Jim Matheson vs. Democrats 

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Polished Pig
It’s not just Matheson’s 2009 votes on the Waxman- Markey climate-change bill and health-care reform that irk progressives. “Over the years, I keep saying, ‘This is the worst I’ve seen from him,’ and then it doesn’t take long before something else equally bad, if not worse, comes out of Jim Matheson,” says Rocky Anderson. The founder of High Road for Human Rights—who says he hopes to never run for Congress again—has a long list of Matheson votes and positions he finds deplorable.

Matheson voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. He voted in favor of the Military Commissions Act, a law the denied the right of habeas corpus to U.S. detainees. He voted in favor of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which union activists complain sends American jobs to countries where workers are more easily exploited.

Matheson broke with his party and voted in favor of a $1.3 trillion Bush tax cut in 2001. Those tax cuts cost $400 billion more than the House health-care reform bill that Matheson voted against, citing a lack of reform measures that would curb costs. “I think putting 30 million additional people into a program that’s going to crash off a financial cliff is not responsible legislating,” Matheson said Feb. 12 on KCPW’s Politics Up Close. Matheson’s staff declined multiple requests from City Weekly to make him available for an interview.

Matheson has also had to dodge complaints since entering Congress that he won’t co-sponsor America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, which would provide wilderness designation to 9.4 million acres of public lands. The bill has 22 co-sponsors in the Senate and 157 in the House, but Matheson isn’t one of them. At an Oct. 1 subcommittee hearing on the bill, he complained that the 20-year-old proposal has not been collaborative enough or inclusive of all stakeholders.

And that’s just his voting record. During summer 2009’s contentious health-care debates, he held no town hall meetings where constituents could face him.

“Matheson won’t even hold public meetings with his constituents. It’s all done in conference call where they can simply, you know, go through and delete the people they don’t want to talk to. I’m not interested in that,” Wright says. “He knows he’s really ticked off his constituency. He knows people are really upset over this health-care thing, and he doesn’t want to deal with them in person.”

Philpot, who also ran for the seat in 2000 but lost in convention, was at a loss to list any policy positions of his that might appeal to Matheson’s Democratic detractors, but he promised to hold public meetings and to be accessible to all. “Here’s the difference. I won’t use them. They’re being used. They’re being asked to step up to the plate and vote for somebody they don’t like simply because they’re being told that if they don’t, they’re going to get something worse. That’s B.S.,” Philpot says. “They need to know that their representative, even if he’s not going to agree with them, is going to listen to them and be honest with them, and they don’t have that right now. They have somebody who’s playing them for the fool. That’s not fair.”

Democrats outside Salt Lake County, such as Carbon County Democratic Party Chair Ed Chavez, aren’t relegated to conference-call-only access. “Every time he comes to Carbon County, I’m able to meet face-to-face with him,” Chavez says. Matheson’s vote on health care was controversial in Chavez’s part of the state, he says, but the climate-change bill in coal-mining Carbon County? “Nobody’s talking about that down here.”

While Matheson remains popular with rural Democrats like Chavez—a January 2009 poll showed an astounding approval rating of 87 percent—those who oppose him do so with zeal.

“He’s worse than a Republican,” DeChristopher says. “The only thing worse than a wolf is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Some complain Matheson has a neutering effect on the state Democratic Party, which itself is often criticized by progressives for acquiescing to the Republican legislative agenda without adequate blood spilled or tears shed in fighting it.

Former state Democratic Party communications director Jeff Bell, now the host of Left of the Dial on KSL Radio and blogger on JMBell.org, says Matheson does have a moderating—and self-censoring—effect on state Democrats. “With Matheson being the highest-on-the-ticket elected Democrat in the state, he has a lot more influence when he or his people talk to the state party and say, ‘We want you to say this, do this, behave this way.’ … The reason is very simple. Jim can, especially when you look at his poll ratings and ever-increasing margins of victory, do a lot of good endorsing down-ticket candidates.”

Practically Perfect

“We’re having more success in areas where Jim is above those candidates on the ballot. There’s no doubt about it that he has an effect,” Utah Democratic Party Chair Wayne Holland says. “Four [state Legislature] seats we took from Republicans [were] all in the 2nd District [since Matheson took office], and in one we held with a freshman against a viable Republican.”

Holland is a pragmatist. He self-identifies as a progressive, says he was in favor of health-care reform, but trusts Matheson’s judgment. While some complain that Matheson is a poll-watching politician without principles, Holland credits him for representing the will of his constituents. “The House of Representatives was designed to be close to the people,” he says.

Matheson’s opponents aren’t fairly assessing his voting record, Holland says. The party chair points to numerous legislative vote scorecards that distinguish Matheson as decidedly more liberal than his Republican counterparts, Reps. Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz, who represent the 1st and 3rd Congressional districts in Utah, respectively.

That’s true. Scorecards from the American Civil Liberties Union; League of Conservation Voters; American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (pdf); Christian Coalition; and Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law all reveal that Matheson is more liberal than Bishop or Chaffetz. Sure, Matheson voted to ban gay marriage in the U.S. Constitution, but he ticked off the Christian Coalition by voting to extend hate-crimes protection to gay and transgender Americans. Can you imagine a Utah Republican doing that?

Holland is also a strategist. He says liberals willing to purge Matheson over his vote on health care and climate change should consider whether those issues would even be debated in Congress if not for moderates like Matheson. “Health care wouldn’t even be an issue. There would be no votes if Democrats weren’t in control of the House and Senate. We have to have those [moderate] members in the caucuses in both houses that can be elected in states that are not like Massachusetts and California.”

He downplays the significance of the Citizens’ Candidate, saying both major parties have internal groups pushing for party purity. He accepts the Citizens’ Candidate group within the Democratic Party with the same warm embrace he gives to Matheson: “The party has to be a broad-based organization that can attract individuals to run as candidates and protect our incumbent.”

And while he would make no prediction about Wright’s chances at the Democratic Party convention, he says, “You don’t see Jim Matheson being challenged by people of stature the way [Utah Sen.] Bob Bennett is and that says to me the majority of our party understands we have to be pragmatic.”