Sandré Swanson's Support of Congresswoman Lee's Historic Stand
On September 14, 2001, Congresswoman Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote "No"— opposing President Bush's historic War Powers Resolution. Sandre Swanson, as the Congresswoman's chief of staff, has received praise for his advice and support during that historic decision.
Sandre R. Swanson, Lee's chief of staff at her home office
in Oakland, consulted with the congresswoman by telephone throughout the difficult days leading up to
the vote on House Resolution No. 64. Swanson's cousin was a flight attendant on United flight 93 and
perished when the hijacked plane crashed in Pennsylvania.
"Our discussions did consider the possibility that we would stand alone in this vote, but that was dismissed as irrelevant," Swanson said. "This isn't a popularity contest vote."
Swanson said Lee's vote was not based upon emotion but upon common sense and congressional duty. Representatives are the men and women who declare war; Lee did not want "to openhandedly turn over that power to the president." Her vote, he said, "had nothing to do with sympathizing with terrorists."
— Los Angeles Times
— September 18, 2001
"I support her decision," Swanson says. "The principle on which she based her decision was that somebody should stand up and say that only Congress has the power to declare war. ...People say she was unpatriotic. I think it was very patriotic."
— Washington Post
— September 23, 2001
Her principled but controversial stand made it necessary for her to have a Capitol police escort because of death threats and other hostile reactions among the more than 50,000 E-mails, faxes and telephone calls that flooded her office. However, 73 percent of the feedback has been encouraging. Ironically, such calls were fielded by her staunchly supportive chief of staff, Sandre Swanson, who was mourning the loss of his cousin, a veteran flight attendant who died working on the hijacked United Airlines flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
— Essence Magazine
December 2001
(All three articles are reproduced in their entirety on the foil owing pages.)
Storm Greets Lone Dissenter in |
 September 18,2001 |
Aftermath: Rep. Lee of Oakland is a lightning rod in the debate over
terrorist attacks. She says
Congress should retain authority to declare war.
By Maria L. LaGanga
Los Angles Times
(Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times)
SEE CORRECTION APPENDED;
Congressional votes -- An article Tuesday suggested that Jeannette Rankin was the sole congressional opponent to World War I and World War II. She was the only member of Congress to oppose both of those wars, but some other members did vote against entry into World War I.
The calls came in so fast that Rep. Barbara Lee's voice mail message system bogged down. She has received 20,000 e-mail missives in the last three days. Plainclothes police officers guarded her Washington, D.C., office.
After casting the lone vote against giving President Bush broad authority to combat terrorism, Lee has become a lightning rod for strong views that divide a nation perched on the edge of war. Judging by the flood of mail and other contacts, constituents and others see her either as a symbol of deep conscience, abject cluelessness, rare reason or misguided pacifism.
An agonized Lee cast her vote late Friday after sleepless nights and lengthy consultations with religious leaders, friends and family members. From the floor of the House of Representatives, she had warned a nation traumatized by attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center that; “we must be careful not to embark on an open- ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.”
It was the historic clarion call of California's 9th Congressional District, home to a university with a peace studies major, a city with its own left-wing foreign policy and a generation- long tradition of challenging the ruling-class ethos of America.
On Monday, residents of that district, which covers parts of Berkeley and Oakland, voiced mixed opinions about their congresswoman's vote. Some said they were ashamed of her action, while others praised it or at least admired the courage she showed in voting her conscience.
If any district would send a representative to Congress who would be the “1” in a 420-1 vote against war powers, it would likely be the 9th. And if any district were to reward such a vote with another term in office, it would likely be the 9th.
"This is a district that has stood out in the country in terms of the strength of the voices, the consistency of the voices against war and militarism as solutions to any of the problems we have in the world," said Wilson Riles Jr., who is running for mayor of Oakland and applauded Lee's decision on Monday.
A poll posted on the Web site http://www.SFGate.com—a combined effort of the San Francisco Chronicle and local NBC-TV affiliate KRON--showed that 59% of respondents approved of Lee's vote, saying she "stood up to pro-war fever." Another 9% said they disagreed but respected her for voting her conscience. Only 32% said her vote "weakened [the] unity of [the] nation."
Staff in Lee's Oakland office said calls Monday were 85% positive, although her press secretary in Washington described responses from within and outside the district as a decided "mixed bag."
Scores of people stopped by Lee's Oakland office. Some complained and threatened to unseat her in the next election, while others delivered flowers in appreciation of her courage. Her staff members listened through bulletproof glass inside her office on the 10th floor of the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building.
“We're deeply upset by this vote," said Jennifer McMahon, a 31- year-old public relations worker. "When my husband and I heard about this Friday night we felt ashamed of our ZIP Code."
Martin McMahon said he and his wife called Lee's office all weekend and decided to visit when they could not get through. "Congress made the right decision," he said. "What's wrong with her?"
Retired high school history teacher Eldon Rowe said he was so angered by the vote that he composed a letter to hand-deliver to Lee's office. As Rowe read his letter aloud for a reporter on the street outside the office, passersby stopped to listen. One walked up and shook his hand.
"You're elected to represent voters," Rowe read, "and not become a preacher for your own form of moral values. In all the things that Gary Condit did, at least he represented our interests. You didn't do that. You failed."
As he read a newspaper during a sunny lunch hour in downtown Oakland, consultant Gus Newport said he was proud of Lee. "There are alternatives to waging war and I'd like to see some of them explored," he said.
Newport said he understood the widespread desire to react quickly. He was in New York City when the World Trade Center was struck, and he flew home to Oakland on Friday under tightened security.
"I thought it was a brave act," he said of Lee. "For days now, I've heard the criticism from so-called liberals on the street. And I've just said to them 'Do you want your politician to vote on the basis of what she thinks is right or to take the party line just to stay in office?' "
In nearby Alameda, the noon-hour regulars at the Pop Inn dropped their sports arguments for a heated discourse on geopolitics.
"I don't like her attitude. I think she's totally wrong," said 66- year-old retired gas worker Don Infarrera.
Just down the bar, under a sign that announced "Hangover Square," John Sullivan nursed an Anchor Steam beer and a shot of whiskey. "Leave her alone," he said. "She voted her conscience"
To which Infarrera replied: "I think she ought to be recalled."
Sneered electrician Glenn Forster: There's a word for people like her: peacenik."
In Berkeley, many people sympathized with Lee, saying her vote was not a swing vote that influenced foreign policy, but a singular voice of conscience.
"We have to take a look at the consequences 24 months down the road for the things we do today," said Rolf Bell, development director for Habitat for Humanity International in Berkeley. "If we're not careful, we're going to be perceived as the enemy by 1 billion Muslims worldwide. If we act rashly, the terrorists have already won."
Sandre R. Swanson, Lee's chief of staff at her home office in Oakland, consulted with the congresswoman by telephone throughout the difficult days leading up to the vote on House Resolution No. 64. Swanson's cousin was a flight attendant on United flight 93 and perished when the hijacked plane crashed in Pennsylvania.
"Our discussions did consider the possibility that we would stand alone in this vote, but that was dismissed as irrelevant," Swanson said. "This isn't a popularity contest vote."
Swanson said Lee's vote was not based upon emotion but upon common sense and congressional duty. Representatives are the men and women who declare war; Lee did not want "to open-handedly turn over that power to the president." Her vote, he said, "had nothing to do with sympathizing with terrorists."
Lee got her start in politics working for former Rep. Ron Dellums. She was elected to the Assembly in 1990 and to the state Senate in 1996. So liberal is her district that those voters who decline to state a party affiliation often are to the left of the Democratic Party.
"I wasn't surprised by her vote. I was surprised that other people were surprised," said state Sen. Don Perata (D-Oakland), whose district overlaps Lee's congressional district.
Perata noted that her tenure in Sacramento "was less about a legislative program and more about taking positions and making statements that were liberal, some would say ultraliberal."
In Sacramento, she pushed bills ranging from studying the status of African American men to providing more aid for pregnant public school students and dealing with issues of homelessness.
"Clearly, she was one of the most liberal people in the Legislature, always advocating on behalf of poor people," said state Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Culver City). "She knew everyone from [Nelson Mandela] on down who was interested in those issues. Much of her advocacy was to use the bully pulpit."
Murray, who counts himself among her friends, said he chuckled when he heard that Lee had cast the sole vote against the congressional resolution. While he lauded her "conviction and strength," he noted that the vote was in keeping with her "ultraliberal, pacifist" philosophy.
Lee is not the first member of Congress to take a solo stand against going to war. Jeannette Rankin, Montana's lone representative and the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, cast the only votes against World War I and World War II.
Although a statue of Rankin stands in the Montana State Capitol, she paid the price for her convictions. She was defeated for reelection after each vote.
Bruce Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, doesn't think the 9th District will judge Lee as harshly.
"She may lose some votes, but I don't think her career is in any way threatened," Cain said, "because of the very unique nature of her district. . . There's a tradition in this seat of pacifism going back to the Vietnam War."
California's Barbara Lee
under attack for opposing
war powers resolution
Sunday, September 23, 2001
By Peter Carlson
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — "We need to step back," said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. "We're grieving. We need to step back and think about this so that it doesn't spiral out of control. We have to make sure we don't make any mistakes."
She was walking down a hallway in the Cannon House Office Building. A plainclothes police officer hovered a few steps away, looking very serious. The Capitol Police began guarding Lee last week because of death threats she received after voting against a resolution authorizing President Bush to use military force against anyone associated with last week's terrorist attacks. The resolution passed 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House. Lee's was the sole dissenting vote.
"In times like this," she said, "you have to have some members saying, 'Let's show some restraint.' "
Led by her police bodyguard, she moved along quickly, slipping into her office and closing the door behind her. Inside, the phone lines had shut down under an onslaught of calls from all over the country — many of them irate, some downright nasty.
'We've gotten thousands of calls and thousands of e-mails," she said. "People are very emotional. ... They're frustrated and they're angry."
Lee, 55, normally has a bright smile, but these days she looks sad, worried, harried. She is quick to point out that she voted to condemn last week's attacks and to allocate $40 billion to fight terrorism.
"I'm just as American and just as patriotic as anybody else," she insists.
She doesn't rule out military action, she says, but she voted against the authorization to use force because she opposes giving the president the sole decision on when and where to make war. "I believe we must make sure that Congress upholds its responsibilities and upholds checks and balances. This is a representative democracy, and it's our responsibility."
War, she believes, isn't the most effective way to fight terrorism. "Military action is a one-dimensional reaction to a multidimensional problem," she says. "We've got to be very deliberative and think through the implications of whatever we do."
This isn't the first time Lee has stood alone against war. In 1999, during the crisis in Kosovo, she was the only House member to vote against authorizing President Clinton to bomb Serbia. "I'm not a pacifist," she says, "but I don't believe military action should be the only action we embark on."
Lee represents one of the nation's most liberal congressional districts: California's 9th, which includes Berkeley and Oakland, and was represented by another antiwar dissident, Ronald Dellums, for nearly 28 years. Lee served as Dellums' chief of staff for a decade before she was elected to the California State Assembly in 1990. When Dellums retired in 1998, she won the election to succeed him, and was reelected last year with 85 percent of the vote.
"I would have voted the same way," says Dellums, now president of Washington-based Healthcare International Management.
"I agonized over this vote all week," Lee says. "I searched my conscience. I talked to many people. Ultimately, on some votes, you have to vote the way your conscience dictates."
Her agony was exacerbated by the knowledge that her chief of staff, Sandre Swanson, was mourning the death of his cousin Wanda Green, a flight attendant on the hijacked jet that crashed in Pennsylvania.
"I support her decision," Swanson says. 'The principle on which she based her decision was that somebody should stand up and say that only Congress has the power to declare war. ... People say she was unpatriotic. I think it was very patriotic."
"I admire the courage of Barbara Lee," said Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who spent the 1960s in the front lines of the civil rights movement. "She demonstrated raw courage to stand up and vote the way she did. She stood alone — one against 420. Several other members wanted to be there also but at the same time, like me, they didn't want to be seen as soft on terrorism."
Lewis voted to authorize military action but, he says, he came close to joining Lee in opposition. "I was probably 99 percent of the way there in my heart and my soul," he says, "but in the end I wanted to send the strongest possible message that we can't let terrorism stand."
Lee’s vote is reminiscent of the first woman ever elected to Congress, Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who voted against the nation's entry into World War I and World War II. It also brings to mind Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, the two senators who voted against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which gave President Lyndon B. Johnson the power to wage war in Vietnam.
On the House floor nine days ago, Lee quoted Morse: "I believe that history will record that we have made a grave mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States." She added: "Senator Morse was correct, and I fear we make the same mistake today."
In Oakland, Lee's vote is the subject of much debate, some of it heated, says Don Perata, the Democratic state senator who represents Lee's district.
Perata calls Lee's vote "wrong-headed," and says he isn't impressed with her explanation of it. "There wasn't a lot of clarity there," he says. "I would have cast a different vote. This is a time for a united front in America, particularly in Congress."
But, he predicts, Lee's vote probably won't affect her chances for reelection.
"The district is overwhelmingly Democratic," he says. "There are probably more people who are to the left of the Democrats than there are Republicans.
"Barbara is very popular here. She's just a very, very nice woman — and in this business that counts for a lot."
On Monday, Perata says, California talk radio was abuzz with callers denouncing Lee as a communist.
"I was wincing," he says, "because that's not Barbara. She did not cast that vote because she's unpatriotic. She loves this country and its opportunities as much as anybody."
You go! Barbara Lee:
going against the tide— now!
December 2001
by Susan McHenry
Unbought and unbossed, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, 55, is resolute in her convictions. Citing her reliance on "my moral compass, my conscience and my God for direction," Lee, a Democrat from California's Ninth Congressional District, cast the lone vote against the use-of-force resolution granting President George W. Bush the unrestricted power to launch military action against anyone associated with the September 11 terrorist attack that killed thousands of innocent people at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and in southeastern Pennsylvania.
"I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States," Lee said in her historic speech from the floor of the House on September 14. (Visit essence.com/features/blee for full text of her statement.)
Her principled but controversial stand made it necessary for her to have a Capitol police escort because of death threats and other hostile reactions among the more than 50,000 E-mails, faxes and telephone calls that flooded her office. However, 73 percent of the feedback has been encouraging. Ironically, such calls were fielded by her staunchly supportive chief of staff, Sandre Swanson, who was mourning the loss of his cousin, a veteran flight attendant who died working on the hijacked United Airlines flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
While the furor Lee faced this time may be unparalleled, this is not her first principled stand for conscience and rational judgment despite a rising drumbeat for war. In 1999, during the Kosovo crisis in Eastern Europe, this daughter of a retired Army officer—whose Bay Area district includes Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda—was the only House member to vote against authorizing President Clinton to bomb Serbia. In both these votes, Lee was voting her conscience and following the will of her traditionally antiwar constituents, as well as the example of her predecessor and mentor, Ron Dellums, whose 28-year service in the House included long-standing dissidence regarding the Vietnam War. Lee was introduced to the workings of Capitol Hill as an intern on Dellums's staff. She rose to become his chief of staff before she left to run successfully for California's State Assembly. She was first elected to Congress in a 1998 special election to fill the seat of the retiring Dellums.
The El Paso, Texas-born Lee moved to California in 1960. "When I was a student at Mills College in Oakland in 1972, Shirley Chisholm encouraged me to register to vote and get involved in politics. I ended up working on her presidential campaign," said Lee, citing the influence of the Brooklyn congresswoman, who was the first African-American woman elected to the House in 1968. Lee maintains, "We have a chance to demonstrate to the world that great powers can choose to fight on the fronts of their choosing, and that we can choose to avoid needless military action when other avenues to redress our rightful grievances and to protect our nation are available to us."
COPYRIGHT 2001
Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group