Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis on MCRA

Oregon Representative Shelly Boshart Davis serves District 15 in the Oregon Legislative Agenda, a district that includes Albany. This conversation occurred September 25, 2024.

Transcript

Shelly Boshart Davis: Logan? Logan!

Logan M. Isaac: I've got something from Sarah Gelser Bowen for you, and I didn't want to crush it.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Did she pass it on to me?

Logan M. Isaac: Aww! Is that, oh.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Is that how we get things from one side of the building to the other? Is it a Tic Tac wrapper?

Logan M. Isaac: I thought it was a Starburst wrapper, but I don't know.

Shelly Boshart Davis: She's adorable. That's amazing.

Logan M. Isaac: She handed me one as well, and mine is more blue, but,

Shelly Boshart Davis: that's amazing. Very cool. Thank you.

Logan M. Isaac: Sure.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Nice to see you. Is your day been productive?

Logan M. Isaac: The week, yeah. I just had a couple today but most of them because both of the committees for veterans were Monday.

That was our busy day. Good. And a bunch of two folks basically said, I'm tired. I'm going to stay home. So I was like, okay.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Oh, your people.

Logan M. Isaac: Yeah.

Shelly Boshart Davis: I thought you were talking about legislators for a second. Oh no. Is that an option? Because I would take it.

Logan M. Isaac: No, I told people, I just need you to be there, and people will believe this is important if they see more people behind it.

Shelly Boshart Davis: That is the case. I think that you'll find that most people see any sort of veterans issue as important, but you are correct. The more people that are there. Yes, I get it. I get it.

Logan M. Isaac: So I'm here as one of your constituents. I wanted you to know what I'm doing. Senator Gelser Blount has been really supportive.

And she her office has been really helpful in guiding me in the right direction. And I had a meeting this morning with Senator Manning. And, yeah, things are looking really good. But the nuts and bolts are I am, I'm advocating and lobbying and doing everything I can for civil rights for military families.

You might not know. On a state level? Yes. Okay. My experience is federal. I was in the army for six years. Deployed to Iraq in 04 and then I got out and started at school. When I got to the degree I was most excited about in theology at Duke, I started seeing things that I shouldn't have been seeing.

As a student I'm sure It's relatively intuitive. Veterans are typically [00:02:00] older, they have more experience more trauma, and it's just a different experience. And things I was shrugging off as a student, I eventually got a second degree and came back to it, and I began working as a TA. And my first yeah, my first section at Duke, I taught undergrad elsewhere, and gone through the PhD application process, et cetera.

But when I came back as a TA, I was given an evening section with half the number of students. And I would have accepted that without a second thought. But I learned that semester that I'd become a father. And I didn't want to have to choose between work and bedtime. So I talked to who I was supposed to talk to at Duke.

And I discovered very quickly that I don't have the rights that I'm supposed to. And some of the rights that I should have, I don't have.

Shelly Boshart Davis: When you say supposed to, can you expand on that?

Logan M. Isaac: Yep.

Shelly Boshart Davis: And when you say supposed to

Logan M. Isaac: The first law I discovered is called VEVRA, the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act of 1972.[00:03:00]

Granted, or it's supposed to require federal contractors to implement affirmative action plans for veterans. When it comes to enforcement

Shelly Boshart Davis: All veterans, not just Vietnam veterans.

Logan M. Isaac: No, not all veterans.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Okay. Oh, some veterans. Interesting. Okay.

Logan M. Isaac: If you are a peace time non-disabled veteran, you are not protected under VEVRAA.

Shelly Boshart Davis: peace time. Okay.

Logan M. Isaac: It's about 20% or four to 5 million veterans. You can discriminate totally lawfully as employer at the federal level. Then as I, as the snowball started rolling and shit started to hit the fan I discovered that Vera is actually, it doesn't really matter. It's written so poorly that when a veteran took the DOL to court retired Justice Senator Day O'Connor called it no law at all because it didn't create a meaningful standard by which to apply judicial oversight.

So it doesn't matter what the bill says if they cannot, they can't force Compliance? Yeah, prosecution, prosecutorial [00:04:00] discretion. is heavily favored, I'll say. But, in addition to that, the DOL, I FOIAed their enforcement data, and from 2000 to 2020, they received more complaints from veterans than any other class.

But, to veterans, they sent a disproportionately low number of findings of merit. They basically said, we don't believe veterans at a statistically significant rate. They refer people frequently to the EEOC, but the EEOC does not protect veterans. Housing and Urban Development does not protect veterans. And some rights that we do have are just simply not enforced.

I eventually discovered that the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, named after Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Included an entire section that extended similar, but weaker protections to service members and their families. up to five years after discharge. How that shakes out is, for example, one of the most [00:05:00] provocative that I found in Cincinnati in 2016, an American citizen had a detailed plan to behead a soldier, his wife and child, and then blow themselves up at a nearby police station.

That service member and the family were sequestered and protected. The guy was then pled out on domestic terrorism charges. In every instance that I found where a service member was targeted on behalf of their military service, they would apply domestic terrorism charges. It's easier to get a conviction or a confession.

But the HCPA is explicit in that it protects entire communities. Not individual victims. Matthew Shepard and James Byrd did not have their murderers convicted under hate crimes. They were three of the four were executed, was under hate crimes. It's for everybody in that community that's targeted.

The Department of Justice, after HCPA was passed in October of 2009, Within eight [00:06:00] months, the Albany Legion Hall, Post 10, was burnt to the ground on July

Shelly Boshart Davis: 4th. Yep, I remember you saying something. Okay.

Logan M. Isaac: The federal government never applied to 2010. It was less than a year after the ACPA. Okay. The ATF was involved, but no federal charges were brought.

The guy again pled out. Domestic terrorism is not mutually exclusive from hate crimes. The KKK is a domestic terrorist organization. There's no reason that DOJ should not enforce that. But by not enforcing it, they are depriving 20 some odd million service members and their families and veterans from their civil rights.

They are being denied equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

Shelly Boshart Davis: So talking specifically about the American Legion incident in Albany, is there any recourse now for something that happened? So what should have happened? What could have the American Legion received? Whether it's money or justice, that they didn't.

Logan M. Isaac: I think the, [00:07:00] had the federal enforcement applied the law, it probably would have gotten more sympathy, not only for the post itself, but for the community that HCP is supposed to protect. They took it they took it on the chin because they're Rebuild was more expensive than the building was worth to the insurance.

And they're still underwater. That's the talk of the veteran community in Albany. They're always trying to fundraise. They don't have the same support they did before. And if we believe what we say about veterans that should have received more attention. And we should, we could have been talking about military civil rights 14 years on now.

But everything I'm going to give you and have given you is a result of my time on my phone, on my laptop, as a stay at home dad, burning time for the kids to go to sleep and then starting to put two and two together. I have two research degrees. When I I started a BEVRA investigation at Duke in 2016, [00:08:00] and I learned, before I discovered O'Connor's decision, that the DOL's Enforcement Agency will piss on the bucket and call it lemonade.

Because they can't, and they don't have the money to do it, just like Boley doesn't have the money to enforce laws here in the state.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Were you listening to my committee this morning?

Logan M. Isaac: No, I don't think I was.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Because we talked about that. It was, it, I got really heated because wage claims.

Logan M. Isaac: Yeah. Because

Shelly Boshart Davis: they, they are over wage claims.

They have decided that because they can't get through them all, they are going to dismiss all wage claims if the earner makes 53, 000 or more a year.

Logan M. Isaac: Yeah. What? I just wanted to mention that, yeah.

Shelly Boshart Davis: So you're just going to dismiss them?

Logan M. Isaac: Yeah, it's arbitrary.

Shelly Boshart Davis: 53, 000?

Logan M. Isaac: HCPA, if I remember correctly, included certain grants to subordinate agencies.

I have an email drafted to Ron Wyden's office because we're talking about amending the federal stuff. And one of the questions I'm [00:09:00] getting ready to send is, can, if VEVRA gets rewritten, amended, whatever, Is there some way to allocate funds to raise money to allocate funds so that enforcement agencies for civil rights matters get the same kind of, resources as criminal law enforcement matters under HCPA?

But one of my kind of low hanging fruits is to just raise awareness of it. Okay. I've been holding these meetings I call Military Improvement Association named after 1955. Montgomery Improvement Association formed by Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy. Ralph was a World War II platoon sergeant.

Martin Luther King was too young to serve when he was, when the draft was up for him. And to this day, Martin would have more rights than Ralph. They passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Ralph later wrote in his autobiography, they thought that they were done. Their statutory obstacles were cleared, so they started turning toward economic [00:10:00] justice.

April 67 King Kim comes out against the war in Vietnam, saying at Riverside Church in New York, that the business of war sends men home from dark and bloody battlefields, physically handicapped and psychologically deranged. In June of 15, right before I got back to, right before I accepted a contract to TA at Duke, I was put on the cover of Christianity Today magazine with the title, Wartorn, subtitle, How a Psychiatrist is Deploying Hope to Soul Scarred Veterans.

And I and the psychiatrist, who was my academic advisor at the time, knew that I and other student vets at Duke could actually influence how he did his work at the VA. And that it was backwards to make it about civilian savior story, when it was, we were made we were sidelined in our own story, and that's happened again and again.

Once I was able to see what I at first wasn't able to call bias, harassment, and [00:11:00] discrimination, now I see it everywhere. I have a book for you since you're my local rep, my most recent book I got real excited about. And much of this material. Came out of researching the last two chapters. I'll earmark it for you.

Hachette is a big five publisher. They they really wanted this book under a conservative editor, Kate Hartson. She published Triggered by Don Trump Jr. A bunch of other stuff. And she picked it up, and after it got picked up, The publisher, the main editor got changed and it was a woman who was really progressive.

And magically, my editor disappeared. I never got their contractual obligation to provide an editorial review. They bad mouthed me to other industry professionals because I didn't fit the paradigm of don't know. But I can't find an attorney to explore contract or libel law [00:12:00] because when we say veterans rights, We usually think of discharge upgrades or disability claims.

And civil rights for military families is for a lot of people, just counterintuitive for some reason. And the only reason I'm here now instead of several years ago is my family. We've been bouncing around but Oregon looks like we'll be here for a while, and I'm picking up where I left off and, yeah, now both of our girls are in school.

And so this is now something that I need to get done so I can get the other stuff I want to do. But, that's what I'm doing.

Shelly Boshart Davis: First of all, how old are your girls?

Logan M. Isaac: Five and eight. Last month.

Shelly Boshart Davis: I've got three that are 17, 19, and 22.

Logan M. Isaac: Oh, so they're out of the house. Most of them are in the house. They grow up.

Shelly Boshart Davis: They grow up. Yes, they grow up fast. So

Logan M. Isaac: I'm real glad I got to be a stay at home. Very tiring, but it's something that they'll never laughs Yeah, something that I didn't anticipate being

Shelly Boshart Davis: privileged to school?

Logan M. Isaac: Oak Grove.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Oh, nice.

Logan M. Isaac: Very quickly.

Shelly Boshart Davis: So you're in North Albany?

Logan M. Isaac: Yeah. We we met in North Carolina at Duke and we, I started teaching, I took a second degree in Scotland, came back, and that's when things started happening in 16.

And very quickly Duke is a big employer and friends were even in our wedding party. We're unable to support us in the face of the power and influence that Duke wielded. And we had just some really bad experiences and the market, the job market for her, anywhere with a good seminary is going to have a lot of good seminarians.

And she works as a hospital chaplain in Lebanon and also in Albany. She takes calls in, sometimes in Corvallis but not usually. And Yeah we felt run out of North Carolina. We found this beautiful house in Maryland that we were, I worked on started doing some advocacy there cause I was about an hour from the Capitol.

That was yeah. And that [00:14:00] house didn't work out. So we moved within the County to this beautiful Victorian farmhouse that our youngest, A couple of days after her first birthday, we found a chip of lead, and then we lived in a basement for ten months. The state remediated, and when we came back, we thought, do we want to stay here where that happened, and we decided ultimately to go back to California, where we grew up and where our parents, some of our family was.

Way too expensive, way too high high fast paced she worked at Mission Viejo Hospital and too many infant traumas and child traumas and like a friend of ours from Corvallis had been trying to get us,

Shelly Boshart Davis: I was going to say inter Albany Oregon. Yeah.

Logan M. Isaac: And we were like, we're tired. Can't stay in California.

Let's do it. Yeah. So we came up in January of 22. We liked it. We came back in April. Found a house. It was really, this is our fourth VA home loan and it was just really easy and fluid it. It's amazing. [00:15:00] Yeah, so

Shelly Boshart Davis: 22 is right before kind of those interest rates start hiking. Yeah, yeah.

Logan M. Isaac: Yeah

Shelly Boshart Davis: I mean it really is the last year that there was like what three four percent and then it just starts climbing So

Logan M. Isaac: yeah, we have a

Shelly Boshart Davis: little bit fortunate there.

Logan M. Isaac: Our last house in Walkersville, Maryland It was a 3. 25 and then we were renting in California and here it's a six to five But yeah, we have friends who are like We'll just never move because we'll never get those interest rates again.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Never get it again.

Logan M. Isaac: But

Shelly Boshart Davis: in listening about your wife with too many My sister's been an ER nurse here at Salem Hospital, right over here.

And that's, she's been in the ER for 20 years. Huh. And when there's She says sometimes it seems like it happens in series. If there's child trauma, that just gets her.

Logan M. Isaac: Yeah.

Shelly Boshart Davis: There's Or abuse, child abuse. Oh, just It eats you up. And so I can sympathize, not emphasize, I can sympathize with that because I hear my sister, that's the only time she ever questions her work is [00:16:00] when you get too many child abuse in a short period because that just eats at you.

Just eats at you.

Logan M. Isaac: You got to the point where I couldn't, there's a six year old boy who was starting first grade and like he was so looking forward to riding his bike and his parents did all the right things. But it's Southern California. And some idiot didn't stop enough or something at a stop sign.

And his one parent was in a bike right behind him and another was in a car. It doesn't, it's just a reminder of how, yeah, how fragile and precious life is. But yeah, it's just, it's too much. I told her, it's like combat deployment. You can do a couple as long as you have some dwell time, but I don't, I certainly couldn't do it as a career. She visits the ER frequently. Yeah, I'll bet.

She, it's a little bit more well rounded experience. And

Shelly Boshart Davis: Lebanon, Albany is going to be a lot different than a Portland area hospital or something. So I'm super glad to hear that. Hopefully our paths cross at some point.

So as far [00:17:00] as this, what I'm seeing a lot of is what you're trying to do is federal.

Logan M. Isaac: Federal, concurrently, I'm working both sides.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Is there something that we can do on the state side?

Logan M. Isaac: Yes. The lowest hanging fruit

Shelly Boshart Davis: And did you meet with either Evans or Lewis or Graber? Yes, not Graber. Okay, Evans and Lewis, I'm just thinking of people that are

Logan M. Isaac: Lewis is tomorrow Evans is tomorrow.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Okay.

Logan M. Isaac: Representative Tran and he are hopefully the House I'm hoping to potentially stand up a comprehensive military civil rights bill. Unlike federal, there aren't many military civil rights in the state to amend.

Shelly Boshart Davis: But I feel like you can do preferences.

Logan M. Isaac: Veterans preference is tricky.

Okay. In part because bully and enforcement. Okay. And I haven't, I only know that LBCC seems to be out of compliance, but the law itself seems to, be relatively not soundproof

Shelly Boshart Davis: or EEOC on a state [00:18:00] level. I'm just

Logan M. Isaac: somebody mentioned possibly amending the protected classes statute wherever it is to add military veteran.

Yeah. One of the difficulties, California did that 2013 assembly bill 556 added military veteran status to the civil rights department. Prerogative. That was when vice president Harris was a G. I had to file a complaint against a professional organization. And when I went in just to start, the complaint intake form did not include military and veteran status.

And this was, no, it was this year. 11 years after military became protected status, we still haven't even been added to the intake form. Making that top level change doesn't always create meaningful difference on the ground. Not that it's not. productive. There has to be some kind of enforcement thing, which Bowley, as we can tell, is already having some difficulty meeting demand.

[00:19:00] And whether that's education for what isn't qualified under the bill, or maybe it really is just happening that much, and we didn't anticipate needing that many resources. But the Senate side, I'm hoping I drafted. I can share with your office. It's a memorial to send to Congress. I'm keeping it focused on hate crimes.

Hate crimes seems to be the most high contrast, and I have a body of evidence to suggest that there are eligible cases that didn't receive that, those charges. And the House side is where I'm focusing a little bit more midterm of what is a ground up military civil rights act look like, doing a concept form with RJ on the veterans caucus and then seeing where that goes.

But the Senate doing a memorial could serve concurrently with widened efforts in hate crimes to bring the DOJ into, to, to seek to begin enforcement. I, like this is, I think, [00:20:00] chipping away at some of the problems is, that's what I've been doing. And so those are the three things right now. The memorial from Oregon Legislative Assembly to Congress.

The stand up bill and the House side and then the federal to take crimes in DOJ, seeing what kind of difference we can make. One of those things is raising awareness of it. Most of, like I had a really interesting conversation, I think, with Louis. He was not convinced this was happening at all.

Yeah, it was an interesting meeting. Particularly within the military, the cultural dynamic between officers and enlisted officers like Representative Pratt said herself, she had a really good experience, but she didn't want to discount mine, and she's an officer, and I think she knows that I was an E 5 when I got out the vast majority of veterans spend less than 6 years in, don't utilize the VA healthcare and there's a reason that a lot of veterans aren't identified.

And so once we can get [00:21:00] One of my priorities is getting the conversation into the mainstream. Manning has said that I can have 15 minutes during the Senate meeting in December for the legislative, which I think is a big thing. But also on the House side, tracking the stand up bill and what that looks like.

It's never happened in our history, because we never thought that it might have to happen, and yet here we are.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Will you get me, and I know time's cutting short, but will you get me The language, once you have that.

Logan M. Isaac: Yeah, I can keep you on my golden brain list.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Yeah, keep me on that, Andrew. Oh yeah, I am.

But so that I can track that, I can be helpful with that on my side. On the committee, but that doesn't mean that I can't be helpful with it.

Logan M. Isaac: Yeah.

Shelly Boshart Davis: For sure. Yeah.

Logan M. Isaac: Can I get a card for whoever I need to be in Petco? Absolutely. Yep.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Yep. Yep. Awesome.

Logan M. Isaac: Okay. I'm going to go home and take a nap real pick

Shelly Boshart Davis: up.

Logan M. Isaac: so much.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Really great to meet you. Yeah, you too. And I hope this week was fruitful for you.

Logan M. Isaac: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I'm walking high.

Shelly Boshart Davis: I like it. Thanks, Logan.

Logan M. Isaac: Thank you.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Here [00:22:00] is Representatives.

Logan M. Isaac: Awesome.

Shelly Boshart Davis: Policy Director Drew. Okay. This is Logan.

Logan M. Isaac: Hi. Nice to meet you Drew. I'll have an email for you later.

Awesome. Thank you. Alright. Alright. Appreciate it.