Why Should Delaware Care?
Chris Coons is one of two elected senators for Delaware and one of the most sought-after lawmakers in Congress due to his connections to President Joe Biden, history of bipartisan deal-making and knowledge of foreign conflicts. His positions are often influential in winning over the support of colleagues in the U.S. Senate.
U.S. Sen. Chris Coons has served in elected office in Delaware for more than two decades and today he’s one of the busiest politicians on Capitol Hill, serving as a co-chair of President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, a rare bipartisan dealmaker and one of the most-traveled legislators overseas.
While most of Delaware’s federal and statewide offices are facing an uncommon round of reshuffling in the fall election, Coons is not on the ballot. He instead is preparing to become the state’s senior senator with the impending retirement of colleague Sen. Tom Carper, and one of the longest tenured state party elders for the Delaware Democratic Party.
This week, the senator was just a few hours off a plane from a Congressional delegation visit to Central Africa when he sat down with Spotlight Delaware to discuss the 2024 campaign season, bipartisanship in Congress, and his view on the state of foreign affairs.
A changing delegation
With Carper stepping down after decades of public service to Delaware, Coons recognizes that he will have to step up to new roles in the Senate, especially in serving military veterans – Carper is the last Vietnam War veteran to serve in the chamber.
He also said that he wanted to continue the tradition of collegiality and support in Delaware’s delegation that Carper inherited and fostered. It’s common to see the First State’s two senators and congressperson at events together – a scene that Congressional colleagues often find baffling, Coons said.
“One of the things Delawareans have gotten used to over a long time is that the delegation gets along well. That is not true of most states,” he noted. “In most states, there is open warfare between the senators and the House members, they have sharply different priorities, personalities and agendas … I intend to work hard to make sure we have a cohesive, respectful, deliberate delegation where we all are in regular consultation.”
Likely joining Coons in the Senate next year is Lisa Blunt Rochester, the four-term Democratic congresswoman from Wilmington. She is a longtime protégé of Carper who would become the first Black senator from Delaware and one of the few Black women to ever serve in the Senate, if elected.
Coons said that Blunt Rochester “is someone who has come through genuine tragedy,” including how she overcame the sudden tragic death of her husband, Charles, and how she navigated the experience of being trapped up in the balcony above the House floor on Jan. 6.
“She’s comfortable expressing the fact that faith is a foundation of who she is and how she serves. That’s a continuation of something that Senator Carper has also been comfortable publicly sharing,” he added. “But obviously, there are other ways in which her generation, her gender and her racial background will be a significant change. So one of the things we’re already talking about is what are the things that Senator Carper has led that we want to continue and what are the things we want to reconfigure.”
Underdog yet again
As co-chair of President Biden’s re-election campaign, Coons is a mainstay defender on cable news coverage and a confidant in private for the president.
Coons, who has known Biden and his late son Beau for some two decades and volunteered on his failed 2008 presidential campaign, said that he usually speaks to the president by phone – sometimes with little warning – as the president considers points of view on issues and strategy.
With polling showing Biden behind former President Donald Trump despite job gains, a booming stock market and moderating inflation, Coons has encouraged the president to embrace a three-pronged campaign strategy: remind voters about the reality of the Trump administration, get the president into everyday scenarios to show his human side and contrast the differences between the past two administrations.
“We have to remind people what the impact has been on their lives of the bipartisan accomplishments of the Biden presidency, and then remind them of what the consequences are for the future. Donald Trump bragged a lot about how he moved the Supreme Court far to the right. There are real consequences to that, and I think millions of Americans are looking at the loss of freedom.
“The American people are going to have to choose, and it will be a close and heartfelt election, but I’m increasingly optimistic that Joe Biden will get a second term,” he said.
Coons and Biden know something about being underdogs, as both were running well behind their opposition in polling for their initial Senate elections. The president has learned to trust his gut instinct, Coons said.
He recalled meeting with the president in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, when he was “alarmed” by polling that showed that Republicans were likely to win a large number of seats in Congress while the president’s message remained on the importance of democracy.
“I said to President Biden that I really thought he needed to shift to focusing on bread-and-butter, kitchen table issues, talking about inflation and the economy and the recovery from the pandemic. And he listened patiently for a few minutes, and he said, ‘You know, you’re wrong. I believe the American people are paying attention, and they understand the significance of the 2020 election, of what happened on January 6, and of what’s at stake,” Coons said. “He was absolutely right … And it gives me some real confidence, some optimism in what is a tough environment for optimism.”
A ‘shocking’ Congress, future for filibuster
Although House Republicans are often in open revolt over their leadership and last year saw the fewest number of bills passed by Congress in modern history, Coons remains steadfast in his belief that important legislation can still be passed at the federal level.
He cited bipartisan efforts on the CHIPS & Sciences Act, the infrastructure bill, gun safety reform and federal budgets as evidence of that, along with five bills recently proposed by him with Republican co-sponsors. Some of the best efforts of lawmakers have been scuttled by the politics of a presidential election year though.
Coons specifically cited the recent bipartisan immigration reform bill negotiated by Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) over the last few months. It was a hard-fought compromise that both Republicans and Democrats signaled support for as it headed to a floor vote.
“It was headed to passage when Donald Trump woke up and said, ‘Kill it. I want an issue, not a solution,’ and he successfully killed it,” Coons said. “This was one of the most shocking examples I’ve seen of a party doing a complete 180 in 36 hours, taking a sincere conservative [Lankford], shivving him in the back and letting him bleed out on the field.”
Coons said that he didn’t believe that bipartisanship could exist in Congress in a meaningful way until the Republican Party excised itself of Trump’s influence.
One obstacle to passage in the Senate is the chamber’s filibuster rule, which requires the votes of 60 members to end debate on legislative issues. Although budgetary matters and judicial and executive appointments have been carved out of the filibuster in recent years, attempts to move to simple majority votes on all issues have fallen flat.
In 2017, Coons co-authored a letter calling for the preservation of the filibuster to preserve “Senate traditions” on debate, but in 2020 said that he would support suspending it to advance the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a bill that aimed to clarify gerrymandering protections and bolster voting rights. It ultimately failed when Democrats could not gain the support of Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Sinema, both of whom announced they wouldn’t run for re-election this year.
Today, Coons said that senators have been discussing what the future may hold for the filibuster, and he believes that “the consequences have been really bad” for suspending the filibuster for judicial appointments, especially for the Supreme Court.
“I was having a discussion with colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats, a few weeks ago about what would have happened if we’d listened to the late Sen. [Carl] Levin, who was very strongly against [filibuster reform],” he said. “There is a chance for us to re-debate and re-examine this issue again.”
Gaza now a ‘catastrophe’
As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chair of its Appropriations Subcommittee, he often travels overseas to visit with national leaders, see war zones up-close and identify how U.S. aid is being used.
In February, he joined a delegation that visited Israel and several Middle Eastern countries to examine the war in Gaza. What he has seen and heard has deeply troubled him.
“Through press coverage and through meeting with Palestinian leaders, and national leaders in Israel, Jordan and Lebanon, it is clear to me that this is a catastrophe. Both a human rights catastrophe and a humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.
The Monday killing of seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen, an international mission founded by Coons’ friend chef José Andrés, in an Israeli attack has only furthered the senator’s concern. He reiterated his position that Israel and Palestine reach an immediate ceasefire and an exchange of hostages to prevent further deaths.
“The president’s been clear that if Israel sends in special forces teams to Rafah to take out specific Hamas leaders, I think that is a legitimate and understandable part of their ongoing campaign against Hamas. But dropping 2,000-pound bombs, targeting aid workers and continuing to prevent the delivery of aid, when famine is a very real and present threat, I think are all grave mistakes by the Netanyahu government,” he said.
Coons said that conditions on U.S. military aid already exist, but it’s a question of whether they would be enforced to prevent further shipments during the conflict. Those conditions rest upon Israel’s approach to a campaign in Rafah and its support of humanitarian aid to Palestine, he opined.
Social media’s ills
The Senate is due to soon take up the controversial issue of whether to force the sale of, or completely ban, the social media platform TikTok, which has grown in popularity in the U.S. particularly among young users but has been accused of being spyware for the Chinese community government.
Coons, who is concerned about the overall impact of social media on Americans’ mental health and civic engagement, said that he has received classified briefings about TikTok that have troubled him.
“I am convinced that TikTok is not just another social media platform, but that it is a pipeline for the personally identifying information of millions and millions of Americans to the Chinese Communist Party, and that they are able to use it to directly influence the political views and conduct of millions of Americans,” he said.
While he is interested in exploring how to disconnect TikTok from the Chinese government in order to retain a platform that supports many young entrepreneurs, he said that he would currently vote to ban TikTok without an alternative option.
“I think it’s important to recognize that Chinese control over huge amounts of personally identifying data of Delawareans and Americans is a negative thing, but it is not dramatically more negative than the ways in which Google, Meta and Twitter and everybody are monetizing our individual decisions and activities every day,” he said, noting that he’s co-sponsored legislation that would require more transparency around the algorithms that dictate social media today.