AMY GOODMAN: Welcome to Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, broadcasting from the studios of Pacifica station WBAI here in New York, where today the primary is taking place. First, a small victory for democracy in a court decision increasing access to the ballot for Republican candidates. Before we turn to Brooklyn Congressmember Major Owens, let’s go to Joe Conason, managing editor of The New York Observer, a weekly paper here in New York. His front-page story today is entitled “The Brave Judge Korman Ends the D’Amatocracy.” Joe, why don’t you tell us what this court decision is about?

JOE CONASON: We almost didn’t have a Republican primary in New York state. You know, I suspect that most of the listeners to this network are not Republicans. But it’s important that, you know, there’s this — there ought to be a single standard for democracy in a multiparty country, a multiparty state, where it isn’t made impossible for a candidate who wants to run in a particular party to get on the ballot unless they’ve been already approved by party leaders in a particular state.

And that was the case in New York. New York’s ballot access rules were so impossible to meet, as Judge Ed Korman found, that, in essence, the party leadership, meaning Senator D’Amato and Governor Pataki and their functionaries on the Republican state committee, really controlled who could get on the ballot. And they were going to give it all to Bob Dole, which in turn was a kind of a — it was a bad thing for the Republican Party, in general, because New York still controls 10% of the votes that you need to get the nomination. So, this was a very large and unfair advantage to Dole from the beginning. And by deciding — by making the finding that he did, and then being upheld in the Federal Court of Appeals, Judge Korman has prevented this from happening again.

It’s not that their machinations didn’t have an effect on this year’s primary, because it did. You know, Dole is going to win. And maybe he would have won anyway. But they kind of made it much more unlikely to have any real campaign here. I mean, I’m sure everybody in New York has noticed that, unlike '92, when Bill Clinton, Jerry Brown and other people spent quite a bit of time campaigning here — Paul Tsongas — that the Republican candidates this year have not showed up here, basically. I mean, Dole was here the other day for a few minutes at a breakfast in Manhattan, gave a very strange speech in which he said he wanted to be a plumber, wanted to be our plumber, said, “If you needed a plumber, you'd want an experienced plumber. And that’s me. This is all about experience.” But other than that bit of rhetoric, we haven’t seen much of them this year.

So, that’s what it’s about. It’s about, really, a court battle, which ended in, you know, us having a primary with three candidates and the prospect that the Republican Party’s leaders will not be able to control the ballot access the way they have in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: You’d think that Bob Dole would remember a little of history and be a little hesitant to talk about himself as a plumber.

JOE CONASON: Well, that’s actually what the headline — I wrote a second headline for that story, and it couldn’t get in because we have this great cartoon on the jump page called “Rumble in New York,” and it shows sort of Bob Dole as Jackie Chan. But I did say, “Hmm, weren’t the Watergate burglars called the Plumbers?” And maybe that’s some subliminal admission on his part. I don’t know. But it was odd.

AMY GOODMAN: Joe Conason, thank you very much for joining us. Again, Joe Conason, managing editor of the weekly New York Observer here in New York. I’m Amy Goodman, and joining me in the studio here at Pacifica station WBAI in New York for the coverage of the New York primary is Daily News columnist and Democracy Now! co-host Juan González.

Juan, welcome.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Oh, good morning, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s nice to see you here in New York, since I’ve been spending a lot of time in Washington, where actually our next guest is. We are joined right now on the line by Brooklyn Congressmember Major Owens. He is the only librarian in Congress. And he has been there for quite a time now. And he joined with independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, as well as a few others, to form the House Progressive Caucus. We hear members of the Progressive Caucus on Democracy Now! every Wednesday, and occasionally, as you hear now, on Thursday. And we thought it would be interesting to get a perspective on the politics here in New York on this primary day from a Democrat, from an African American congressman in Congress. And that is why we’ve invited on Major Owens, who, in addition to being a congressmember, also writes some rap.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

REP. MAJOR OWENS: Good morning, Amy. How are you?

AMY GOODMAN: Good. I hope you’re prepared for the end, when we ask you for a bit of your rap.

REP. MAJOR OWENS: Oh, no, I’m not, but I’ll see if I can rise to the occasion.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ll think of something. Well, on this primary day here in New York, why don’t you give our listeners, listeners around the country, a thumbnail sketch of the atmosphere here in New York and how politics plays out in the Big Apple?

REP. MAJOR OWENS: Well, it’s going to be a bit anticlimactic after those sweep of all the primaries on Tuesday. I’m interested in seeing what exactly the Buchanan vote is going to be. The word has gone out that the Christian right should switch to Dole, so Buchanan will not get as much of that vote. The Buchanan vote probably will be an indication of the most desperate Republicans there are, the working-class Republicans, the few that there are, and their willingness to vote for a candidate as a matter of protest against the kind of anxiety and insecurity that workers are experiencing.

Buchanan, of course, is not the friend of the workers. He’s just a guy who is receptive enough to see that anxiety there and to take advantage of it. But he’s certainly not the friend of the worker. He won’t support an increase in the minimum wage. He won’t try to stop his Republican colleagues in their onslaught against labor and working people, their attempt to cut back on OSHA and to wipe out the labor standards board, Labor Standards Act. All kinds of things are happening with respect to the attack on workers that Buchanan certainly doesn’t show any interest in.

But I’m interested in seeing how many votes he gets from those discontented people who were there. I think you’re probably going to have a low turnout, because a large number of Republicans who may be discontented and upset and feeling anxieties will probably just not bother to vote, because the Republicans are totally irrelevant, they feel, to the question of — addressing the question of worker anxieties in the age of streamlining, downsizing, layoffs and maximum profits by Wall Street. Dole certainly will not address it, now that he doesn’t have the danger of losing the primary looming before him with respect to Buchanan’s rhetoric in the area of championing the pool of American workers.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, Congressman, you’re discounting — I know you don’t seem to be at all worried in terms of Forbes’s involvement or what kind of turnout he’ll get today.

REP. MAJOR OWENS: Well, Forbes may get a respectable vote in terms of those people who just can’t stomach Dole and see Buchanan’s extremism, of course, as being totally out of the question. New York is not the place for Buchanan in terms of his antisemitism and racism and anti-immigrant position. So you’re only going to have the most desperate kinds of people, who want to send a protest message with respect to their anxieties related to the job and the economy, voting for Buchanan, because the Christian right has sent out instructions: “We don’t want to go with a loser. We want to go with Dole.” Newt Gingrich has sent out instructions: “We don’t want to have Buchanan on the scene with highly visible extremism. Our extremism, we’re going to spend a lot of time” — Newt Gingrich’s goal in the next few months is to try to create an image of moderate Republicanism. The extremism is a fact, but he wants that image that “We’re really not as extreme as we really are.”

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk —

REP. MAJOR OWENS: So, it would be projected. And Buchanan messes that up, because he’s a highly visible right-wing extremist.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about that for a minute, Congressman Owens, because it seems that what Pat Buchanan says is what the Republican legislators in Washington, including Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, do. Now, a couple months ago, I was covering you on the steps of New York City Hall, where you were speaking out against welfare reform, what you call welfare repeal. Do you think that Patrick Buchanan is really an extremist in comparison to, say, Bob Dole when it comes to legislation?

REP. MAJOR OWENS: No, he isn’t. Gingrich and Dole are extremists. The Republican positions and Republican ruling, the way they’ve ruled the 104th Congress, has been extremist rule. And the welfare repeal is just one example of it. They do not only want to pretend that they’re trimming the waste and streamlining the program for better administrative efficiency. They’re going to wipe out the entitlement. It’s almost gone, because I think the president is going to capitulate and let the entitlement for Aid to Families with Dependent Children be taken away. That is extreme. It is extreme to take away lunches from immigrant children. It’s extreme to cut back on the school lunch program. It’s extreme to cut the only federal aid to elementary and secondary education, the Title I program, by $1.1 billion. More than one-seventh of the total amount is cut. That extremism is going, and they are not backing away from their extremism here in Washington. They’re just trying to create an image. They understand they’re in trouble, and they want to spend a lot of time trying to change the image and make it appear that they’re not extreme.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, it seems, then, that what we’re talking here is about relative extremism. And in terms of the way that the Republican establishment in the last week seem to unite and send a message out that this is enough of this situation with Buchanan, do you feel that, to some extent, though, that the Buchanan candidacy, especially if it continues throughout the rest of the primaries, will, in essence, create an opening for the Republican Party to, in practice, produce an even more extreme program and, in essence, open the way for an even more conservative policy to be espoused?

REP. MAJOR OWENS: I see what you mean, but I think that they are not taking that approach. What? You mean Buchanan is so far to the right, until their extremism will be offered as moderation?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Right.

REP. MAJOR OWENS: That approach, I think they are afraid of that. Buchanan is so vocal and so visible, until they’d like to see him silenced. And they’d like to not have the extremist agenda out there so obvious. They want to candy-coat it. And he’s an embarrassment. I hope that he stays in the race. God and American politics work in mysterious ways. And although we know he’s not sincere about his concern for the American worker, he has forced Democrats to begin talking about the issues that relate to the economic injustices and dislocations in our society. Democrats have not been addressing that properly. Democrats have their own set of corporations that they bow down to, and they’re happy about Wall Street making unlimited profits, while at the same time Wall Street forgets about workers and is wrecking the American economy because of the fact that they can conduct so many of their functions in another arena overseas and just destroy the — actually, they’re destroying their own consumer base. And they don’t realize that, but it’s going to be obvious pretty soon.

So, we hope that Buchanan stays in long enough to keep the dialogue going. We don’t have a Democrat out there visible enough. Bernie Sanders and myself and the Progressive Caucus, we’ve introduced legislation to deal with these problems we talk about all the time, corporate welfare. Buchanan has even touched on that, and nobody else will touch that. We’ve talked about it, and we are always beating the drum down here, but we can’t get the level of visibility that media star Patrick Buchanan can get. So, we hope that he will be out there raising that flag, so we can all take advantage of the fact that it at least makes us talk about what’s important in this election.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking with Brooklyn Congressmember Major Owens, who is a nine-termer in the — seven-termer in —

REP. MAJOR OWENS: Seven, yeah, please.

AMY GOODMAN: — U.S. Congress. Well, we’ll see. Maybe we’re being optimistic. You’re with the Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus, which have all been defunded. Where is the Congressional Black Caucus today?

REP. MAJOR OWENS: Well, defunding is not exactly the way I would put it. I won’t try to explain the complexity of that. The Progressive Caucus never took a penny from official funds, so they couldn’t be defunded. It was always just a low-key history independent operation. And the both are healthy and well at this point. The Congressional Black Caucus was inconvenienced by the fact that you could not take money out of your member’s account and pay your dues to provide for the running of the operation. We can support it in many other ways, and we do. So, it’s as healthy as it ever was in terms of being able to function. There’s no curtailment of function.

The problem is: Where does it want to go, and what does it want to do? We’re strong in the area of — we continue to produce an alternative budget. I’m the chairman of Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget task force. And we produced one last year in concert with the Progressive Caucus, where we produced it at the Black Caucus level. And they reviewed it at the last minute. We made changes. This year, we’re working together to produce a unified budget from the very beginning. And we want to go right into the appropriations process and the reconciliation process all together as the Congressional Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus.

So, we are out there offering the alternatives. We are the conscience of a Congress which, you know, has a real problem dealing with its conscience, certainly the conscience of the Democrats, and growing. We are bigger than the Blue Dog contingent. Our two contingents together make up larger numbers than the conservative Democrats. And we just have to keep pressing in the arena of the infighting for advantages and trying to get our message out and raise the level of courage among Democrats. They’re not courageous enough —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Congressman, can you point to —

REP. MAJOR OWENS: — to take on —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Can you point to any particular successes that you’ve had, given the fact that not only is the Congress firmly in the grip of conservative Republicans, but that the president is more often willing to compromise and to cede ground to those forces than not, although, admittedly, with the recent budget, he’s stood firm? But can you point to any successes that this alliance of the Progressive Caucus and the Black Caucus have had in the recent sessions?

REP. MAJOR OWENS: Well, we think it’s very important. The fact that we have stood so firm and pressed so hard on certain issues have led to a stalemate, at least. We were afraid, when the Gingrich forces came on with their bully tactics, shutting down the government and threatening default and — we were afraid the White House was going to cave completely. And it took a lot of maneuvering behind the scenes to keep the pressure on the Democratic Caucus of the Congress and make them keep the pressure on the White House to stand fast. And they stood fast long enough to see that the public was with him.

So, once the public — and, of course, we had a lot to do with educating the public as to the horror of the school lunch cuts and the environmental cuts and the assault on labor with respect to OSHA and the Labor Relations Board. And a steady drumbeat back into our districts and drumbeat over the C-SPAN has raised the level of awareness to the point where the public opinion polls show that when people are asked the question, “Would you like a Democratic Congress or Republican Congress next go-around?” we are nine points ahead. The president, of course, is ahead in the polls. And once we were able to keep up the courage level to the point where the president held out until public opinion came to his rescue, then public opinion took over, and the White House stood fast.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Owens, we’re going to have to —

REP. MAJOR OWENS: Is staying fast.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Owens, we’re going to wrap up. We have 30 seconds. But I was wondering if we can end on one of those raps that relieves your political frustrations.

REP. MAJOR OWENS: I wish I’d known. I don’t memorize them that much. But there’s one that’s very relevant. I wrote it several years ago when they were negotiating with George Bush at the White House. Democrats in the Congress was negotiating with a Republican president, and it became quite relevant when the tables were reversed. I wrote a rap called “The Meeting of the Mob.” In that great white D.C. mansion, there’s a meeting of the mob. And the question on the table is which beggars will they rob. There’s a meeting of the mob. Now we’ll never get a job. There’s a meeting of the mob. And I went on, developed that. It is still very relevant.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Owens, we want to thank you very much for joining us. And when we have you back, we want to talk about what you’ve been doing around education, known as the education congressman in Congress. You’re listening to Democracy Now!, Pacifica’s national daily grassroots election show. Coming up next, the president of UNITE and Democracy Now!’s chance to catch up with Hillary Clinton. Stay with us.