles to joining a lawsuit that challenges systemic discrimination. (The House has passed it four times since then. The bill has died in the Senate each time.)

“More and more Americans are realizing how unacceptable it is—that after three decades, we have made only marginal progress on the issue of equal pay,” she said this week. “We need to break that cycle. At the end of the day, it is really this simple: Men and women in the same job deserve the same pay.”

President Joe Biden has striven to deploy his authority in service of a sustained commitment to make the promise of America real for all of us, despite opposition from Republicans and congressional gridlock.

The budget he submitted to Congress this week calls for deep investments into the care economy, HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions, and businesses owned by women and people of color. 

Many of these policies will receive short shrift unless they have the votes with Democratic majorities. But until then, Democrats hope to lead by example in public so women and people from diverse communities can advocate for change in their personal lives.

“There’s strength in numbers,” Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) told me this week. “So much opportunity presents itself for us to demonstrate the camaraderie, the solidarity, the sisterhood that can help push policy forward. So I hope what you see will help women see the example of what it looks like to unify, collaborate, and join collectively for a really, really meaningful cause.”

Jahana Hayes, a Democrat from Connecticut, agreed.

“We are in the driver’s seat. Women are stepping into places where if you’re not making decisions for us, we’re going to step into these roles and make decisions ourselves—and that’s from Congress to workplaces to everywhere,” she said. “Women have to step up into leadership positions so that when those decisions are made and the text is being finalized that their fingerprints, their footprints, their imprints are all over it. We can’t be on the sidelines. We can’t be in the cheering section supporting legislation. We have to be the ones drafting it, pushing it, moving it forward and amplifying it.”

Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.