Rep. Sean Casten

There was that Louis Brandeis line when he said, when you have great concentrations of wealth, you only have three choices.

You can let the wealth take over the government, which is to embrace fascism.

You can have the government take over the wealth and embrace communism, or you can break up the wealth and embrace capitalism, right?

I find myself thinking...

That there's almost an exact parallel, but exactly inverted to the reconstruction era time.

It was, you know, the Democrats were the party of essentially the oligarchs and the white working class.

The Republicans were everybody else.

And if you're the oligarchs and the white working class, you have plenty of room for the Klan.

Right.

But in that era, the Republicans who said we need to hold people account for their sins, they were the radical Republicans.

Right.

And and they had that same sort of like they were defined not by who they were, but who they weren't.

And I feel like we're flopped on that right now and a lot of the same issues.

And I don't know what lessons we learned from that era, because ultimately the radical Republicans didn't.

You know, we got three solid amendments out of it.

And 100 years later, we actually started enforcing those amendments.

So I don't want to throw this member under the bus, but at one point we were voting on one of these dumb gotcha votes.

And he came up to me on the floor.

He said, are you voting on this one?

And I said, well, you know, Churchill said you can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they've exhausted all the other options.