Immigration
Bennet may be best known for being part of the so-called Gang of Eight: four Democratic and four Republican senators who negotiated a comprehensive immigration proposal in 2013. The bill, which passed the Senate but not the House, included:
— A path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally who passed a background check, paid a fine and back taxes, and learned English.
— An expanded visa program for agricultural workers and an expedited path to permanent residency for student visa holders who earned advanced science, technology, engineering and math degrees.
— A 700-mile border fence, new border-monitoring technologies and about 20,000 more Border Patrol agents.
— A stronger system for companies to verify employees’ immigration status.
More recently, Bennet was co-author of a proposal that would have prevented the government shutdown in December by giving President Donald Trump $25 billion for a border wall in exchange for protections for immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children.
Education
Bennet, a former superintendent of the Denver school system, has focused heavily on education policy in the Senate. “I think we need an education president,” he told The Des Moines Register this year. “There’s no public good that’s more important than education.”
In 2015, he helped write legislation that overhauled the No Child Left Behind Act, transferring some authority from the federal government to the states and reducing the use of standardized tests to evaluate students and teachers.
He has supported expanding Pell Grants and is a co-sponsor of the Finish Act, which would provide funding for colleges and universities to “increase access to higher education for high-need students, increase degree attainment and improve efficiency in our higher education systems.”
In materials provided to The New York Times, his campaign did not make any concrete education proposals but said Bennet would work to ensure that “college students can pursue their studies without incurring the crushing burden of debt; more people seeking an alternative to college can pursue high-quality apprenticeships and job training; and Americans throughout their lives can advance their careers by improving their existing job skills or learning new ones.”
Climate Change
Bennet is in line with the rest of the Democratic field in calling for recommitting to the Paris Agreement and preserving Obama-era climate regulations that Trump is reversing. He has also supported regulating methane emissions and creating a standardized metric for the federal government to measure the cost of greenhouse gas emissions.
In March, he helped create the Senate Special Committee on the Climate Crisis, and last month, he was co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill that would provide tax incentives for energy storage.
In other areas, though, he has diverged from the party’s left wing. In a USA Today Op-Ed essay in 2017, he said some Democrats had played into Republicans’ portrait of them as “job killers fundamentally out of touch with most Americans.”
“It is not enough to call for less coal or oil without having meaningful work to replace lost jobs,” he wrote, and “when Democrats oppose natural gas, we fail to appreciate both its importance to small-town economies and its pivotal role in reducing coal production.”
He also suggested that instead of opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, Democrats should have negotiated a deal that approved the pipeline in exchange for emission reduction measures.
Economics and Health Care
Bennet is a co-sponsor of the American Family Act, a Senate proposal that would give every family with children a refundable tax credit of $250 to $300 per month. He also supports expanding the earned-income tax credit.
And his campaign outlined the broad strokes of an economic platform involving infrastructure improvements, high-speed broadband in rural areas, and investments in “advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, superconductors and quantum computing.”
On health care, he and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., recently introduced a bill that would create a public option called Medicare-X; Bennet said that he wanted “universal coverage” but that his model was “more practical” than the single-payer ones many other Democrats have come to support.
He has specifically criticized “Medicare for All” proposals that would eliminate private insurance.
“What Democrats are saying is, ‘If you like your insurance, we’re going to take it away from you’ — from 180 million people that get their insurance from their employer and like it, or 20 million Americans who are on Medicare Advantage and love it,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in February. “That seems like a bad opening offer for me.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.