Chris Rabb: Candidate for US Congress, Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District

0:00This is Play Cain Extended, an extended version of my radio show on Series XM Urban View channel 1, 2, 6, which airs Monday through Friday from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. Listen, I try and tell y'all that primaries are everything. Primaries are everything, primaries are crucial, and we gotta make sure we show up and show out. Y'all know I'm from Philly, y'all know I am from West Philadelphia, so I am excited for our next guest. He is actually running in the district that it wasn't this particular district when I was younger, but he's covering my area, my old block, my own stop, my old stopping grounds. He's running in Pennsylvania's third congressional district. Let's bring him on. Chris Rab, state house rep, Chris Rab. How you doing, sir? I'm well, thank you. So my old stop and grounds, my guy, 60th and race, 60th and Vaan, tell me about your roots

1:03in Philly, Rep. Rab? Well, I'm actually a shy delphian. I was born and raised in Chicago, and I adopted Philly as my home 24 years ago. It's where I raised my kids, bought my first house, went to grad school, joined community organizations. So this is home, it's the longest I've ever lived, and I've represented a majority black mixed income neighborhood in Northwest Philly for 10 years in the Pennsylvania legislature. Nice. And the current rep is Rep to White Evans. Is he running for re-election? He is not, which is why this is open. This is open. Yes, the seat is open. It's the first time in 35 years that the seat is open. So it's hard to beat incumbents, so no one has to worry about that hurdle. So a lot of people are running. Last count was 13 Democrats, seven made it onto the ballot, including myself. And of those seven, there are about three folks who are considered front runners, and

2:07I am the only progressive among those three running. When you say you're the only progressive, tell me what you mean by that title compared to the others, because they are all Democrats. I know Democrat doesn't mean progressive, but you're going to have a Democrat win that area. So what do you mean by you're the only progressive? Well, I'm the only one who is, who identifies as a progressive, and I'm the only one who has a consistent progressive track record, both legislatively and long before I took office. So what does progressive mean? It believes that you don't, you're not playing around the edges, you're not focusing on the margins, you're focusing on the structural issues that create the disparities that we are addressing, that we have, or frankly, not been addressing for generations and centuries. So it's about a transformational view of society and what we need to do to rid ourselves of the inequities that persist irrespective of how many Democrats we put in office, because as you said, this is everything.

3:10The primary is everything in Philly, and particularly for this congressional district. This congressional district, Clay, is the most democratic performing congressional district in the entire nation. So number one out of all 435 seats, and with an open seat, with no incumbent on the ballot on May 19th, it means that how we show up, or don't show up, will determine what kind of Democrat we get. We know the person who's going to serve us in Congress is going to be a Democrat. We know they're going to be black. We don't know if they will be committed to being accountable to the people, or accountable to the people who fund their campaigns, which may not be the constituents of the third congressional district. So let me ask you this, this is really personal for me. When I go back to my old block in Philly on Millic Street, it looks like a bomb hit it. The majority of the houses are abandoned, or just nobody's living there.

4:10The house that I grew up in on Millic Street, the deed was stolen. So my grandfather's home, the deed was stolen, I reached out to Larry Krasner's team. They said they can't do anything. I'm sure it was bad back in the 90s, but now it just looks like a ghost town. And I got to be honest with you, when I was growing up, I never saw Rep Shaka Fata. I never saw him. And I was there. I went to Overbrook, then I went to Kappa. And as far as to why Evans, I moved when he got into office. But I know what people on my old block say. That politicians don't give a damn about West Philadelphia. So from your lens, what were the mistakes previously, and what are you going to do differently? Great question. But when you talk about infrastructure, and you talk about what these neighborhoods look like, we have city council on the local level. And a lot of folks from city council take money from private developers who sit on land

5:12and wait till they can gentrify it, which does not help you, your family, right? That's displacement, which is the norm, right? Then you have the state level. The state level has the ability to fund projects that go to municipalities like Philadelphia. I'm on the state level. And then you have the Feds where we have active disinvestment in our communities from a hostile administration. But all of this is informed by the corrosive influence of money in politics, right? So who funds candidates determines what their priorities are when they take office? So if you are funded by a bunch of private developers as a candidate, what should people expect when you're in office? And so I think the difference is there's a lot of black politicians who can give a good speech, right? Who can say they came from this neighborhood or that neighborhood? But who are they accountable to, right? And what is their actual track record in the legislature?

6:16Most folks who go to Congress don't even have any legislative history at all. I think fewer than 50% of folks in Congress have been a part of a legislative branch prior to becoming a member of Congress. But to your point and you mentioned something that's very important to me. You mentioned deed fraud. You said your own family, your own home, your grandfather's home was stolen from him through no fault of his own. I actually just passed the deed fraud bill that passed unanimously in the House of Representatives. That means I even got fascists and corporate dems to support a bill because it is impacting everyone's community, disproportionately black, but vulnerable homeowners, urban and rural alike. So I'm very proud of my track record. And ultimately, whatever people say on the campaign trail, they got to have receipts. So if they're talking big stuff about ice, you know, we need to abolish ice. What were they doing in office before that became popular? I introduced anti-ice legislation in 2017 and there was Narea Democrat who was supportive

7:18of that. Very few. Ultimately, how you know you're going to get someone new and different and better in office is by kicking the tires and see what they've done up to that point before they announced their candidacy for office. I do want to say that the voter turnout in this area is really, really low. I mean, I think it's like 50%. Oh, lower than that. Oh, is it? Oh, what is it? No, no, 50% of the thing is, I'll be voting. Go ahead. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry, because I get real. No, break it down. All right. So four years ago, so when we look at election cycles, we have to compare apples to apples, right? So we're not going to compare this election cycle with the presidential because that's when everyone's all hot and bothered and like, okay, we got to do stuff. But we have to compare it to a previous election cycle where it's, you know, similar. And that was four years ago, four years ago, one out of five registered Democrats came out to vote. Now, this is a congressional district that is majority black.

8:21Yes. This is a district that is majority under the age of 40. This is a district that has significant poverty, as you mentioned. So this is the only time where you can collectively come together and say, we demand a change that is not just going to be a new name, we're going to be a new approach to governance where that person is going to be accountable to the people, to the many and not to the money. And so if you don't do that, if you don't show up, bad politicians are elected by people who don't vote because four out of five voters did not vote when it mattered most four years ago. But here's the difference. And we've seen this in New York and I know you've interviewed Mayor Mamdani. He reached people where they were, particularly young people. Young people came out like never before. And there's this trope among the political class and campaigns that, oh, well, don't invest in young people.

9:21Young people don't vote. And that is the wrong way to look at it. It's also cynical and problematic. But here's the other way to look at it. If young people saw themselves in the candidates who are running who are speaking to their needs and their priorities and their values, they would show up because they took the time to register to vote. We're not talking about unregistered young people. We're talking about young people who already took the initiative to register to vote as Democrats because in Pennsylvania, the only voters who can vote in a Democratic primary are registered Democrats, unlike other states. And I have a bill that will open that up because many young people are disenchanted with the Democratic Party and have real no interest in the Republican Party. So they're independent. But if you live in a one-party town like Philly, you can only run as a Democrat if you're actually going to get elected. So that means if you're a voter, you need to make sure that your vote will count when it matters most and that's primaries. But you have to give someone a reason. You can't just be lambasting young people or progressives in saying, oh, if you don't vote,

10:23it means that you love Trump or whatever. That is a very disingenuous and problematic way to engage a very important voting block of our electorate. Yeah. Well, I agree with that rep, but I just, I also feel like that, um, if we want, I mean, I, the numbers are even worse than I thought I brought it up, I looked it up to rep Evans one had 97,000 votes. That's heartbreaking. Oh, hello, I'm mercy. Welcome to your Peloton Pilates era, built on precision backed by results and trusted by over two million members, experience instructors with true Pilates expertise, offering classes for every level, from foundational to powerfully challenging, choose from 10 to 45 minute sessions with little to no equipment anytime, anywhere. And with the cross training swivel screen, you can move seamlessly from cardio to mat, press Pilates, small moves, big impact, find out more at one peloton.com slash Pilates. So if we want to have these changes, we have to vote at higher numbers and I've interviewed

11:26some phenomenal candidates and they couldn't get past the primary. So I, I hear what you're saying. I think it's a, I think it's a both and because, you know, politicians will invest in communities where they see higher voter turnout. And for some politicians, it is good to not see higher voter turnout because they'll stay in an office. So there's so much strategy around it, but I, I do have a straight up question to ask you. You talked about bad politicians. Was rep to white Evans a bad politician? I think he is someone who ran for the right reasons 50 years ago. And over time, he became part of an establishment that was complacent. So even though his heart may have been in the right place that he voted the right ways when he showed up to vote, that he did good things, ultimately his investment was in his incompetency and the Democratic Party and less so for the folks who were not represented,

12:29who did not see themselves in the electorate and people who didn't even take the time to register to vote. So no, I don't think he was a bad politician, but I do believe he made some problematic choices that impact the most vulnerable communities. So if you take money from the richest Pennsylvania, who is anti-union, who is anti-environment, anti-dei, anti-queer, I got a problem with that. If you're taking money from defense contractors, I have a problem with that because I'm an anti-militarist, anti-imperialist Democrat. Like where you get your money and how you use it matters. And I agree with you that certain incumbents are, their ideology is in competency. It's not left or right. It's staying in power. And I have a problem with anyone who does that. This is not specific to Dwight Evans, and I'm not suggesting that that is his ideology, but that has benefited longstanding incumbents. He's been in office for 50 years. I have been in office for 10, and I've already decided I'm not running for re-election

13:33from my state house position if I don't win for Congress. Like there needs to be a new generation that I need to pass the baton on to, and that's important. The other thing I want to mention because you use the term politician. When we talk about elected officials, there is a big difference between politicians and public servants. And politicians serve themselves and the people who fund their campaigns. And public servants serve the people. And that is a major distinction. It's not a semantic thing here. It's not a rhetorical flourish I'm using. It's a real thing. And ultimately, look, if I were being cynical, I would just focus on the super voters. Those are the folks who come out every election, right, and figure out what my path to victory is just by catering to them. That's not my plan. I'm focusing, as I always have, on young people and folks on the margins who are not a good investment of campaign dollars, but are aligned with my values and why I serve.

14:35And so I've always invested in young people. I've hired 14-year-olds paying them $21 an hour. This has been the norm and not the anomaly for me as both in a candidate and a five-term incumbent. Because I want to defuse power. I don't want to concentrate it. When we concentrate power, that's how establishments are ossified. That is a democratic machine. Democratic machines rarely have ever helped the most vulnerable communities. So for somebody listening in my old neighborhood, or when I talk to my cousins, what can you... I don't think people even understand, make it plain, what can you do if you're representing this district? I mean, this district has been held for many, many years. And I want to also add that we can't expect two or three black politicians to come along and clean everything up. Philadelphia is still recovering from the Rizzo years.

15:37I won't always remind people that the Rizzo years were held and it's been 30, 40 years later, well 40 years later we're still recovering from that. But what can you do if you represent this area? It just appears sometimes folks in the house, their hands are tied and there's not much that they can really do. What can you do that the two folks before you couldn't do? Well, I'm not even suggesting that the folks who came before me were ineffectual because you can bring home millions of dollars to the district, right? Shaka Fatal was very good at that. He was very good at that. Bringing home money, now it may not go to all the places you would have won it or as much as you would have won it or as consistently, but he did bring home millions of dollars to the district. That's one thing that any Congressperson can do regardless of their ideology or race or any of that. So that's definitely important. But how you bring money back to the district has a lot to do with how you run your race and how you fund your race.

16:38So if you're getting money from private developers, then the projects that you prioritize are going to benefit private developers, right? Like there are certain things that we just have to know and it's why I keep saying follow the money. If you follow the money in my race, you can see that my biggest donor is my mommy. It's not going to be a private equity or hedge fund manager. It's not going to be a pack. It's not going to be all these other entities that have a vested interest in owning elected officials that are representing majority black districts. So back to your point, you're right. We are one of 435 in Congress in the House of Representatives, right? So one, two, three, a dozen alone cannot change what looks like whatever challenges we have on the ground and certainly not in an election cycle. It will take time, but that requires a certain level of civic literacy where people have to understand that some things move faster than others.

17:41City Council, which is local and controlled by Democrats and Philly, can move a lot faster than the higher up you go when we have the least power. So what does that look like for those people who are doing an effective job in Congress, who may not be in the majority or who are in a small majority in 2027 with a Republican controlled Senate and what's his name in the White House? At the very least, we need to be demanding what we all deserve for generations. If we can't even say what we deserve and what success looks like, we have no chance of getting there, right? So our ancestors were like, we want some freedom. No, they said this is we are trying to bought a slavery and be equal citizens under the law. That's what they fought for. They didn't think that it was going to come in a season or a year or even in their lifetime. But they planted the flag and said, this is what we demand because we are full human beings. And the reason they were free was not because of Abraham Lincoln because Black folk free

18:44themselves. So how do we free ourselves of all the systems of harm today? We got to speak the truth. But if you have Black members of Congress or any member of Congress who are not prepared to talk about capitalism, patriarchy, queer phobia, xenophobia, misogyny, pedophilia, like all these things, like if they can't even use the words, we're not going to address the symptoms and we're just going to be playing around with the symptoms and not the root causes. And that has to happen every day. If you think about the successes of the civil rights movement or Black liberation movement, these are things that we pound it through and through for years without leading with legislation, it ultimately influenced legislation and policy that moved us in the right direction. But you need to have public advocates who are honest, substantive and caring and who can articulate these things to people who are really tired and distracted and busy, who need

19:46those dots connected for them. And that's the job of public servants to connect the dots in ways that corporate media is not going to do for them or other institutions that have failed us. Rep. Let me ask you though. You said that Rep Fata, he put in, he got millions of dollars for the district. But where did it go? Because it appears that my old area has just gotten worse. So when if you're in Congress and you get millions of dollars, how is the district seeing it or feeling it? Where does it manifest? Maybe I'm not seeing it. Maybe I didn't see when I was a kid, but it appears that my neighborhood looks even worse. And it was bad in the 90s now. It was, it was bad. But you know, I didn't leave the stoop. You know, I'm sorry. I didn't, I kept saying on the block, you know, when the street lights come on, when the house had a very strict grandparents and grandfather, rather than my dad was strict. But when you all get millions of dollars, where does it go? And if you're getting millions, how come it, it appears, I should say, that we don't

20:49see it? Right. Well, that's because millions of dollars will not meaningfully impact the level of disinvent investment in Philadelphia over generations, like redlining was invented in Philly, right? Environmental racism is ridiculous over generations in Philly. That takes billions, not millions. So whatever millions, and it's not Congress people's millions. It's not like we have a bunch of funds. It is what we advocate for from Congress to go to our respective districts here and there. So it could be a million dollars here or 10 million there. That's not nearly enough for this six largest city. And it has to be recurring. That's why we need to make sure that those of us who aspire to higher office on the federal level get billions back and not just benefiting the neighborhoods we want to get reelected, but benefit all cities, my best advocacy is showing common cause with Philly and Minneapolis

21:53and DC and Portland and LA and Atlanta, because our fates are intertwined. We are all targets because they don't like our diversity, they don't like our cultural and economic engines that fund so much of what rural communities need, right? So we have to stand up together and say, this is not a Philly fight. This is a urban, for those of us who identify as urbanites across the country, we need to come together because the disinvestment in your neighborhood in West Philly is very similar to the disinvestment on the south side of Chicago, right? And we have to work together because we need 218 votes to pass anything and it can't be a Philly agenda. It's got to be an urban agenda, right? Because if you help cities, you help the entire country. Local communities need the economic engines that are the tax base that allow them to get the subsidies they need and the food that we subsist on in cities come from rural communities

22:54and we need to find better ways to connect. But I will say this, they had the gear up program that Shaka Fata introduced and it identified poor folk who did well education and who otherwise not have upper mobility education. That was a signature piece of legislation that Shaka Fata introduced and helped many people out of poverty through formal education. And you may not see that in terms of infrastructure, roads and buildings and such, but it elevated a lot of black folk who otherwise would not have a chance to excel to do so. So it's not as visible, but it's no less impactful. And so no one congressperson can bring back enough money themselves to any city or any neighborhood, frankly, even just West Philly to do it without major legislation that helps all cities. And that's what we have to stand up for. We have to find common cause with other folks who are representing urban areas and say this

23:55disinvestment is not specific to my district. It is the norm across the country and we need to fund to the tune of a trillion dollars. That's what I'm looking for, a trillion dollar investment in 12 million new homes across the country. And that would disproportionately benefit Philadelphia, where we have a serious housing crisis. And it's not just home ownership, because even when black folk do own a home, a lot of us can't afford to keep it up, right? And the cost of home ownership is significant. And there may be people who simply don't want to own a home and they shouldn't be disadvantaged because of that. We need to take care of renters too. You know, it's so great, my aunt, she passed away in 98, but she had a house on right on 60th Street. And she got the house through this program where they gave it to people in Philadelphia for like a dollar. And it was a really an incredible program for home ownership in the 1980s.

24:58And I don't remember all the details of it, but I remember that really being a signal in the right direction for my area, Philly, but then the crack cocaine epidemic came and really devastated us. So yeah, there's a lot there. Thank you for listening to Claycane Extended. If you want to hear more, tune in to my show on Series XM Urban View, Channel 1226 from 12pm to 3pm. You know the deal, y'all. I never really gone.