The complicated politics of the poor

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

Chip Pickering was ticking off the ways Congress had stepped up to the plate to help after Hurricane Katrina:

“Initially, [there was] the quick passage of emergency appropriation bills with $10 billion and the $60 billion package,” he said. And that’s only the beginning. “There’ll be energy packages, agriculture-, infrastructure-, education-, Medicare- and Medicaid-related legislation” — all possibly by Thanksgiving.

Charles W. Pickering Jr. represents heavily damaged Mississippi counties in Congress. He is a Republican who is proud to call himself a fiscal conservative.

Pickering is grateful for the federal largesse, even as many of his Republican colleagues raise alarms about the government’s exploding deficit spending. “The breadth of the destruction” from Katrina reminded everyone — conservatives and liberals alike — that the first duty of government is to protect its people.

“It’s not just the pictures of New Orleans or the Mississippi Gulf Coast where you had the destruction and the devastation,” Pickering said. “You had hurricane-force winds of 90 to 120 miles [per hour] that caused severe damage to the largest parts of our economy — forestry and poultry and agriculture.”

Conservative choices from the poor
Like most of the congressmen representing the parishes and counties of Louisiana and Mississippi flattened by Katrina, Chip Pickering is strongly conservative. New Orleans, a traditional Democratic urban powerhouse, is an obvious exception, but otherwise, most of the congressmen in the region — although they represent some of the poorest people in America — have consistently taken positions considered more favorable to business interests and the wealthy and have opposed those backed by labor activists and advocates for the poor.

Greg Campbell / AP Hurricane Katrina briefly obliterated political lines: Leisha Pickering, the wife of Rep. Charles W. “Chip” Pickering Jr., R-Miss., helped unload relief supplies for hurricane survivors last month with the Rev. Jesse Jackson in Jackson, Miss.

Pickering is a leading advocate for lower taxes, less government spending and less regulation of business. His ratings from pro-business groups such as Americans for Tax Reform, the American Conservative Union and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are consistently in the 90s. His ratings from pro-consumer and anti-poverty groups such as Public Citizen, the National Association of Social Workers and the Catholic Social Justice Lobby hover near 0.

Pickering voted against raising the federal minimum wage, which has stood at $5.15 an hour since 1997. He voted to permanently repeal the estate tax on wealthy Americans and to make it more difficult for individuals to shelter their assets when seeking personal bankruptcy protection.

It’s a similar story in western Louisiana, where Republican Jim McCrery represents the 4th District. The 4th District includes Beauregard Parish, where no Interstate highway goes through and where a fifth of the population lives below the poverty line.

McCrery also scores nearly perfect on the pro-business lobby’s scale. In addition to opposing a higher minimum wage and backing repeal of the estate tax, McCrery voted against employer subsidies to prevent millions of retirees from losing their prescription drug benefits. This year, he voted to cut spending in non-defense, non-homeland security programs rather than jeopardize $182.6 billion in federal tax cuts.

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