Do we like George Miller?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Four decades backing workers, kids, nature and LGBTQ+ rights with no harmful words found, though he was slow to move the big LGBTQ+ jobs bill.
George Miller was born in Richmond, California, in 1945 and won his House seat in 1974 at just 29. He was one of the post-Watergate class of young liberal Democrats, and he stayed until 2015. Along the way he chaired the Natural Resources Committee and later the Education and Labor Committee, and he was a long-time ally of Nancy Pelosi.
His best-known stoush is a 1993 hearing where Donald Trump told a House subcommittee that organised crime was rampant on reservations and Indian gaming was a huge scandal. Miller wasn't having it, and told him: “You don’t know this; you suspect this.” PolitiFact later recounted him calling the testimony irresponsible and rejecting the idea that how people look decides their rights. It's the clearest picture we found of him: standing up for a group that was being smeared, with the cameras on.
On workers and wages he was a true believer. With Senator Tom Harkin he co-proposed lifting the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10, and he opposed fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He said he came to Congress “to stand up for the rest of us”, and The Nation named him the House's most valuable member in its 2013 Progressive Honor Roll. That's a friendly outlet, so take the gushing with a pinch of salt, but the policies are on the record.
His record on kids and nature is solid too. Pelosi credited him with bipartisan bills on health care, education, child policy, labour rights, the environment, energy and national parks. Earthjustice called him “a fierce protector of this country’s public lands, wildlife, and endangered species”. Both are statements issued when he announced his retirement, so they're tributes, not scorecards.
Nothing new on him lately. He left the House in 2015 after choosing not to run again, and our searches found no fresh news, controversy, court case or allegation against him. That's a clean sheet, but it's also a quiet one: there's little reporting on how he treated staff or colleagues day to day, so we can't say much beyond the public record.
Put it together and he's a pretty easy yes. He's a long-serving progressive who backed LGBTQ+ workers, low-paid workers, kids and the environment, and who called out a famous bloke for smearing Native communities. The only real quibble is the slow ENDA wait. If you wanted a Democrat who did the job quietly for four decades, this is him.