Congress returned this week after a brief recess, and for the first time in a long while, there wasn’t a colossal, contentious issue looming over their heads that they needed to resolve immediately. (Well, there is the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization, but that didn’t come up much this week.)
Instead, New Jersey’s senators and representatives were able to focus on their own legislation: one bill to ban hair discrimination, another to broaden the scope of antisemitism investigations, and a third to decriminalize cannabis nationwide. Here’s some of what New Jersey’s 13 members of Congress did this week.
A CROWNing achievement
A large number of states – New Jersey among them – have protections in place prohibiting discrimination based on hairstyle, a form of discrimination that most frequently ends up applying to Black hairstyles like afros and dreadlocks. But no such protections exist at the federal level.
Senator Cory Booker and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) have a bill to change that: the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair (CROWN) Act, which prohibits hair-based discrimination in federal housing programs, public accommodations, and employment.
“Nobody – no worker, no study, no person – should ever face discrimination because of how their hair grows out of their head,” Watson Coleman said at a press conference outside the Capitol on Wednesday. “We can’t control the texture of our hair, any more than we can control the color of our skin. And yet Black Americans routinely face discrimination simply because of the way their hair looks.”
This is not the first time the CROWN Act has been put before Congress. The bill was first proposed in the Senate by Booker in 2019; in 2022, Watson Coleman shepherded it to passage in the House, but it never came up for a vote in the Senate. With Republicans – most of whom voted against the bill in 2022 – now in control of the House, success this session seems unlikely, but Booker noted that similar policies have succeeded even in traditionally conservative states.
“To be clear, this is not a partisan issue,” Booker said. “The federal government would simply be following the lead of our states. Already, 19 states have passed laws that prohibit hair discrimination, including my home state of New Jersey, but also Maine, Alaska, California, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Louisiana. If Tennesseans and Californians can find common ground and agree on this, then we all should be doing something about it.”
Anti-antisemitism
The biggest House vote of the week came on a bill co-authored by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Wyckoff): the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would broaden the definition of antisemitism used in federal discrimination investigations.
The bill – which was led by Rep. Mike Lawler (R-New York), who has New Jersey ties of his own – had support from both Democratic and Republican leadership in the House. But 71 Democrats and 20 Republicans still voted against it, among them two New Jerseyans, Reps. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing).
“This bill, while potentially well-intentioned, could be used to limit speech in a way that runs contrary to our values as Americans and doesn’t include the common sense critical steps that I’ve long advocated for like surging resources to houses of worship to help protect congregations against targeted hate,” Kim said in a statement.
Gottheimer, though, said that the progressive critics of the bill who were worried about free speech protections were mistaken in their opposition.
“Let me clear up any confusion, since I’m a huge champion myself of free speech: this bill protects the First Amendment,” Gottheimer said on the House floor. “It allows criticism of Israel. I ensured that; it was critical to me. It doesn’t allow calls for the destruction or elimination of the Jewish state. But it certainly allows criticism of Israel.”
The tip of the Lautenberg
More than 600 people have received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’s highest civilian honor, since it was established in 1963, including a large number of members of Congress and other politicians. But none of those congressional awardees had been from New Jersey – until today.
Former U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg, who died in 2013, has been posthumously awarded the medal by President Joe Biden, his old friend from his nearly three-decade Senate career. Biden will officially grant Lautenberg and 18 others the medal at a ceremony this evening.
“Frank Lautenberg was a proud son of Paterson, a World War II veteran, a self-made multi-millionaire, and a damn good United States Senator for the people of the greatest state,” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson) said of the news. “To my mind, Frank is the model of public service: he got into office to do right and fight for his neighbors and he did both as well as anybody in office. He would be so happy to get this recognition.”
A farewell to Donald Payne
The funeral for Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-Newark) was held yesterday, a week after the congressman died at age 65 following a heart attack. It was a sad finale to Payne’s 12-year congressional career representing parts of urban North Jersey – and to his lifetime in and around politics.
Back in New Jersey, attention will now turn to the process of choosing Payne’s successor, with a special election primary scheduled for this summer and a meeting of local party leaders to choose a new general election nominee likely coming soon afterwards. But no successor will be able to take office for a few months at least, meaning that there will still be a Donald Payne-shaped hole in Congress for a while.
That means New Jersey will have lessened representation on Payne’s two committees, Transportation & Infrastructure and Homeland Security, though Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) also serves on both. And it will mean that in a House with a razor-thin margin between Republicans and Democrats, the Democratic caucus will be down one member on close votes throughout this summer.
Other Garden State plots
• Senator Booker didn’t just reintroduce the CROWN Act this week; he also joined Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to once again put forward their proposal to completely decriminalize cannabis at the federal level, a policy which Booker said is long overdue.
“It is long past time to confront the failure of the War on Drugs, particularly its disproportionate impact on communities of color and low-income individuals,” Booker said. “Thousands of people have suffered at the hands of our broken cannabis laws, and the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act would finally dismantle the outdated federal marijuana prohibition, expunge past convictions for people with low-level cannabis offenses, and ensure restorative justice for communities impacted by the War on Drugs.”
• A highly unusual, obscure event happened in the House this week: a motion to send a mining-related bill back to committee was successful, marking yet another surprising procedural defeat for House GOP leaders.
Motions to recommit, as they’re known, are typically offered by the minority party and shot down on party-line votes. And as expected, every Democrat voted for the motion to recommit the mining bill; what was more unexpected was that six right-wing Republicans joined them as well, allowing the motion to pass. (None of the renegade Republicans were from New Jersey.)
• Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar and his wife were indicted today on federal charges alleging that they received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for taking official actions benefiting a Mexican bank and an Azerbaijani energy company. A Democratic member of Congress and his wife charged with helping a foreign government for bribes… sound familiar?
There’s also a direct New Jersey connection to the Cuellar charges: one of the illegal acts Cuellar allegedly committed was working to kill a bill amendment offered by Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) that the Azerbaijani government opposed.