Lisa Lerer and Shane Goldmacher

Their statements came as a number of other lawmakers, including Sen. Dick Durbin, the second most powerful Democrat in the Senate, said they had second thoughts about their role in pushing out Franken, a former senator from Minnesota.

While few Democrats are eager to revisit the politically painful situation surrounding Franken’s departure, particularly with a presidential primary underway, he is back in the news after telling The New Yorker, in a story published Monday that contained some of his first public comments since his resignation, that he “absolutely” regretted his decision to step down rather than fight the accusations.

And that means Gillibrand, his onetime friend and the first Democratic colleague to call for his resignation, is back in the news, too. “There is no prize for someone who tries to hold accountable a powerful man who is good at his day job,” she said at a town-hall event Monday night, responding to Franken’s remarks. “But we should have the courage to do it anyway.”

Gillibrand, who has predicated her presidential campaign on being an unyielding advocate for women, expressed no regrets, and neither did some of the women who joined her in calling on Franken to step down over allegations of unwanted touching and kissing.

“With the first accuser, we didn’t call for his resignation from the get-go. It was a difficult decision,” Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, said Tuesday. “But when the eighth person comes forward, there’s a pattern. Women have been putting up with this BS from time immemorial. And we’re sick of it.”

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the highest-ranking Democratic woman in Senate leadership, said she stood by her decision to call for Franken’s resignation. So did four presidential candidates: Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Michael Bennet of Colorado. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, another presidential candidate, did not respond to a request for comment.

“Al Franken’s decision to step down was the right decision — for the good of the Senate and the good of the country,” Schumer said. “I regret losing him as a colleague, but given the circumstances, it was inevitable.”

Franken’s supporters have long blamed Gillibrand for his abrupt political demise, while Gillibrand’s backers have expressed bewilderment that, somehow, a woman has been held responsible for a man’s alleged transgressions.

On the presidential campaign trail, it is Gillibrand who faces the bulk of criticism over the episode from activists, voters and donors, including billionaire financier George Soros. She is one of six 2020 candidates who called for Franken’s resignation from their perches in the Senate.

“I’m not going to get into a debate about any of this with Senator Gillibrand. All I’m going to say is it seems to me that the idea of proportionality was never considered,” said Lou Frillman, a Democratic fundraiser in Minnesota who had supported Franken.

But Frillman said the decision to resign lay with Franken: “You’ve got to blame yourself. He’s the one who pulled the plug.”

The Franken matter has become a persistent distraction for Gillibrand’s struggling campaign. The latest flare-up occurred as Gillibrand prepared to take a victory lap on an issue that has been a centerpiece of her political career: securing permanent funding for the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, established to aid first responders, their families and those who became ill following the terrorist attacks.

Gillibrand has consistently said that while the decision to resign was Franken’s to make, she had to choose whether to “remain silent.”

Jess Morales Rocketto, a Democratic activist, said Gillibrand should be celebrated for standing up for her principles.

“Kirsten Gillibrand is asked to explain why she stood with sexual harassment and assault survivors while there is very little to no interrogation for Al Franken why he perpetuated those crimes,” she said. “It should actually be a shining accomplishment for her. It’s hard to be courageous against your friends.”

Gillibrand was hardly alone in arguing Franken should step down, and her news release to that effect came just minutes before similar calls from her colleagues. By the time Franken stepped down in December 2017, three dozen Democratic senators had called on him to do so.

Durbin said Tuesday he wished the Senate “had given some time for due process.” But he added that Gillibrand shouldn’t shoulder all the blame.

“There was a momentum behind it which was for a number of reasons unusual,” he said. “She might have been the first name on the list, but it was a strong list of Democratic senators.”

On Capitol Hill, few Democrats were eager to reopen a divisive political issue.

“Why is that coming up now?” asked Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, before waving away any further questions.

“I think it was a very unfortunate time. I’ll leave it at that,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.

At the event Monday, hosted by Mic and Bustle Digital Group, Gillibrand cited a “double standard,” noting that female senators were pressed for comment about Franken far more frequently than their male colleagues. “Who is being held accountable for Al Franken’s decision to resign? Women senators, including me. It’s outrageous. It’s absurd,” she said.

Gillibrand has argued that Sen. Doug Jones, a Democrat, would not have won a special election in Alabama if Franken had not stepped aside and provided the party with a clear message against the Republican candidate, Roy Moore, a state jurist accused of sexually assaulting teenage girls. Others in her party, including Schumer, voiced similar concerns.

In the New Yorker piece, Franken alleges that Schumer forced him to leave, his resignation, saying that if he refused to resign by 5 p.m. the entire Democratic caucus would demand he quit. People close to Schumer disputed that description of events, pointing to Franken’s failure to sufficiently address the allegations both publicly and privately within the Democratic caucus. Schumer, they point out, was one of the last Democrats in the Senate to come out against Franken.

“Senator Schumer warned Senator Franken repeatedly that it was certain that there would be procedures used against him in the Senate, including the fact that Republicans would go to the floor and demand censure, call for stripping of his committee assignments and more,” said Justin Goodman, a spokesman for Schumer. “And given the number of senators who called for his resignation, such moves would have inevitably succeeded.”

The magazine quoted seven current and former Democratic senators — five men and two women — as saying they regretted calling for Franken to step down.

Franken had appeared unhappy with his choice in real time. “There is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office,” he said in his farewell speech.

In recent months, Franken has gingerly waded back into public life, after sinking into what he called a clinical depression. “I’m angry at my colleagues who did this. I think they were just trying to get past one bad news cycle,” he told The New Yorker.

His resignation has divided Democrats ever since, with some activists and donors blaming Gillibrand for costing the party a rising star who was able to effectively take on President Donald Trump. Wealthy contributors, in particular, continue to refer to Franken as a factor in Gillibrand’s inability to raise money for her campaign and her lack of traction in the polls.

Gillibrand expressed frustration she was being blamed for Franken’s choices. “Blaming a woman for the actions of a man: I don’t know. I don’t believe in it,” she said. “I don’t think it’s right.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/politics/al-franken-kirsten-gillibrand.html" id="dabfb7e1-d81d-360f-a8f8-f986f3863cb3">The New York Times</a>.

Franken Has Regrets. Gillibrand Does Not.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, and several Democratic senators running for president aligned themselves with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Tuesday, standing by their calls for Al Franken to resign from the Senate more than 18 months ago following numerous allegations of sexual misconduct.

The convention will be held next year on July 13-16 in the newly built Fiserv Forum, a 17,500-seat arena that is home to the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks.

Milwaukee was selected over a pair of larger Sun Belt cities, Houston and Miami, to host the event.

Milwaukee organizers raised more than $10 million and reassured officials that they had secured sufficient hotel capacity for the event, ameliorating concerns that the city lacked the finances and infrastructure to support an event that regularly draws tens of thousands of out-of-town activists, officials and media.

Wisconsin holds a searing place in the Democratic Party psyche after Hillary Clinton, the party’s last presidential nominee, opted not to campaign in the traditionally blue state during the general election — a decision that some blamed for her 22,000-vote defeat in the state.

Democrats won back the governorship of the state in 2018, assuaging some concerns that Wisconsin was drifting away. Still, some in the party are urging the 2020 candidates to broaden their focus beyond the upper Midwest to the rapidly growing Sun Belt states.

Democratic officials worried about the optics of hosting a convention in Houston, a city dominated by the oil and gas industry, at a time when Democratic activists are focused on combating climate change.

Houston had faced another complication. Harold Schaitberger, head of the International Association of Fire Fighters, has been in a prolonged battle with the mayor, Sylvester Turner, over firefighter pay. In an interview last week, Schaitberger said he had warned the DNC that he would consider establishing a union picket line if Democrats located their convention there.

“Tom Perez knows, for whatever it’s worth, that it’s not going to be pretty if they go to Houston,” Schaitberger said.

In recent days, the mayor of Houston has announced plans to lay off hundreds of firefighters to fund a voter-approved measure to increase firefighter pay in the city. Schaitberger accused him of “an old-fashioned double cross” and “just being a jerk.”

Republicans will hold their convention Aug. 24–27, 2020, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/us/politics/dnc-milwaukee-2020.html" id="6c869f75-6f0a-38ba-acea-e75176d534c8">The New York Times</a>.

The Democratic National Committee has selected Milwaukee as the site of its national convention, placing a spotlight on a key Midwestern battleground state that Democrats lost for the first time in three decades in 2016 and see as central to the party’s efforts to reclaim the White House.

Milwaukee Picked as Site of 2020 Democratic National Convention

After spending the next two months “deeply depressed,” the junior senator from New York experienced what she called the most inspiring day of her political life: the women’s march. And almost two years to the day after that, Gillibrand sat in a Manhattan wine bar, holding a glass of pinot noir, and described why she believes the country and the Democratic Party need an unabashedly feminist campaign for president — and why she thinks she is the candidate to run it.

“You understand, this is my space,” Gillibrand said in an interview. “I don’t know if my party will get as far as I will go on a lot of these issues. But I believe in them so strongly.”

At a moment when women are ascendant in Democratic politics and polls show a record gender gap between the parties, Gillibrand and her advisers see an opportunity to ride a wave of women’s political energy right into the White House. While multiple women are serious contenders for president for the first time in American history, Gillibrand is the only one who is making running as a woman, for women, the central theme of her candidacy.

Whether her campaign is successful or not, Gillibrand’s approach will test how much views have changed on issues like discrimination, sexual harassment and female leadership, after two years of an administration that has embroiled the country in an emotional debate over gender bias.

Gillibrand says advocating for women has been the cause of her political life, from her days as a young lawyer raising money for women’s charities. But she is choosing the mantle of feminist crusader at a time when other core Democratic issues are more problematic for her.

As a House member from upstate New York earlier in her political career, she held far more conservative positions on gun control and immigration. Her years as a corporate lawyer, taking clients that included a big tobacco company, and her past as a voracious fundraiser from Wall Street donors complicate her ability to attack greed and inequality in big business.

And by using her gender to find a toehold in the Democratic electorate, Gillibrand risks pigeonholing herself in a race where voters may be seeking a broader populist message.

“There may well be a risk,” Gillibrand said, in what she calls her “women plus” campaign platform. “But it is who I am. I think the country would be so much stronger if women had greater voices.”

Still, Gillibrand is unwavering. Calling out sexism and sexual misconduct in all corners — including her outspoken critiques of former President Bill Clinton and former Sen. Al Franken — is a political calling card that she feels distinguishes her.

Her first words on national television describing her rationale for running were that she is a “young mom.” Her first big speech as a candidate took place at a women’s march in Des Moines, Iowa. Her first fundraising event was hosted by a women’s group in the Bay Area. And her first question from the press — about her likability — she derided as “sexist.”

Of Trump’s 2017 tweet that Gillibrand “would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions,” she called the president “misogynistic,” saying in the interview, “I mean, he essentially called me a prostitute!”

There is no real precedent for Gillibrand’s strategy. As a candidate, Hillary Clinton struggled to talk about her gender and essentially tried to copy the approach of the male presidential candidates who had preceded her, said Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s former communications director.

“I had no idea what it looked like to do it differently. Sen. Gillibrand is doing it differently,” said Palmieri, who has discussed Gillibrand’s presidential ambitions with her. “She knows the risk involved with being so plain-spoken and forward-leaning as a woman candidate and doesn’t care.”

There is also the math: Women are expected to make up a clear majority of voters in a Democratic primary — nearly 60 percent, according to Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who specializes in female voting behavior.

For years, Gillibrand has fundraised for women seeking office through her Off the Sidelines political action committee, helping her develop a national network of female donors and a robust list of supporters. In 2013, she delivered a speech laying out her economic plan aimed at promoting women in the workforce that included proposals for equal pay, paid leave, affordable child care, universal pre-K and raising the minimum wage.

In the Senate, some of her biggest fights have been around securing greater protections for women facing sexual assault cases in the military, on college campuses and on Capitol Hill.

Gillibrand has also shown a willingness to buck powerful men in her own party.

In 2017, she made headlines by saying Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky should have prompted him to resign, angering the Clintons, who had championed her early in her career.

Gillibrand is also still navigating the fallout from another controversial choice within her own party: her decision in late 2017 to become the first Democratic senator to call for the resignation of Franken, following multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. Despite the backlash she has faced from some Democratic quarters, Gillibrand said she saved the party from itself, arguing that standing by Franken would have cost Democrats congressional seats in the midterms.

And she said Sen. Doug Jones, a Democrat, would not have won his special election in Alabama if Franken had not stepped aside and provided the party with a clear message against the Republican, Roy Moore, a state jurist accused of sexually assaulting teenage girls.

“God bless him if he wanted to sue every woman who made an allegation against him,'’ she said of Franken. “But just imagine this last election how many women came out to vote and ran for office, and young women. Would they have felt that nobody had their back?'’

Her advisers argue that the incident shows Gillibrand as a fighter unafraid to take on powerful men and that the intense energy of women in the Democratic Party will outweigh the concerns. Her campaign distributed a memo as she entered the race saying that 58 percent of Democratic presidential primary voters in 2016 were women, and that female candidates won nearly two-thirds of open House Democratic primaries in 2018.

“Looking at 2018, there was something in the water she will tap into because it’s authentic to her,” said Glen Caplin, a top adviser to Gillibrand.

It is a strategy neither Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., nor Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., have embraced in their presidential platforms. During her campaign rollout last month, Harris focused heavily on her connections with the black community and her career as a prosecutor. Warren has centered her argument around class, rather than gender, making her personal story of economic struggle the centerpiece of her pitch to voters.

“Ultimately, that’s why I decided to run,” Gillibrand said. “Because I was concerned maybe the rest of the team doesn’t focus on these issues. Maybe the rest of the team doesn’t get where they need to go.'’

And while Gillibrand denounced questions of “likability” as sexist, Warren explicitly demurred from such labels in an interview last month.

Gillibrand’s bluntness worries some Democrats in early voting states, who fear a repeat of the kind of sexism they believe sank Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.

Linda Smoley, who hosted Clinton at her Sioux City, Iowa, home in 2015 and attended Gillibrand’s first house party in Iowa in January, said she was so distressed after Trump was elected that she got anti-depressants from her doctor and then accidentally drove her car into her house.

Gillibrand had reached out moments earlier about appearing atSmoley’s local women’s group, Siouxland Progressive Women. But after the trauma of 2016, Smoley at first voiced reservations about selecting another female nominee.

“My only concern is that she is a woman,” Smoley said, “and I fear that in this misogynistic society in which we live, I think it will be hard for a woman because there are so many middle-aged and older white men who don’t want to cede power.”

But moments later, she was reconsidering, gingerly.

“But maybe we have turned,'’ she said. “Maybe this time, if she can convince those white women Trump voters how we as Democrats could make lives better, maybe she could get some of that vote that Hillary lost.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/us/politics/kirsten-gillibrand-president-feminist.html" id="7a54be89-e197-3d73-aeb7-1bdb41244fa1">The New York Times</a>.

'This Is My Space':  Gillibrand's Unabashedly Feminist Campaign

NEW YORK — The morning after the election of Donald Trump, Kirsten Gillibrand woke up and began crying. “Bawling,” she corrected herself.

There is no real precedent for Gillibrand’s strategy. As a candidate, Hillary Clinton struggled to talk about her gender and essentially tried to copy the approach of the male presidential candidates who had preceded her, said Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton's former communications director.

In 2017, she made headlines by saying Bill Clinton's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky should have prompted him to resign, angering the Clintons, who had championed her early in her career.

<h1>The Democratic National Committee has selected Milwaukee as the site of its national convention, placing a spotlight on a key Midwestern battleground state that Democrats lost for the first time in three decades in 2016 and see as central to the party’s efforts to reclaim the White House.</h1>

Milwaukee organizers raised more than $10 million and reassured officials that they had secured sufficient hotel capacity for the event, ameliorating concerns the city lacked the finances and infrastructure to support an event that regularly draws tens of thousands of out-of-town activists, officials and media.

Houston had faced another complication. Harold Schaitberger, head of the International Association of Fire Fighters, has been in a prolonged battle with the mayor, Sylvester Turner, over firefighter pay. Last week, Schaitberger said he had warned the DNC he would consider establishing a union picket line if Democrats located their convention there.

This article originally appeared in <a id="f5e2c97c-fb0a-45a8-ba8a-3c4761b19de0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/us/politics/dnc-milwaukee-2020.html">The New York Times</a>.

Milwaukee picked as site of 2020 Democratic National Convention

Milwaukee was selected over a pair of larger Sun Belt cities, Houston and Miami, to host the event.

<h1>NEW YORK — The morning after the election of Donald Trump, Kirsten Gillibrand woke up and began crying. “Bawling,” she corrected herself.</h1>

This article originally appeared in <a id="699aad9c-d927-4a27-ae78-b6ec7edc0f92" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/us/politics/kirsten-gillibrand-president-feminist.html">The New York Times</a>.

After spending the next two months “deeply depressed,” the junior senator from New York experienced what she called the most inspiring day of her political life: the women’s march.

'This is my space': Gillibrand's unabashedly feminist campaign

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