How Cory Booker went from progressive hero to traitor in under 2 days

Jeff Stein · Saturday, January 14, 2017, 10:11 am

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker was trying to walk to the men’s bathroom Tuesday afternoon when about 30 immigration activists surrounded him to offer their thanks. Booker had just vowed to testify against Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, a longtime immigration hard-liner, at the attorney general nominee’s confirmation hearing — something no senator had ever done to a colleague.

Progressives cheered the decision. When Booker followed through the next day and denounced Sessions’s record on race, many left-leaning voices were ecstatic:

Applauding @CoryBooker, first sitting Senator to testify against fellow sitting Senator. Will oppose #JeffSessions.  https://t.co/3R2JFAYvfV

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) January 10, 2017

But by Thursday, the story about Booker had flipped. The New Jersey senator and 12 other Senate Democrats had joined the bulk of the Republican caucus to kill a proposal aimed at lowering prescription drug prices. What made Booker’s vote all the more anguishing for the left is that the proposal won the backing of 13 Republican senators, and had a real chance of passing.

The recriminations came quickly. “This is classic Booker — stand out front on feel-good social issues, regardless of his past positions, and align with big money everywhere else,” wrote Walter Bragman at Paste Magazine.

Booker has long faced criticism on the left for cultivating the elite financial ties that much of the Bernie Sanders wing despises. And while it’s true that his vote may have had more to do with the concentration of the pharmaceutical industry in his home state, it’s also only served to confirm some progressives’ suspicions that he’s too closely allied with corporate interests in the Democratic Party.

An attempt to rein in out-of-control drug prices goes down

It didn’t help Booker that the amendment he voted against was co-sponsored by the best-known progressive in the Democratic Senate caucus: Bernie Sanders.

On Wednesday, Sanders and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar put forward a proposal during what’s known in Capitol Hill parlance as a “vote-a-rama.” Because of a quirk in congressional procedure, senators were allowed to offer hundreds of proposed changes to the budget resolution Republicans want to use to repeal Obamacare.

The Sanders-Klobuchar proposal would have allowed Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada, where they are significantly cheaper.

“[The Canadians] pay 50 percent less for the same exact medicine that we buy in Vermont or in America. We know why: The power and wealth of the pharmaceutical companies have bought the United States Congress,” Sanders said.

EpiPens, for instance, cost twice as much in the US as in Canada. The depression drug Abilify is more than six times as much in the US as in Canada. Drug companies have scored record profits as the cost of prescription drugs has soared year over year by about 18 percent, according to the Huffington Post.

As Dylan Matthews explained at the Washington Post in 2013, the kind of amendment put forward by Sanders and Klobuchar was mostly symbolic — it would not have actually legalized prescription drug importation from Canada. But if passed, it would have signaled that there’s enough political support in the Senate for the idea, increasing the odds of some real action eventually being implemented.

It’s an idea that has broad public support. One poll found 72 percent of Americans support importation. As the Intercept notes, Trump campaigned on a similar pledge, and on Wednesday he accused the pharmaceutical companies of “getting away with murder” — a quote Sanders then read from the Senate floor.

Why do Americans pay so much more than Canadians for prescription drugs? Because the pharmaceutical industry has bought the US Congress. pic.twitter.com/Si8q8otWj5

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) January 12, 2017
“The time has come for us to stand up to the drug companies,” Sanders said.

It wasn’t to be, as the amendment failed narrowly by a 46-52 margin.

In an email, Booker’s spokesperson cited concerns over the “safety standards” of the prescription drugs that would be coming in from Canada under the amendment. As both the New Republic and the Intercept have noted, that explanation is somewhat hard to believe — the drugs sold in Canada are often literally produced in America, and Canada doesn’t seem to have a particular problem with poisoned medicine.

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http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/14/14262732/cory-booker-senate-democrats