Roseanne Goes Red

What’s at stake in the Trump administration’s decision to ask about U.S. citizenship in the 2020 Census; the good, bad, and ugly in the Roseanne reboot; how Tennessee Republicans want to rob Peter to rob Paul, and more. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

Earlier this week, the Trump administration announced that the 2020 Census would include a question about U.S. citizenship. The news generated immediate and widespread blowback, including the filing of lawsuits by at least 2 states’ attorneys general who argue the change violates the law. Rebecca sits down with Corrine Yu, managing policy director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, to unpack what’s at stake.

Next, when the TV sitcom Roseanne premiered in 1988, it was heralded for its honest portrayal of a working-class family struggling to make ends meet in the Midwest. The show returned to the airwaves this week, drawing tens of millions of viewers — and generating not insignificant controversy due to the eponymous character’s proud support of Donald Trump. Rebecca talks with Mara Pellittieri, managing editor of TalkPoverty.org, about the good, the bad, and the ugly in the controversial reboot.

But first, Jeremy Slevin returns with the news of the week, including Tennessee Republicans’ plans to use funds intended for poor families to bankroll the disenrollment of thousands of the state’s struggling workers from Medicaid. We also break down Utah’s bittersweet Medicaid expansion, and more in another edition of In Case You Missed It.

This week’s guests:

• Corrine Yu, managing policy director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
• Mara Pellittieri, managing editor of TalkPoverty.org
• Jeremy Slevin, Director of Antipoverty Advocacy at the Center for American Progress ( and Trusty Sidekick)

For more on this week’s topics:

• Read more about the wrong-headed decision to add a U.S. citizenship questionto the census.
• Slate tells the history of Roseanne Barr, her show and what it all means in today’s day and age.
• Tennessee wants to use funding meant for poor families to kick people off Medicaid; Utah expands Medicaid but hampers it with work requirements; Miami’s new affordable housing plan has teachers living at school

This program aired on March 29th, 2018

Transcript of show:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, earlier this week the Trump administration announced that the 2020 census would be including a question about U.S. citizenship. I dig into what this means with a Census Expert from the leadership conference on Civil and Human Rights. Next, the Roseanne reboot has everyone talking now that Roseanne has returned as a Trump supporter. I talk with Mara Pellittieri of TalkPoverty.org who has some choice words for the show. But first, Jeremy Slevin, the Slevinator, hello and welcome, how are you today, Jeremy?

JEREMY SLEVIN: Hello, I am doing great thank you for asking, how are you?

VALLAS: You know it’s a dumpster fire.

SLEVIN: As good as one can be.

VALLAS: It continues to be a dumpster fire, you brought many, many things that are currently burning in that dumpster fire with you, and with not a moment to lose because of how much I know we need to get through, what’s going on this week?

SLEVIN: So there’s a lot going on on a lot of different fronts. I think we’ve been talking about this a lot, how 2017 was these big fights like health care and tax and now the Trump administration has gotten smarter and is fighting many smaller fights on a lot of different battlefields and it’s much harder to keep track of all of the policy decisions. So there was a lot that flew under the radar this week and I think we can start with some state actions on Medicaid. So first of all, Utah, one of the most conservative states in the country expanded Medicaid.

VALLAS: Woo hoo! That sounds like great news.

SLEVIN: Which is great news, however —

VALLAS: Oh, why do I feel like there’s a ‘but’ coming.

SLEVIN: Being Utah the way, part of the way they are so called paying for this expansion is by taking away Medicaid from people who can’t find work or can’t get enough hours at work. This is under the guise of these so called work requirements. So while they are expanding Medicaid with one hand they’re taking away Medicaid with the other hand by saying if you lost your job you can’t get health care. Which is the whole point of Medicaid, it’s if you don’t have a job or you don’t have enough money you need health care so you don’t die. So kind of bittersweet news.

VALLAS: Incredibly bittersweet, and you when you actually dig into the expansion you actually find that it’s not even a full expansion of Medicaid like many states have done. They only partially expanded Medicaid and so up to the federal poverty level. Basically if you make $12,000 a year now, congratulations, you can qualify for Medicaid but if you make more than that you’re too rich. And of course then that intersects with these awful so called ‘work requirements’ because you could be in the situation of having to work a certain number of hours so that you can qualify to receive Medicaid but then making too much in your earnings to actually receive the benefits that you were just required to work to receive. So kind of a Catch-22 that it’s setting up in a really cruel way.

SLEVIN: Right now, a single adult to qualify for Medicaid you can’t make more than $600 a year in Utah. Like $600, essentially Medicaid, while they’re expanding it to just the poverty line, they are still making it so hard to get that virtually no one qualifies.

VALLAS: That’s right and part of a broader trend of red states seeing the opportunity to enact these so-called ‘work requirements’, really a way of taking away health insurance from people who can’t find work or get enough hours at their job as you mentioned. As well people with disabilities, people who are facing employment discrimination because of having a criminal record, all kinds of other folks who are facing barriers to work that this policy is going to especially hurt and red states are seeing the opportunity to enact these as part of some kind of a bipartisan deal where they hand over progressive folks in their state the bone they’ve so long been wanting in the form of some kind of Medicaid expansion.

SLEVIN: Elsewhere in Medicaid work requirements because this is something that is now being implemented in many states after the Trump administration earlier this year —

VALLAS: I sort of feel like we need a new segment called ‘This Week in Medicaid Work Requirements’ or just ‘This Week in Medicaid’, right? There we go.

SLEVIN: So this is something you drew attention to over the weekend and I want you to talk about it a little but Tennessee is also implementing work requirements that would, it’s estimated to kick about 3,700 Tennessee workers off their health care but they’re paying for it in a really insidious way because actually implementing work requirements, implementing this rule costs money up front. So maybe you can talk a little bit about how they’re paying for these work requirements.

VALLAS: This is one of those things, I have to say, I feel like in this political climate we’re so inured to horrific and just mind-blowing news that breaks like every ten minutes that it almost feels like nothing shocks me anymore, it’s almost like when you watch Law and Order for a long enough period of time, of course I wouldn’t be talking about myself, I’m definitely talking about other people here. No, I love and watch way too much Law and Order guys, anyone who knows me would know, it’s my comfort television. So when you find enough of that kind of stuff the things that used to shock you like seeing the dead body that gets found in Central Park, it’s no longer shocking. I feel like that’s the moment we’re living in now, this extended very long dumpster fire moment where nothing shocks you anymore. This headline actually managed to shock me this weekend because it is so absolutely evil at it’s core. So you’ve got lawmakers in red states who are wanting, really chomping at the bit to take away health care from people anyway that they can get permission to do it and now trying to take advantage of Trump’s new invitation to take away health insurance from people who can’t find jobs and states are finding that it actually costs a lot of money to set up what end up being really complicated bureaucracies to figure out who is meeting those rules and then to take away health insurance from people who aren’t. and Tennessee is just the latest state to find that it’s going to cost a lot of money to take Medicaid away from people in fact they found $10,000 per person is what it’s going to cost to take away Medicaid from folks that they’re looking to pry it away from and they’ve decided to pay for by raiding the state’s TANF program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Which is income assistance, extremely meager income assistance for the poorest families with kids in that state.

SLEVIN: This was created under the 1996 welfare law, one of the few remaining sources of cash assistance is now being raided to pay for taking away health care.

VALLAS: And the state law makers they make it sound like wow we’ve got all this unused TANF money because, some of the news reports even buy into this, we’ve had this booming economy and historically low unemployment and so that’s why we are just flushed with unused cash that we didn’t need to give to struggling families. The reality is that nearly a quarter of Tennessee children live below the federal poverty line. It’s one the worst states in the nation when it comes to child poverty but almost none of them are actually getting help from Tennessee’s TANF program because it is one of the stingiest in the country and if you are one of the families in that state lucky enough to get help guess how much you can get per month, Jeremy, if you’re say, a family of three.

SLEVIN: Mmm, is it more than $600 because that’s how much you can earn in Utah to get Medicaid.

VALLAS: It’s $185 per month, that is month, that is how much Tennessee provide it’s poorest families with children, that’s about $6 a day and that’s if they’re lucky enough to among the 1 in 4 poor Tennessee families with children who actually get help from this program. So what have they been doing with all this money over the years that they’re not giving to the families who need help? They’ve been squirreling it away and now they’re sitting on $400 million of unused money that was supposed to go to poor families with kids and they’re saying hmm, maybe this is the money we should spend to take away health insurance from struggling workers.

SLEVIN: Which is one of the results of the 1996 welfare law, you basically converted cash assistance into a slush fund, so states use it sometimes during recessions, sometimes not even during recessions to pay for other things instead of actually helping the people who need it.

VALLAS: That’s exactly right and so you’ve got states using TANF money to close budget gaps, to fill potholes, for all kinds of stuff that isn’t about helping struggling workers and their kids. It’s like TANF has become this program that at this point and actually when you dig into the numbers I can use a stat here, fewer than 1 in 4 TANF dollars are actually going to help poor families with kids today nationwide so Tennessee, far from the exception to the rule. Tennessee sort of is the poster child of what we’re watching happen in TANF. But then you just get to this really gross instinct on the part of lawmakers saying, let’s take that money and use it, not even in this case to close budget gaps or to go to other good purposes at least, but to use it to take away health care from in some cases the very same people who aren’t even getting helped by the funds in the first place. I’ll get off my soapbox, but this one really, really stuck with me because there’s really a pretty deep rot at the core of what we’re seeing in Tennessee that’s not just about that state and really that cuts across conservative proposals to slash not just health care but also food assistance and housing and more and that is really, in my view an ideology fueled willingness to spend whatever it takes to take aid away from struggling workers and families even if it costs more than it saves.

SLEVIN: So I’m sure people would love to hear us talk about TANF for hours.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: If I’m listening to this show, I think they might Jeremy.

SLEVIN: Fair enough.

VALLAS: Hate to break it to you.

SLEVIN: Sadly that is not even the most insidious policy we’re discussing this week.

VALLAS: I might disagree; I don’t know because what’s coming next?

SLEVIN: Well, you’re about to find out what’s coming next. This week a full 200-page draft of a new Trump administration proposal leaked in the Washington Post yesterday and the draft of the proposal that’s been rumored for months now basically makes it difficult for immigrants who accept any public benefits including Medicaid or food assistance or even tax credits, legal immigrants would make those benefits consider them a public charge. In other words, they could not gain citizenship if they needed healthcare under Medicaid. This has been rumored for months but it would take away health care coverage or food assistance from hundreds of thousands of immigrants and it could be one of the most insidious rules that the Trump administration puts forward to really exacerbate poverty in this country and hurt working people.

VALLAS: And we’ve talked about this on this show before, in particular with Shawn Fremstad one of our colleagues who knows a lot about this type of policy as well as with a professor who has studied the history of basically excluding people from this country on the basis on poverty, not something that’s new but a truly evil proposal, which OK, I take back what I said before about how this wasn’t going to rival what’s going on in Tennessee.

SLEVIN: I think there are a couple new things we learned. One is that my computer just died so I lost the —

VALLAS: This is going to be a good test to see how much you actually know without your computer, Jeremy.

SLEVIN: [It] will require low-income families to post a cash bond of a minimum of $10,000, which is something that wasn’t in the rule beforehand that we’re now learning about. We don’t even fully understand how that would work. Obviously if you are not well off enough to afford basically like health care or food you’re probably not well-off enough to post a $10,000 bond. Another thing about this rule, it somehow is the apex of everything this administration stands for. It’s simultaneously trying to punish people for being poor by saying you can’t get into the country if you need healthcare.

VALLAS: Or stay in the country.

SLEVIN: Or stay in the country or even if your child needs healthcare by the way. If a immigrant, a legal immigrant has a citizen child who needs Medicaid or who needs food assistance that parent could be denied citizenship based on this kid’s ability to get Medicaid.

VALLAS: So you end up with this really, really sick Sophie’s choice where you’ve got parents in the position if this rule goes into effect and we should note this rule has not even been released yet, it certainly hasn’t gone to effect. What we’re discussing is a leak of a rule that has now threatened to come later this year. So really important for folks to understand that who are listening who are maybe wondering what does this mean for them, for their friends for their neighbors, for their immigrant communities. This rule is not yet in place but what they are threatening would put parents in this just unbelievably awful position between having to choose making sure their kids have what they need, health care and food and shelter and clothes and all of the basics. Childcare, even head start is in here in terms of if you access it that you end up triggering this rule. Choosing between those basics for their kids and their own ability to be on a pathway to citizenship so they can stay with their kids in this country.

SLEVIN: And by expanding it to virtually everything including child tax credits, basically what it is saying is if you’re low income we don’t want you. And that’s why the other thing it combines with this basically criminalization of poverty is white supremacy frankly. Because the large proportion of the people who this would affect are low income people of color. So it’s somehow combining hey, if you’re poor in this country we’re going to make it harder for you and if you’re a person of color seeking a better life we’re not going to let you into the country.

VALLAS: It’s an extension of the shithole country thing.

SLEVIN: That’s exactly what it is.

VALLAS: But tied together with criminalization of poverty but only for black and brown people. Alright, you’ve thoroughly depressed me, Jeremy, did you come with any news that isn’t horrible?

SLEVIN: Yeah.

VALLAS: I’m sort of remembering as I say this —

SLEVIN: There’s always the silver lining. When you look at public opinion surveys on not just poverty but on the tax bill, on Trump which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, the American people are moving in the right direction. I know this isn’t huge news but this week a new poll came out on the tax bill and it turns out most people as many people warned before the bill was passed are not seeing the direct benefits of the actual tax bill. So less than a third of Americans are saying they are being directly helped by the tax bill and I’ll add that even within that small group of people, not all of them, many of them are still not supportive of the tax bill because they see that it will force cuts to health care and Medicaid and Social Security and Medicare and that the rich would benefit. But this kind of I think undermines, and what’s funny is it was written in the conservative Washington Examiner who first surfaced this poll.

VALLAS: Wait, they were the ones who broke it?

SLEVIN: They were the ones who broke the news.

VALLAS: Did they know what they were saying?

SLEVIN: I think they were just being good, objective journalists as the Washington Examiner always is.

VALLAS: I love it, alright.

SLEVIN: But it cuts against even the mainstream media narrative which we say this year which was basically oh, people are going to start liking the tax bill once they start seeing the benefits and that was based on a lot of these corporate press releases that were saying oh, we’re giving out bonuses but in reality the so called trickle down effect of the tax bill is not trickling down.

VALLAS: So I was remembering as I was asking you the question did you come with any good news that epic moment when I asked you that once and you literally googled on air ‘good news this week’ and thought maybe you would find something.

SLEVIN: I go to the Washington Examiner every week.

VALLAS: This time you go to the Washington Examiner, I like it. It feels right, Jeremy, it feels right. The other thing that we learned about this week that I feel like is maybe worth talking about. It’s not a good news thing, it’s not a bad news thing it’s sort of an interesting thing and I’d actually love to dig into it a little deeper for a longer segment at some point on this show. Comes out of Miami and has to do with the fact that teachers there and teachers everywhere are struggling to afford housing nearby their schools.

SLEVIN: Yes, they are basically building public housing for teachers on campus. Miami of course has really high housing prices, Florida is known for having issues with it’s education system so the proposal would basically build public housing in an elementary school, a floor devoted to residential units in addition to parking, as many as 300 apartments in the school. I mean personally, I would say how about just pay teachers more.

VALLAS: It’s exactly what I was about to say. Everyone, New York Times, all these stories about wow this really creative approach, right, and yeah it is a really creative approach and it’s interesting and maybe other cities are going to look at this and say hey this is something that we can do but it sort makes me want to back up and say like why aren’t we talking about just paying them more? Especially in a time of teacher strikes and action across the country where teachers are standing up and saying we can’t live on these salaries and here we are working with in many cases kids who are themselves in poverty and needing all kinds of support that isn’t just in the form of instruction in the classroom. So we’re asking more and more and more of teachers and not paying nearly enough to be able to live anywhere nearby their schools.

SLEVIN: I mean it kind of reminds me of these old coal towns that you see, like these abandoned coal towns where the company would build all the housing on the mine, you would go to work in the mine, everything in the town would be owned by the company. And honestly I think people value their independence to a certain extent so if we just paid people a living wage and actually funded affordable housing for people who aren’t getting by on sufficient wages that’d my vote but kudos, Miami.

VALLAS: Radical ideas, the Slevin approach, let’s just pay people what they need to live and make sure that housing is something that people can afford. And we’re going to have to leave it there, Jeremy Slevin, the Slevinator, always a fan favorite, Jeremy thanks for coming by with the news of the week even though most of it was terrible. That’s ok, I forgive. Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, we’re talking census and the citizenship question that dropped a bombshell this week. Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Earlier this week the Trump administration announced that the 2020 census would be including a question about U.S. citizenship. The news generated immediate and widespread blowback, including the filing of lawsuits by at least two states attorneys general who argue the change violates the law. With me to unpack what’s at stake is Corrine Yu, she’s the managing policy director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Corrine, thanks so much for joining the show.

CORRINE YU: Happy to be here, Rebecca.

VALLAS: So there’s been a lot of news flying this week about this announcement but to kick us off help us understand why does it matter if the census includes a citizenship question?

YU: Well it matters a lot Rebecca because this question is both unwise, it’s unnecessary and it’s untested. It’s also untimely, you’ve got the four U’s there, it’s a really bad idea. I’m happy to go into more detail, it’s untimely because the topics for the census have already been submitted so it’s very late in the game, the census has already begun. It’s unnecessary because the Department of Justice doesn’t actually need this question to enforce civil rights protections or the Voting Rights Act and it’s unwise because it’s going to have a chilling effect on census participation which in turn will negatively impact the accuracy of the census and ensuring a fair and accurate census is a top civil rights priority and that’s why the Leadership Conference, our coalition all the stakeholders who are participating in census outreach are so concerned about this.

VALLAS: Well let’s get a little, let’s get into that aspect a little bit which is you were just describing some of the technical consequences, people may be away of the census being a head count effectively of how many people are in this country and where they live. There is other information as well but there are a lot of decisions that flow from census data including around federal funding for government services.

YU: Sure, so that’s right the census is in the constitution, it’s constitutionally required, it’s the once every ten years undertaking. They count every person living in the United States so under normal circumstances, that’s a huge endeavor but this question make it just so much more challenging. So I mentioned how important the fair and accurate census is to the civil rights community and really to everyone. It needs to be fair and accurate for several reason. Census data are used to ensure fair political representation. Community leaders use census data to make decisions about allocating resources like assistance for veterans, hospitals and transportation and to prepare for disaster response. Businesses and entrepreneurs use census data to make critical economic growth decisions about where to locate plants and stores, hiring and customer needs. You mentioned the role of census data in the allocation of more than $600 billion in federal government resources to state, localities and families every year. Census data played a key role in the implementation enforcement of our nation’s civil rights laws so that’s why the census is important and that’s why we’re so concerned.

VALLAS: Now just to state the obvious here because I think it’s sort of helpful to get concrete. The concern that many advocates including you guys at the Leadership Conference have been voicing is that what this question may end up producing is a quote, bad census. There may be people who get scared off from wanting to fill out the form and in particular, people in immigrant communities and that that may produce an inaccurate count. One question that occurred to me is if this is being done electronically how is this actually going to play out?

YU: So I want to start with the first point you made which is the concerns of the civil rights community. I should say that it’s not the civil rights community, there has been a groundswell of opposition to the inclusion of this question. More than 60 members of congress called on Secretary Ross to reject the politicization of the 2020 census and the Justice Department’s request. they were joined by 161 Democratic and Republican mayors, six former census directors who served in Republican and Democratic administrations, 19 attorneys general, business leaders from around the country in addition to the civil and human rights community and other stakeholders. So there are lots of people who opposed the inclusion of this question and the issue is really, this is where I think you’re going, whether the question would jeopardize the accuracy of the census. Commerce Secretary Ross himself told the House Census Oversight committee last October that quote, “One of the problems with adding questions is it reduces response rates.” It might see counterintuitive but the more things you ask in these forms, the less likely you are get them in, so he acknowledged that and four former Census directors in a brief in the Evenwel case that asking about citizen status in decennial census which goes to every household would likely exacerbate privacy concerns, lead to inaccurate responses and the sum effect would be bad census data. So I just wanted to highlight that there has really been a groundswell of bipartisan opposition to this. Now you asked about the internet option and so noting that for 2020 there will an internet response option so people will have the option of responding by mail, over the telephone and over the internet. And I think in this day and age cyber security threat whether real or perceived are something that we’re very concerned about, we are calling this the first high-tech census and I think technology can bring great efficiency to the census. As you know, this bureau has been under great pressure to keep costs down and so that is a major reason why the internet option is going to be so important. But the bureau itself has adjusted down it’s prediction about self-response including through the internet. So they appear to be acknowledging that in the current climate, encouraging robust participation is going to be very tough.

VALLAS: Now you mentioned Secretary Ross and some of what he said actually last year when he was testifying about the census and he testified, as you mentioned, that adding a question could be the wrong thing to do because it makes it less likely that people are going to answer all the questions, all the reasons you laid out. But it’s worth noting that he was actually speaking in that moment about why didn’t think it made sense to add a question asking about sexual and gender identity and he said that he thought that might depress participation so as a result the 2020 census is not going to count how many LGBT people there are in America. That is the position of the Trump administration. However they do think it’s necessary to be asking about citizenship so some real hypocrisy there.

YU: That’s a good point.

VALLAS: So just continuing on what they’re really after, some news reports have noted that this change did not originate from the census department when one might expect it to have originated given that this is a major decision about how the census is conduct but news reports are indicating that it may actually have come from Jeff Session’s Justice Department which is saying that they need these numbers and they need to be asking this questions so that they can enforce the voting rights act. Does that hold water at all?

YU: We don’t think so. Yes, the request came from the Department of Justice and ProPublica published a story that indicated that top leadership were involved in this. But the fact is that the Department of Justice does not need this information to enforce civil rights protections or the Voting Rights Act. And as I think you know, my boss Vanita Gupta, former head of the Civil Rights division of the Department of Justice and she knows what’s necessary to enforce civil rights protections or the Voting Rights Act. So the census has not included this question on citizenship on the form that’s sent to all households since enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which means that these data have never been necessary to enforce our civil and voting rights laws. Instead what civil rights organizations, what the Justice Department have relied on are the estimates of the citizen voting age population that are derived from the ongoing American Community Survey, which is part of the census and that has been and continues to be robust for civil rights and Voting Rights Act enforcement. So that stated reason, we think just doesn’t hold up.

VALLAS: And worth noting as we’re getting the facts out there but also busting some of the myths that are being generated by the Trump administration as they push for this policy, Trump’s press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made it sound like a citizenship question had been included in, I’m going to quote her here, “in every census since 1965 with the exception of 2010 when it was removed.” That claim garnered her a slew of ‘Pinocchio’s’ not only because the census comes every ten years, not five years, we’ll put that aside but because in point of fact the last time the decennial census asked about citizenship was as you mentioned, in 1950.

YU: That’s right, the 1950 census was the last to collect citizenship data from the whole population.

VALLAS: So where do things go from here? We talk a lot on this show about not just problems but how people can get involved and actually take action. This is sort of a different type of fight than a piece of legislation or even an executive action by the administration. This is an announcement about how the census is going to be administers. What is it that people can do if they’re hearing this and they want to get involved and they want to fight back?

YU: Well there is lots that folks can do and people are paying attention now which is quite extraordinary because the 2020 census is two years away even though, as I mentioned preparations testing has already begun. So we are working on the side of elected officials of all parties, business leaders, our coalition of more than 200 organizations, grassroots and civic activists around the country to defend our census, our democracy and our nation. And already, states officials and others are speaking out in reaction to this terrible decision. The state of California has already filed a lawsuit, the state of New York has stated it’s intent to file a multi-state lawsuit to challenge this decision. We anticipate that more lawsuits will follow and we stand with them because the stakes are too high. This really is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. The fight’s not over, we’re not giving up. We’re going to be working with our coalition partners, with state and local leaders, members of congress, other key decision makers to overturn this decision and congress has a really important role to play here, in fact a constitutional role to play. It can hold robust oversight, it can hold hearings, it can make inquiries of the Commerce Department, of the Census Bureau, it can pass legislation and so we are urging everyone to speak out on the importance of the census, tell congress to take action to fix this error.

VALLAS: And if you had to look into your crystal ball and make a guess and I hate to put you in that position but I know there are a lot of people who are wondering, I’m one of them what the answer to this question. Are these lawsuits going to be successful, is this decision going to be found illegal?

YU: Oh, I know that the plaintiffs in these lawsuits are going to really fight, they’re going to make good cases. They’ve got constitutional arguments to back them up so we’ll have to see. But I think what I can predict is that just as there was a groundswell of opposition to the inclusion of this question, if anything, opposition is going to grow and people are very concerned and we’ve been fielding questions left and right and it’s great to see people energized and motivated to protect our democracy in this way.

VALLAS: Corrine Yu is the managing policy director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Corrine, thank you so much for your work to overturn this decision and for taking the time to join the show.

YU: Thanks Rebecca, happy to do it.

VALLAS: Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

[START VIDEO CLIP: “Roseanne”]

HARRIS: Can I have some money?

DARLENE: I don’t know, mom can I have some money?

[LAUGHTER]

ROSEANNE: I don’t know, can I have some money?

[LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE]

HARRIS: You could have just said we were poor, I didn’t need the routine.

[END VIDEO CLIP]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. That was a clip from the reboot of the TV sitcom “Roseanne” which premiered this week. When the show originally premiered in 1988, it was heralded for it’s honest portrayal of a working class family struggling to make ends meet in the Midwest. The show returned to the airwaves this week, drawing tens of millions of viewers and generating not insignificant controversy due to the fact that the show’s eponymous character is now a Trump supporter. With me to dig into the reboot and someone who has many thoughts about the show I am sure is Mara Pellittieri, she’s the managing editor of TalkPoverty.org and incidentally someone who keeps Jeremy Slevin in check better than most as his lucky office mate. Mara, thanks for coming back on the show.

PELLITTIERI: Thanks for having me. I will talk about “Roseanne” all day.

VALLAS: Well we have some time so I’m going to keep you here as long as you want to keep talking. So you watched it, I watched it, I’d love to hear your immediate reactions.

PELLITTIERI: Yeah, I mean the first thing that I feel like we can’t not talk about was the marketing for this show.

VALLAS: Oh yeah.

PELLITTIERI: So during the Oscars which it should be noted, of all of the Oscar years to do this it’s one of the years where it felt like Hollywood was finally starting to make some headway into the unbearable whiteness and maleness of it all. Right, we’re in the middle of the Me Too movement where all of these powerful men are finally being held responsible, we had not perfect diversity but an unusual amount of diversity. Our best actor got his award for playing a young gay man, we had a woman nominated as a director, we had a black man who won for the [best screenplay] award. So to be in these awards where it felt like Hollywood was having this moment where it was finally starting to create programming that could represent a broader diversity of what America actually looks like, a commercial cuts in for “Roseanne” and describes it as the family that looks like us.

VALLAS: Ooooh God.

PELLITTIERI: And then cuts right to a family of exclusively white folks, which is a tough pill to swallow and even stranger in context when you think about what the rest of ABC’s programming looks like. ABC is the network that has “Modern Family”, it’s network that has “Fresh Off The Boat” and that has “Black-ish” so there are all of these different depictions of American families on ABC that this commercial seemed to be saying we all know we’re not that.

VALLAS: And it wasn’t just that commercial. It’s actually been some of the taglines for the show that have been everywhere. The one that jumped out to me that was similar to “The family that looks like us” is “The normal American family.” Normal.

PELLITTIERI: Gross!

VALLAS: Right, right, ugh.

PELLITTIERI: Yeah, yeah, so that’s how it’s marketed, right, is it’s not even really dog-whistling at that point, like it’s an airhorn. It’s like alright people of color and queer folks, this is not for you. And when you look at how the premiere turned out, it worked! It worked really well, it got really high ratings and those ratings were, with the exception of Chicago where the show is set, almost exclusively in Trump country. So basically saying I mean it’s the sitcom equivalent of offering something that’s like fair and balanced, taking the lame-stream media to task.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: No, it’s an important point because I think the marketing tells us a lot about what’s behind the show. One of the, perhaps the only discussion that has really made it into mainstream media in reacting to the reboot has been about the fact that Roseanne has come back in 2018 as a Trump supporter. And obviously this is evidence of not just a evolution of Roseanne the character’s politics, she was a very different character politically back when the show was on the air, and actually was heralded widely for being bold and lefty and feminist at a time when that was still something that was bold for a female comic to be embracing and leading on. That’s not the Roseanne of 2018.

PELLITTIERI: Yeah so I think she’s a little more nuanced now than we’re really giving her credit for. I mean it’s a shame that the advertising was what it was because when you get into the show itself, she’s actually still kind of a complicated character. So she is nearly and dear to my heart because I have always been a weird fat kid. And there are not that many places growing up that I could see anyone who looked in anyway like me or talked in anyway like me so in the 90s my options were Roseanne, or Oprah or Rosie. And Oprah and Rosie, a big part of their public personas was they were going to lose the weight. Rosie was clearly queer but weirdly closeted, she had that decade long Tom Cruise thing that I still haven’t really sussed out. So Roseanne was one of those women who actually kind of felt like a mom. And I think there is some way in which watching the reboot still feels a little bit like coming home to me. It’s still easy to identify with Darlene, she’s back at home, she’s grown up a little bit but Roseanne is, it feels like a logical way that the character could have aged. She still stands up for her kids when she thinks it’s important. She still feels pretty strongly about bodily autonomy and about her kid’s ability to be themselves. But you do get the sense that’s frustrated with stagnation. It’s just really clear in the way that she, it’s clear in the set design in and of itself.

VALLAS: To watch the show, I mean that was actually the first thing that washed over me. You see the credits and it looks the same, everything looks exactly the same. It’s like it literally has been frozen in time since 1988.

PELLITTIERI: Right and so you get the sense that these characters have been stuck in a literal exact stasis. So to have her be slightly frustrated and when she does finally talk about Trump, it’s not a whole lot, most of the discussion about Trump is just her and Jackie barbing at each other.

VALLAS: Jackie is her sister who we watched dramatically walk into the house and to cheers and jeers from the live studio audience watching. She comes in with a ‘Nasty Woman’ shirt and a matching pink pussy hat on her head and it’s pretty clear what they’re setting us up for in terms of the family feud.

PELLITTIERI: Right, so she’s obviously a caricature being played for laughs. The entire rest of the family is wearing normal clothes and moving about their day and Jackie is like the wild unhinged liberal barging in.

VALLAS: Including with Russian salad dressing which is sort of a laugh line that also is maybe a little too cute but it’s clear what they’re going for with her character.

PELLITTIERI: Yeah, I mean it’s, oh Jackie. What a gem.

VALLAS: I mean she is, it’s a fun character but it’s pretty clear what they’re doing with it. But I want to get back to Roseanne and her politics because I agree with you that going into the show based on all of the blowback and that’s something that’s probably worth mentioning the immediate reaction by so many folks on the left was almost an out and out boycott to the show. I’ll be instead of watching “Roseanne” tonight, I’ll be watching my dachshund sleep. Tweets like this were a thing. People trying to signal that they couldn’t be paid enough to watch this show because she’s a Trump supporter and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. But then you had a lot of folks who were trying to say, well wait a second, maybe there’s actually more here and that’s what I’d love to hear a little more from you about.

PELLITTIERI: Yeah, so that’s why I think that the stasis is really important. so the only discussion that we really get out of Trump for Roseanne when Jackie is trying to egg her on and say do you understand how badly you messed this up, do you understand how deeply broken things are now? Roseanne just kind of shrugs it off and her only really explanation is he talked about jobs, he said he’d shake things up. And you can tell based on the way her home has stayed exactly the same that the idea of something being shaken up seems like the only way to end the frustration of 20 straight years of not being able to get ahead. And there’s both an incredible frustration and a very real privilege in that. There’s the frustration of we’ve worked our entire lives, they open with a scene where they can’t afford their own medicine, they’re trading it back and forth. Their kids have all lost their jobs, they’re struggling to make ends meet. That’s all hard but at the same time their politics seem they’re much less fraught than the people who’s literal lives are on the line. The Connor family, their comfort is at stake but their lives in a lot of ways are not in the way that the lives of immigrant families and people of color are.

VALLAS: The trading pills scene is a pretty amazing one and I actually want to talk about that in some detail. So we’ve got Roseanne sitting at the kitchen table with her husband Dan played by John Goodman and he comes in with his big haul from the pharmacy where he’s brought home their meds that they need for various health conditions and he throws them all on the table and you hear all the pills juggling and Roseanne is asking did you get the stuff for my back and did you get my happy pills and she’s ticking through the things.

PELLITTIERI: Right, he literally calls himself the candy man.

VALLAS: He calls himself the candy man but he has to say, look actually I wasn’t able to get all of the prescriptions that we needed filled because and I think the way he puts it was I was able to get us half what we used to be able to afford at twice the price. And so he says I think we’re just going to have to trade and they literally sit at the table and decide who gets which pills because they don’t have enough for both of them for all of the different health conditions that they face.

PELLITTIERI: Right, I mean it’s a stunning scene to watch and it’s a very real scene to watch. This is a thing that we know is definitely happening, especially in older relationships.

VALLAS: Survey data tell us that something like 30% to 40% of Americans in the past year have experienced serious problems accessing medical care or medicines that they need because of costs so clearly something that is really hitting a nerve with a lot of the country. You mentioned other characters as well who are facing very real struggles that are poster children of what people in this country are facing, Darlene, she finally comes clean that she lost her job. And now that’s why she’s going on job interviews and she says at one point, in a moment of real depression and exasperation, I’ve got two kids, I’ve got no partner and I’ve come home to live with my parents. I thought I’d be some huge success now with a huge house, something that millennials are facing in extremely large numbers. Roseanne even makes a mention at one point that she’s driving for Uber.

PELLITTIERI: Yeah, she’s in that gig economy.

VALLAS: So the question that I was confronted with in watching this was obviously as you’re mentioning Roseanne’s politics are complicated and they’re presented in that way in the show but is there hope that this show in coming back on the air and in this moment and as a form of comedy, is there hope that it might actually be a vehicle for having a conversation about politics and how it intersects with class and economic struggles at a point where we’re feeling more polarized than ever and like there isn’t really a space to have that conversation.

PELLITTIERI: I would love to be able to say yes to that, I’m a little skeptical and the reason that I’m a little bit worried comes back to the issue around marketing. This show is so clearly being sold to people who have already bought into it’s premise. It’s begin sold to people who are going to look at these characters and who are going to see themselves in them right away. It’s not really being sold as a way to stretch your understanding of what it looks like to be an American in this moment. So I think there are a lot of people who will find comfort as a form of representation that they feel like they’ve been denied. I’m a little bit worried about whether or not people who don’t look like the Connor family are going to feel like they are even welcome to turn it on.

VALLAS: It’s a great point just from the representation angle and I think the marketing is something we can’t ignore but I do find myself actually being incredibly surprised by how much I enjoyed watching it and I think I ask that question from a place of hope because I find myself one of those people who is really hungry for that space, for that conversation and viewing comedy as one of the ways to get there, I walked into the show and I’ll confess this, assuming I was going to hate it, assuming that it was going to be deeply offensive to me. And I found myself surprised to be really enjoying some of the back and forth in the family. Roseanne says, Grace at one point decides she wants to squeeze ‘Make America Great Again’ into it, and then looks over at her sister Jackie and say, “you going to take a knee, I’m saying grace”, it’s like they actually do manage to have some fun with what have been really serious and polarizing conversations so I did leave with that piece of hope but you’re dashing my hope, Mara.

[LAUGHTER]

PELLITTIERI: So I think I managed to, I got to that place because honestly we had agreed to watch it together. Once I turned the show on, it felt in a lot of ways to me like coming home. There was a very realistic depiction of what my own American family looked like which included a mix of people of very different politics, of different races, of different orientations. So I think the show itself does have a relatively diverse portrayal of viewpoints and of people that are all up against feeling like politics and the country are not designed to work for them. They operate outside of it and it’s just not concerned with their lives. I would love for it to be one of the many vehicles that people can use to start talking about what it’s like to be an American today and I just, I would love to see the show let itself be that.

VALLAS: And perhaps my hopes should be dashed, especially with the news that following the premiere of the reboot President Trump himself actually called Roseanne Barr to congratulate her on the show and Kellyanne Conway shortly thereafter tweeted how excited she was to start watching television again because this gave her a reason to do it. So obviously the marketing combined with the immediate polarized backlash and response including support from Trump supporters and Trump himself, setting this up not to be something that really is inviting of people who maybe really could actually learn a lot from the show itself. So Mara where do you hope the show goes and maybe if Roseanne is listening, where do you hope that she takes some of the storylines when it comes to depicting families that are living paycheck to paycheck like this show does?

PELLITTIERI: There’s a lot of exposition in the first episode that I think can get teased out. So they start dealing right away in the second episode with Darlene’s son who is coded queer in the same way that Darlene herself was coded queer in the 90s. Darlene pushes back on that as a character saying he’s just nine years old, he’s not old enough to really know. But they’ve clearly written the character Mark in a way that’s designed to gender bend and to set him up to try to figure out how to navigate the world.

VALLAS: At one point John Goodman’s character Dan notices that Mark is wearing nail polish and his notices him saying your nails are drying and then I actually kind of enjoyed the exchange a little bit because then Dan says well, my nails are drying too and he’s referencing that he was working with dry wall. But kind of a weird moment but they’re trying something there?

PELLITTIERI: Yeah, they are and you can see John Goodman’s character, he’s comfortable with it inside the house but he’s still very worried about respectability politics. So I think seeing some parents come to terms with having a child who is a non-normative gender identity could be extremely powerful in the households where we do know the show is getting watched. I know we think of the internet and of young gay folks of having this unfettered access to online communities but it’s still not always entirely true. And childhood is long, it takes a really long time before you feel like you’ll ever be able to have agency over your life. So I would love to see the family get to a place where they work through Mark’s character and give him room to develop and be a whole person rather than just a caricature like you mentioned, I definitely want to see some discussion of health care.

VALLAS: The only discussion of health care I heard in that first episode was a joke where Roseanne said something along the lines of, and she’s talking the Jackie, well you want the government to give everyone health care because you can’t do simple math.

PELLITTIERI: Right, coming from a character who is trading pills with her husband!

VALLAS: So is that an opportunity then for there to be some interweaving of actual policy as it could solve the problems the family is facing? Maybe not something to be optimistic here for but it feels like there could be an opening.

PELLITTIERI: I would hope so especially since they, so they brought John Goodman’s character back.

VALLAS: Back from the dead actually.

PELLITTIERI: Back from the dead but in the 90s he died, he had a heart attack. So I think we have some room with his character in particular and especially since they set up both him and Roseanne as having a lot of health concerns to talk about ongoing care in a whole bunch of different ways. That could mean the cost of health care, it could mean any kind of home care giving. That I think is a very, very rich vein.

VALLAS: Well a lot to watch for, the show is just getting started, obviously getting lots of attention only in certain circles in a way that involves watching it but call to listeners is give it a shot, actually check it out, watch that first episode, it doesn’t take that long and interested to hear what you think, tweet @offkilter and let us know your thoughts about the “Roseanne” reboot. Mara Pellittieri is the managing editor of TalkPoverty.org and someone who helps Jeremy Slevin behave better than he otherwise might when he’s in the office by being his officemate. Thank you for volunteering as tribute for that Mara, the team thanks you and thanks for coming back on the show.

PELLITTIERI: Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.