Rep. Magaziner speaks at Brown
Brown University
Magaziner, then serving as Rhode Island’s general treasurer, got a call about the siege on the United States Capitol from the state police colonel.
Due to the violence in Washington, D.C., the colonel
said, he planned to send several state troopers to keep watch over Magaziner
and several other Rhode Island elected officials.
“I had this surreal experience of watching a violent mob… storming the Capitol, attacking police officers to try to stop the counting of votes under our Constitution, while state police cruisers were circling outside my house,” the congressman said in a Tuesday, April 11, conversation at Brown University.
“I thought, okay, this is what I want to do:
I want to be on the front lines of trying to protect our democracy. This is the
fight of our generation: to make sure we preserve our democracy, to make sure
that there’s accountability for those who would attack our democracy… so that
people can have faith in our democratic system of government going forward.”
Magaziner, a Class of 2006 Brown graduate who is three months into his first term representing Rhode Island’s second congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives, spoke during a wide-ranging conversation co-hosted by the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy and the Brown Democrats, a student-run organization. Held at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the event was Magaziner’s first appearance at Brown since taking office, and it drew dozens of students and Providence-area residents.
Magaziner said that while he is still finding his feet in Washington, he is determined to focus on understanding and combating the political extremism that is, he said, fueling a growing number of violent and sometimes fatal incidents in the nation.
After campaigning for a
spot, he was appointed the Democratic ranking member of the Counterterrorism,
Law Enforcement and Intelligence Subcommittee within the House’s Homeland
Security Committee, where he has the opportunity to invite and learn from experts on
international affairs and security.
That position has allowed the congressman
to better understand what legislative, and even academic, action is needed to
reduce domestic terrorism, which is now killing more Americans than
international terrorism.
Magaziner said that at the moment, he’s
focused on advancing gun-safety legislation. He shared that House Democrats are
mulling bringing a discharge petition on legislation that would ban the sale,
import and manufacture of assault weapons. If the petition gets 218 signatures
from his congressional peers, he said, it would force Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the
speaker of the House, to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.
“The fact that 70% or 80% of gun owners
support common-sense gun safety legislation [shows that] some cracks are
starting to show in that wall of Republican opposition,” Magaziner said. “There
are 18 districts Republicans [represent] where Joe Biden won [in 2020]. They’re
going to have to answer to their constituents [who ask], ‘Well, why aren’t you
signing that petition?’”
But Magaziner insisted that lawmakers
weren’t the only ones who could help reduce incidents of domestic terrorism. He
urged scholars at Brown and other colleges and universities to kickstart
research into why an increasing number of young people are becoming radicalized
and taking up arms against fellow citizens. According to the congressman,
almost all recent domestic terrorists have been either racially motivated or
fueled by anti-government sentiment.
“We as a society need to get a stronger
idea of, if someone has become radicalized and they believe… this charged
rhetoric… how do you get people away from that ledge, both as individuals and
en masse?” Magaziner asked. “I don’t think there’s enough of a roadmap on how…
we do that on a core personal level. That’s what we need researchers at Brown
to dig in on.”
From college student to congressman
Magaziner related to the crowd of students
and community members that being a freshman in Congress feels much like being a
first-year college student: “You’re in this big, fancy new place; you get lost
a lot; there are lots of people to get to know.”
There’s even pressure, he said, to pick a
“major” — that is, to choose one or two issues to focus on.
“You can’t specialize in everything; you
have to pick a couple of spots and decide that that’s what you’ll lean into,”
he said. “I’m in the process of figuring out what my ‘major’ is going to be…
maybe domestic extremism… [maybe also] climate and energy. I want to take the
first year or two to find my way.”
Magaziner also answered audience members’
questions about his priorities when it comes to education — subsidizing
universal preschool and investing more in technical post-secondary education,
he said — and climate change. He emphasized the urgency he feels to enact
certain elements of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that could help halt
further catastrophic climate change.
“The Inflation Reduction Act has an
enormous clean energy measure that will jumpstart the energy transition,”
Magaziner said. “There’s a $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit… we have to work
to get that money out as soon as possible, because Republicans will cut those
programs as soon as they can."
Magaziner, a lifelong Rhode Islander who
grew up in Bristol, said Brown students were among those to thank for his
victory in the 2022 midterm elections: Their canvassing and advocacy work, he
said, motivated voters to show up to the polls and defeat his opponent,
Republican Allan Fung, who had been polling several percentage points
ahead of the Democrat on the eve of the election.
He urged students to continue prioritizing
advocacy work, adding that that work was an important learning experience
for Magaziner during his own time at Brown.
“You’re in a state where government is so
accessible,” he said. “It’s not hard to get meetings with members of Congress,
or statewide [officials] or the mayor. To have that kind of connectivity with
government is really rare; it allows the political scene in Rhode Island to be
a training ground.”
He advised students who aspire to a
political career to have a clear answer to the question, “Why are you running
for office?” Some people “want the fancy title” — and those, he said, are the
candidates who use a nonsensical “hodgepodge” of disconnected thoughts to
describe their reason for running.
“I knew the reason I was running for
Congress… it was because of Jan. 6,” Magaziner said. “Fast forward: We were
able to get it done, we were a big upset on election night. Now I’m excited to
do the work.”