In her 50 years of public service, Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, has survived five gunshot wounds at the Jonestown massacre; became the first member of Congress to speak openly about an abortion; shared her experience with sexual harassment during #MeToo; and has been outspoken on efforts to stop sexual assault in the military.
Weeks before retiring from Congress, Speier spoke in a wide-ranging interview with The Chronicle about her legacy, her regrets and her reflections on the institution. She focused on her lifetime of efforts to make the country better for women as she sat in a gathering room exclusively for women lawmakers.
Speier said that she was able to do much of that highly controversial work because the tragedies she’s survived made her “fearless.”
In an 11th-hour feat, Congress passed protections for pregnant workers in late December — a measure Speier told The Chronicle was one of her biggest priorities before leaving office.
Rep. Jackie Speier (center) listens during a meeting about women’s rights in Washington D.C., on Dec. 14, 2022.
Gabrielle Lurie / The ChronicleYet the list of things she wishes she could have accomplished is long, especially after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion and the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, became the latest dramatic and devastating reminder of the country’s struggle to control gun violence. She attributes failures on some key issues to Congress being “rigged to retain the status quo.”
She left her former colleagues and successor Rep.-elect Kevin Mullin with one important piece of advice: Do something, don’t be someone.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Rep. Jackie Speier heads to a naturalization ceremony in Redwood City on Dec. 2, 2022.
Gabrielle Lurie / The ChronicleThe Chronicle: How do you feel about your career thus far and what do you think your legacy will be?
Jackie Speier: My legacy will be one in which the voices of women were heard. Whether it was on the House floor talking about my abortion, or reading the complaints filed in district court of women and men who have been sexually assaulted in the military, or creating an opportunity for members to go to the border to express our outrage of separating mothers and children, or organizing the women of the House to get arrested to object to the abortion decision Dobbs. I think about women’s voices being heard and amplified.
Rep. Jackie Speier leaves her retirement party to vote at the Capitol in Washington D.C., on Dec. 14, 2022.
Gabrielle Lurie / The ChronicleWhat are your regrets? What do you wish you had gotten done in your time in Congress?
There is a list that’s three pages long, and bills that were not passed in the Senate that I have now passed on to my colleagues in hopes that they will take up the mantle and pursue those issues.
The ( Equal Rights Amendment) is a big one, I mean we’re the only country that has a written constitution in the world that doesn’t have an equal rights amendment. And it’s a passion that I have that will continue. … It’s shameful that that bill has been introduced in every Congress since 1923 — coming on 100 years — and we can’t get it into the Constitution.
There are regrets around a bill that’s sitting there in the Senate right now, the Shield Act, which would designate as criminal conduct those who make public, without the consent, images of persons that are intimate in nature. It destroys women’s lives.
This place needs to change in a big way. As I’m leaving — I’m realizing the things that I would want to do to improve the way we operate. The fact that we’re now taking up the (National Defense Authorization Act) on suspension. It’s going to be almost a trillion dollars and we’re not going to have a debate on that and we’re not going to fully explore it is really problematic.
( Note: The NDAA is an annual bill that authorizes defense funding and policy. Taking up a bill on suspension means that the House of Representatives is bypassing the typical rules that are followed before voting on a bill, including allowing debate and amendments.)
The fact that we don’t do oversight to speak of in our legislative roles, it’s something I feel strongly about. It’s informed a lot of my legislation by going out in the field, determining what’s wrong and trying to fix it.
We passed in the NDAA (in a prior year) a requirement that sailors get seven and a half hours sleep because we had the Fitzgerald and McCain that crashed into each other. I mean, billions of dollars in costs associated plus the fact that they were fatigued, and it was impacting the quality of their lives as well. And so we put that into the NDAA. Do you think that was followed? No. We asked the (Government Accountability Office) to go and assess whether or not that was being followed. Now they were getting like five and a half hours. So oversight’s key, and we don’t do enough of it.
We often see a lot of oversight when the opposing party of the president is in control of the House or Senate.
But it’s not oversight, it’s theater. It’s not oversight about how these agencies are working. It’s theater about how they’re trying to message that they should win and the other party should lose.
Oftentimes people say that Congress feels like a broken institution. How would you fix Congress, or is it even possible?
It happens when the American people demand it. … The whole process needs to be revamped. I think you’ve got to get rid of the filibuster, you cannot have the minority controlling the majority. And we’re all going to have to live with the fact that yes, majority rules. And this effort to somehow stop legislation because you could have one member put a hold on it is, it’s just wrong. It really makes me embarrassed, frankly, that we do so little. It’s sort of rigged to retain the status quo.
And so what I’ve been saying in the last few weeks to my colleagues as I’m feeling the loss of this power happening to me … what I was urging them to do is use your power the way you can, separate and distinct from your vote on the floor or your speech here. I mean, when just something happens, call for a briefing by that agency, amplify the issue by doing a press conference, asking the GAO to do a study. That’s how we can really help our constituents. … There’s lots of good we can do separate from the charade that goes on here from time to time.
PG&E is hugely controversial in California with them causing the 2018 Camp Fire and the deadly 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion in your district. Do you think the company can be controlled?
JS: After the explosion in my district, I worked really hard to change some of the rules and requirements for pipeline safety. … Really what was going on was the (California Public Utilities Commission) and the national entity were basically doing paper audits. They weren’t doing the job. So we made changes.
I’ll tell you why I think maybe things are changing. The woman who lost her husband, her mother-in-law, her son and her dog, they were at the epicenter of the explosion — she has worked as a volunteer in my office. She sued PG&E. And so I’ve been very close to her — her name is Sue Bullis — for a long time. Sue told me a few weeks ago that the CEO of PG&E came to her house and spent two hours with her. So I’m hoping that that signals a change.
In addition to your experience with gun violence, you’ve spoken publicly about your own abortion story and reproductive rights has been a major issue for you. You’re leaving Congress without protections for abortion access and with the Supreme Court just having overturned Roe v. Wade. How do you feel about that?
That was a double whammy this year, both in terms of the issues that have impacted me personally, gun violence and abortion, and recognizing that we took up a reform measure on gun violence that frankly, (did) very little. I mean, truly, we can’t fix fundamental problems.
So what’s our solution? The one that everyone kind of patted each other on the backs about? We’re gonna do enhanced background checks of persons between the ages of 18 and 21 to buy assault weapons. Well, if you look at these assailants, these mass murderers, they don’t have records. … So the fix was not a fix. And so that really bothered me. You had Uvalde, you had the Dobbs decision, two issues that personally impacted me. And yeah, that’s hard to leave. It’s really hard.
You’ve suffered from gun violence as a survivor of the Jonestown massacre. What do you think members of Congress don’t understand about gun violence and how it truly affects people?
Every time there was a mass shooting, we would engage in a moment of silence, and thoughts and prayers. As if that did anything, as if that was the responsibility that we had, as if that’s what we thought the American people wanted to hear. I walked out of those moments of silence years ago and decided I’m just going to do something different. And so for one year, I posted outside my office the photographs of everyone who was the victim of a mass shooting for that year. And it wrapped around the whole side of my office. And we put a black banner around families, because you lose sight of that, too. There’s a lot of families that get wiped out because of gun violence. So I just feel that we don’t care.
Actually, they do care. They care about getting re-elected. And so this is really all about “What can I do to kind of make it look like I’m fixing this problem, but still have a pass with the lobbying interests that could take me down?”
These are people, and the people that die leave families that are shattered for the rest of their lives. The people that survive carry with them that trauma for the rest of their lives, and a fair amount of survivor’s guilt.
Rep. Jackie Speier (center) and her daughter Stephanie Sierra (left) laugh as they cuddle with their dog Zoe at their home in Hillsborough, Calif., on Dec. 11, 2022.
Gabrielle Lurie / The ChronicleYou’ve survived a lot of tragedy: Jonestown, the death of your husband, the Jan. 6 attack. How has that driven your career in public service?
Jonestown made me realize how fragile life was. I made that commitment to myself, if I survived, I would dedicate my life to public service. But it also made me fearless. And so when I’ve taken on the correctional guards in the state legislature, or the military here in Congress, I do so without any regrets. Because I’ve had these tormenting experiences of life that make you realize you’re just not guaranteed tomorrow, so make it work. Everyone focuses on Guyana. But truly, that was my second chance at life. That was that silver lining on that cloud. The death of my husband when I was pregnant with our second child after having a real hard time getting pregnant, and then having miscarriages was devastating. … And it was like, the whole world was crashing in on me, I couldn’t breathe. But, one foot in front of the other.
A video of Jackie Speier throughout the years played on a loop during her retirement party in Washington D.C., on Dec. 14, 2022.
Gabrielle Lurie / The ChronicleYou’ve also spoken out publicly about your experience with sexual harassment in the Capitol. Have things changed?
That’s a hard question for you to ask me. … It appeared that it was working, I mean, certainly informing members of what their roles and responsibilities are in terms of preventing sexual harassment in your office. … But I was meeting with women in government relations just this week.
Well, come to find out in the course of our meeting, I said, “Since we’ve put all these requirements in place, since we’ve changed the rules so we have the victim having more power, have things changed?” And one of them raised her hand and said, “We just had a member in at our law firm and meeting with one of our clients, and the member had his hand on one of the women lobbyists the whole time.”
We’re now going to have a meeting next week with the committee on administration staff and with the office of employee advocacy. We can’t let this keep happening.
How do you feel about leaving Congress now, with all that is going on?
JS: I don’t think there’s a good time to leave. And this was not for any reason other than it was time to put my family first. And oftentimes, when you’re in this job, it’s hard to do that. I made a promise to my husband that if I could get sexual assault taken out of the (military) chain of command, I would leave. And then after I got it out of the chain of command, I thought I could go back to him and he would release me from that process, but he didn’t. We gotta keep our promises.
What advice would you give to your successor, Congressman-elect Kevin Mullin , and other new members of Congress?
Congressman-elect Mullin, all of the new members that have been elected — they’re great talents, they’re going to carve their own paths. I’m very excited about who they are and what they’re going to do. And I hope they look at this institution with a jaundiced eye and recognize that it needs to have significant reforms. And I guess my advice would be to them: Just put the people first, don’t get swept up in this place of three-dimensional chess and power.
One of my colleagues said to me … “Some people come to Congress to be someone, some come to Congress to do something.” And I would just say: Make good public policy. That’s what we’re here to do.
What memories will you take from your time in Congress? What is next for you?
There’s so many. One of my first memories — and I had just been elected —I had my family come back to D.C. for Easter. And I created an Easter egg hunt in Statuary Hall for my kids.
There are so many, I mean, going to Normandy on the 75th anniversary with the speaker was amazing. Going to Armenia with her right after the Azerbaijanis had invaded Armenia. The incredible privilege to serve on the Intelligence Committee, and the opportunity to go to our bases around the world as chair of the Military Personnel Committee.
I’m going to miss the ability to do my experiential legislating. … I learned that from Leo Ryan. He goes down to Jonestown to find out for himself, not taking the State Department’s word that everyone there was happy. And so I’ve taken a page from his book and tried to do that in my work.
We have such income inequality in this country that is choking us. And so part of what I’m going to do is draw attention to that and try to equalize that. … I’m not leaving the arena, I guess, is what I’m saying. I’m just going to have to do it without the powerful megaphone on the House floor.
Shira Stein is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: shira.stein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @shiramstein
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