Jackson Lee leads the way on social justice
WASHINGTON — When U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee first got to Congress in 1995, Democratic leadership sent her straight to the high-profile House Judiciary Committee — a show of confidence in the freshman from a Houston district long represented by fierce civil rights advocates.
Among them was Barbara Jordan, the first Black Texan elected to Congress, who rose to national prominence from a seat on the committee.
“There were few slots on that committee,” Jackson Lee recalled. “They just saw me, I guess through my profile, through Barbara Jordan’s work — ‘This is the 18th congressional district, and this is where she’s going.’
“I thought it was an honor because they assumed I was going to be the person they needed.”
Nearly three decades later, Jackson Lee has in many ways become just that. The 72-year-old congresswoman, one of the most senior and recognizable members of the Texas delegation, has become a go-to member for House Democrats on a slew of social justice issues, from policing reform to reparations for the descendants of slaves.
Long one of the most active members of the House, Jackson Lee has been busy as ever since Democrats took control of the chamber in 2019.
“She understands that she inherited the district that was the district of Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland, both of whom were serious civil rights advocates,” said Melanye Price, director of Prairie View A&M University’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice. “She has risen to the occasion to become part of the senior leadership, the sort of elder statesman of Congress.”
Jackson Lee works as chief deputy to Majority Whip James Clyburn and serves on the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee,
the House Budget Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee.
Clyburn called Jackson Lee an “effective and unrelenting lawmaker.”
“She embodies what we, as a party, are trying to accomplish, which is to bring this country back toward the path of equality, equity and accessibility,” the South Carolina Democrat said. “From criminal justice reform and voting rights to her work addressing the energy crisis and protecting our homeland, she is a true stalwart fighting to preserve our safety, well-being and our democracy.”
Republicans show Jackson Lee respect, too, even as they strongly oppose some of the policies she advocates.
“Sheila is no shrinking violet,” said Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican with whom Jackson Lee has worked to advance legislation through the Senate. “She always speaks up and has a point to make.”
The reparations bill has drawn particular criticism from conservatives who say it is out of step with race relations in the country.
“I believe she and some of the others are true believers in their view of the world that’s rooted in the 1960s,” said Carol Swain, a former Vanderbilt University professor and prominent Black Republican. “They have not really progressed much beyond that, in terms of creative ways to address the problems of the poor.
“I think that’s unfortunate, because Sheila Jackson Lee and many other Black members of Congress are certainly very talented, and they have the resources, they have the platform, they can actually be doing more for the Black community than complaining about white people.”
Juneteenth holiday
When the House passed legislation in response to the murder of George Floyd, the bill was based largely on police reform legislation Jackson Lee had pushed for years. It would ban officers from using chokeholds to subdue people and forbid no-knock search warrants in drug cases, as well as bolster the Justice Department’s authority to crack down on misconduct and chip away at some of officers’ legal protections when they are sued in civil court.
Jackson Lee led the first rewrite of the Violence Against Women Act in nearly a decade, with new protections for Native American women and provisions that would close the so-called boyfriend loophole that allows those with a history of dating violence to legally purchase firearms. Federal law prohibits abusers from having guns, but only if they were married, lived with or have children with the victim.
She also led legislation that made Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established in 1986. Jackson Lee inherited the effort to commemorate the day that the last enslaved African Americans in Galveston finally learned of their freedom, which Democrats had pushed since 1996, and worked with Cornyn in the Senate to get it passed and signed into law last year.
“I couldn’t for the life of me believe we would ever see this miracle come, which I really associated with in a historical reconciliation and recognition — I’m using those terms — a sense of respect and knowledge for the fact that African Americans, now the descendants of enslaved Africans, were held in bondage for 246 years, longer than the country is old,” Jackson Lee said.
And she successfully shepherded the bill to create a commission to study reparations through the Judiciary Committee. The committee vote was a major milestone, marking the first time the decadeslong effort had received a vote in Congress. The bill now has the support of 195 members, and Jackson Lee says she’s talking to leadership about getting a floor vote on it as soon as possible.
“We are so much further along than anyone would ever imagine,” Jackson Lee said.
Cornyn and Jackson Lee have worked together repeatedly, most recently to get the Juneteenth bill through both chambers and to President Joe Biden’s desk. The bipartisan pair also successfully pushed for a federal study for a 51mile Emancipation Trail between Galveston and Houston, a necessary first step toward establishing a national landmark commemorating the announcement of the abolition of slavery in Galveston.
Those were important achievements, in part because of the history they acknowledge and can help teach — especially at a time of debate over how race is taught in schools, said Price at Prairie View A&M.
“We’re talking about book bans, we’re talking about discussions about critical race theories and what you can teach white children,” Price said. “Having the federal government step up and say, ‘We’ll pay for some of the historical work that might be ignored in this political climate’ is huge.”
Jackson Lee says she works to get Republicans to buy in.
“If you get issues that people are mutually concerned, or they agree with you or buy into your advocacy, then you’ve got a partner,” she said. “The best thing to do is to work with those who work with you and then it will start spreading.”
But the bipartisan agreement has gone only so far, even for Cornyn and Jackson Lee. Like most Senate Republicans, the Texas senator is also opposed to many of Jackson Lee’s priorities. Much of the legislation she has championed in the House remains stalled in the evenly divided Senate.
Senate Republicans oppose the provision in Jackson Lee’s Violence Against Women Act rewrite that would close the boyfriend loophole — a portion of the bill Jackson Lee calls “my heart.” Cornyn has argued state law already prevents abusers from buying guns, though women’s advocates in the state say Texas laws don’t do enough.
Republicans also oppose portions of the policing bill, including measures that would end qualified immunity, which protects police officers from being sued individually over allegations they violated the constitutional rights of members of the public.
As for the reparations bill, the goal is to “bring American society to a new reckoning with how our past affects the current conditions of African Americans and to make America a better place,” Jackson Lee has said.
“We’re asking people to understand the pain, the violence, the brutality … of what we went through,” Jackson Lee said during committee debate on the bill. “And of course we’re asking for harmony, reconciliation, reason — to come together as Americans.”
She says the forming of a reparations commission is not about blaming white Americans and to argue it is about money “grossly misrepresents the commission’s task,” which is to study the “lingering debasement” of Black Americans from a long history of slavery and government-enforced segregation that followed.
‘She’s relentless’
Jackson Lee, however, says she doesn’t want her work to be “limited to social justice issues.”
Now in her 14th term in Congress, she is seemingly in two places much of the time — in Washington, D.C., and in the central Houston neighborhoods she represents.
“It’s her life,” said Glenn Rushing, who served as her chief of staff for 10 years and now works at the Peter Damon Group, a Washington-based lobbying firm. “She’s relentless and she never stops.”
Jackson Lee rarely misses votes in the House — or opportunities to speak on the floor. She has racked up the most appearances in Judiciary Committee hearings of any member on CSPAN’s archives, which date back to 1974.
She has served on the Homeland Security Committee since its inception, a position she says has allowed her to be “a helper at the forefront of every hurricane we have had.” Working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency through that post, she said, is “one of my greatest joys.”
Rushing said he typically left the office between midnight and 1 a.m. when he worked for Jackson Lee. The congresswoman was typically there only late at night, after a full day of committee hearings, floor votes and receptions, where she would make a point to show her face and let people know she understands the issue at hand, he said.
Rushing said Jackson Lee doesn’t keep a schedule so much as a packed calendar with events stacked on top of each other. She’s often trying to make as many of them within the same hour as she can. And she rarely takes vacation, he said. When she does, “she’s still calling staff at one in the morning.”
She is also a regular presence at food distribution drives and in emergency response meetings in Houston during disasters including Hurricane Harvey and the electric grid failures during the freeze in 2021. She helped set up federal COVID testing and vaccination sites during the pandemic, and in November she delivered a eulogy at the funeral of a 16-yearold who was killed in the Astroworld festival crowd rush.
The relentless pace has at times earned her a reputation as a difficult boss, though her supporters say that’s a label often attributed to effective female politicians. Her office regularly has among the highest turnover in Congress, a place known for churn.
But it appears to pay off. The Center for Effective Lawmaking at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University ranked her sixth most-effective in the House in 2021, a list on which she regularly lands near the top.
She also easily wins re-election every two years. In 2020, Jackson Lee faced six primary challengers and drew 77 percent of the vote. This year, she faces no primary challengers and one Republican, Carmen María Montiel, a Houston Realtor and former TV news anchor. Montiel did not respond to a request for comment but has called Jackson Lee a “career politician” who has “given in to the far-left socialist Democrats and their radical agenda.”
Rushing said the pace is what sets her apart from other politicians, especially longtime incumbents.
“A lot of times, people, when they get in office, after so many years, it’s not that they’re not working, it’s just that they find their place,” he said. “She continues to work as if she’s a freshman and still win over the voters.”