lauren underwood
Adventures in remote legislating with the first-term congresswoman from Illinois.
p.10 /
On illinois representative Lauren Underwood’s first flight during the pandemic back in March, she was the only passenger on the plane to Washington, D.C. The 33-year-old—who is the youngest Black woman ever elected to Congress and also a registered nurse with master’s degrees in nursing and public health—has a heart condition (supraventricular tachycardia) that puts her at elevated risk of complications if she contracts covid-19.
This has meant that doing her job—as both a legislator in a country clawing its way through economic crisis, where the unemployment benefits holding up many American families are about to expire, and a candidate up for reelection in November in the historically conservative district she flipped two years ago—has been trickier than usual.
Underwood works mainly while sheltering at home in Naperville, participating in video conferences with colleagues and holding hearings over Webex, but when we speak, she’s in her car taking a “rare field trip” to Waukegan for a press conference on the use of cares Act funds in her district. Before she tells me more about how the work in Washington gets done in a pandemic, she talks about the anxiety of just trying to get to the capital every month. Her most recent flight was full. “No one right next to me,” she says, “but I was very scared because the man on the aisle was very, very, very slowly drinking a coffee without a mask on. It was just like, Oooh, God.”
And that’s all before dealing with her work itself, especially on the big omnibus covid bills being hammered out remotely. “Usually,” Underwood says, “every member in an area of jurisdiction would have the opportunity to shape the bill, to touch it in some way.” But now, “we have been so far removed from that, and negotiations have pretty much been between the Speaker, Mitch McConnell, and Steven Mnuchin. So a lot of the work we’re doing is just trying to flag issues, items that should be priorities, accounts that are running out of money.”
Underwood says sometimes she learns details about bills from the press, meaning one of her biggest everyday responsibilities is “reading Politico, reading the Washington Post, reading the Times several times a day, as these little nuggets of information drip out, so we can react and respond.”
She winds up writing more letters to leadership, and speaking up and calling on Nancy Pelosi and her committee more directly, than she used to. Email and text exchanges between members, she says, “are far more active than they ever were before, because we’re geographically distant from the action. It’s very different from how things have been throughout my first year and a half.”
Underwood is part of the House’s historic 2018 freshman class, many of them young, many women of color, many first-time candidates who swept into office in the midterms. In her 2018 primary, she defeated five white men for the Democratic nomination in her predominantly white district; she then beat the four-term incumbent Republican by running on a platform that prioritized affordable and accessible health care, public education, paid-leave reform, equality in the workplace, affordable child care, and improvements in local infrastructure. Now she and many of her young female peers have found themselves and the issues they ran on at the absolute nexus of global, national, and local calamity.
“We flagged so many of the key issues early!,” Underwood tells me. “The system was broken during good times, right?” She and many of her incoming peers “saw this problem coming with paid leave and affordable child care,” she says. “We saw this problem coming with unaffordable out-ofpocket health-care costs. We saw this problem coming with inequality in our education system. And we started to try to lay the groundwork, but obviously those have all sharpened into focus during this time.”
Her text chains, she says, are mostly with her fellow committee members, others in the Illinois delegation, colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, and the whole freshman class, the members of which have an ongoing email conversation. The freshmen interacted more socially at the beginning of the pandemic, “when the differences were so stark and we were acutely missing one another,” she says. Now, their communications are “more business stuff.” And then there are her girlfriends (whom she declines to name). “We like each other, we trust each other, and we are the ones that are saving our country, period.”
In its way, the crisis has brought even more clarity and opportunity, she says. When 5.4 million people are kicked off employer health-care plans, the argument that health care should be decoupled from employment gets easier to make, and while Underwood—who hasn’t been a supporter of Medicare for All but rather of protecting, expanding, and lowering the costs of the Affordable Care Act, which she worked on in the Obama administration—doesn’t exactly think her constituents are suddenly going to become leftists, she has seen more openness to policy reforms.
“If you ask people, unprompted, to describe which changes they want to see in our health-care system, you wouldn’t necessarily get a fully developed set of reforms, but when we present solutions and give very concrete, localized examples, they embrace it.” She recalls how some of the farmers in her district who were initially the wariest of health-care reform became some of her most enthusiastic backers in her efforts to pass a Health-Care Affordability Act, which would mandate that no family pay more than 8.5 percent of its adjusted gross income on health-care premiums.
Underwood sees racism as a publichealth issue, and her work reflects her understanding of the interconnectedness of oppressions: The covid handbook that her office prepared for constituents links not only to public-health and employment offices but also to emergency child-care services, mental-health and domesticviolence hotlines, food-assistance programs, and numbers to call about broadband access. Earlier in the term, alongside Karen Bass, Ayanna Pressley, Barbara Lee, and others, Underwood introduced a bill demanding the CDC provide a full demographic breakdown of illness and outcomes for those with covid. It’s the kind of information the New York Times recently had to sue to get, and, as she points out, her bill “would require 100 percent reporting; the Times got 50 percent.” It’s also the kind of information the Trump administration is working hard to obscure.
“Because the president believes if you don’t test people, then there won’t be covid,” Underwood says with exasperation. “And he believes that if you hide the ball, that must magically mean everything’s fine. I mean … it’s not fine, Mr. President.” ■