Ed Markey’s case for 6 more years in the Senate

The Lexington Observer interviewed Sen. Ed Markey, who is running against U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass, for the Democratic nomination in the race for U.S. Senate. Reporters from the Cambridge Day, Brookline.News, Waltham Times, and Belmont Voice were in attendance and contributed to this reporting. 

Sen. Ed Markey, a popular progressive who has served in Congress for nearly 50 years (including 13 in the Senate) is running for reelection this fall.

Markey is facing a primary challenge from U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass, a 47-year-old Marblehead resident, who is running on the desire for “generational change” in Congress.

Asked whether he supports term limits, Markey said “we have term limits, they’re called elections,” during the most recent debate between Markey and Moulton on Aug. 3.

Despite his age, Markey, 80, is favored by double digits, a Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll found. 

While in Congress, Markey has teamed up with fellow Democrats to propose environmental bills and pass legislation that helps bring costs down for Americans. If re-elected, he plans to continue those pursuits, fight ICE, support Massachusetts’ innovation economy, and more. 

The son of a milkman who grew up in Malden, Markey said he understands the struggle working class Americans face to make ends meet. To make money in college, his father helped him get a job as an ice cream truck driver with a route through Lexington. Markey touts his humble beginnings along the campaign trail today, repeating that he’ll fight for “ordinary families.”

One of Americans’ largest expenses is rent. That’s why Markey has supported Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s housing legislation, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. The bill aims to increase the supply of diverse housing across the country, limit private equity’s ability to buy single family homes, and offer local governments grants to update zoning laws.  

“The more construction that takes place, the lower the price will be for the remainder of the housing stock,” Markey said. He also supports the MBTA Communities Act.

“It’s absolutely essential that all communities that benefit from the MBTA have to comply with the law,” he said. “We need more housing, and those communities that have MBTA stops should have a responsibility to rezone to ensure that housing is being constructed.”

Transportation is another line item that’s stretching the pockets of American families. That’s why Markey has pushed “fair-free transit” under his and U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s Freedom to Move Act. The proposal aims to invest $25 billion in public transit to eliminate fares, boost ridership, and improve equity. 

“Greater Boston, we should be first, we should be first in providing that opportunity to folks to be able to move around, get to work, get to their medical appointments, without feeling like they’re having to be tipped upside down,” he said.

He noted there’s an “experiment” taking place in Boston right now where service on bus routes 23, 28, and 29 are free for the rest of the year, funded by the city. The experiment has brought on a “dramatic increase in ridership,” Markey said. 

“What we’ve seen in Merrimack Valley, what we’ve seen in Worcester, what we’ve seen around the Commonwealth is when fair, free transit is put into place, it dramatically increases ridership, it increases economic activity,” Markey claimed. “It also reduces greenhouse gases because people get out of their cars and they start to take public transit.”

Markey helped pass the 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, he added. Some of that funding went toward increasing accessibility to the Green Line in Brookline for people with physical disabilities. That Law is also helping fund the replacement of the Sagamore Bridge. 

“The Sagamore bridge [will] sag no more,” he said. 

Markey argued the country needs a new infrastructure bill, which he will push for if reelected. 

“We need a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that provides at least $10 billion in transportation funding for the Commonwealth for the projects that are going to be needed in order to increase public transit but also increase accessibility and safety in our transportation system,” he said. “A vision without funding is a hallucination.” 

Asked how he’ll help bring down rising healthcare premiums, which have caused local governments in Massachusetts to lay off municipal employees and teachers, Markey said the country needs Medicare for All. 

“I think Bernie and Elizabeth and I are right, I think it’s clear we have a failed system, and we just have to move to Medicare for All,” he said. “We have to eliminate all of the middle men and women, all of the additional costs.”

Hammering down on his commitment to improving healthcare, Markey noted he led the effort to investigate the Steward Healthcare system. The for-profit business’ facilities grew unsafe and it collapsed into bankruptcy in 2024, all while its leaders and investors profited.  

Moulton says “universal healthcare” is a must — but thinks people should have options beyond the public one. The difference between Moulton’s ‘universal healthcare plus options’ and Markey’s Medicare for All is nicely outlined by the Globe: 

“Moulton’s pitch would cover the uninsured, but also allow for people to buy their own private insurance or enroll in an employer-sponsored plan. Markey’s ideal ‘Medicare for All’ would eliminate private insurance in place of a single-payer system.”

On the affordability front, Markey said he advocates for free community college and universal childcare. 

Markey has also been outspoken about wanting ICE to be abolished, noting that he voted against the creation of the agency years ago.

“I feared that it had the seeds of authoritarianism,” he said.

The country needs to create a new pathway to citizenship for “all of the immigrants in the country right now,” he said. “If those 11 million people left, our economy would collapse in a month.”

Asked why Congress has not been able to accomplish immigration reform since former President Ronald Reagan was in office, Markey blamed Trump. 

“Each time we get close…there’s kind of a Charlie-Brown-Lucy-holding-the-football quality to it. We negotiate in good faith, try to find a responsible compromise, and then Donald Trump says, ‘I’d rather have the issue than have the solution,’” he said. 

In terms of the local economy, Markey spoke at length about how he’s helped bring businesses to Massachusetts. Big biotech companies like Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Novo Nordisk, and Moderna have blossomed in the Bay State, though over the past five years, some newly built lab space has been left empty. 

Asked how he’ll work to bring companies back into those empty lab spaces, like the one at 440 Bedford Street in Lexington, Markey said the answer is to invest in the clean energy industry.

“Those are the companies of the future,” he argued. 

In former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Markey co-authored a $20 billion climate bank to help fund green energy projects. A federal appeals court voted again to protect that climate bank on Aug. 4 after Trump’s repeated attempts to terminate the program. 

”That’s a perfect example of my leadership to make sure funding is there for the kinds of technologies and the companies that are still in their relatively nascent stage but grow into the Vertexes or the Modernas of the clean energy sector,” Markey said. “We need to innovate our way out of the climate crisis.”

“I partner with Greentown…in terms of protecting the programs that they say are absolutely essential for those hundreds of younger companies to all grow up and then ultimately fill the real estate space which has been created here.”

The group of local news reporters asked Markey for his thoughts on the recent ascendance of Democratic Socialists. Markey warmed up to the question by listing candidates of the like that he’s endorsed — Abdul El-Sayed, Peggy Flannagan, and Justin Pearson. Markey’s campaign is endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom he worked closely on the Green New Deal. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez identify as democratic socialists.

His energy then shifted as he explained how Republicans have shot down the “socialism” that Democrats are asking for, while all along, they’ve been acting “socialistically” to get what they want for years. 

“The Republicans all voted against social security in the 1930s — they called it socialism. The Republicans voted against Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 — they called it socialism. The Republicans all voted against Obamacare in 2010 — they called it socialism,” he said. “They called the Green New Deal, the IRA, socialism because finally we’re going to fund wind, solar, all-electric vehicles, and battery storage technologies the same way they have socialistically been funding oil, gas, and coal tax breaks for 100 years.” 

“All we’re saying is give us some of that socialism for all of the things that we care about too, but don’t pretend that the tax code…isn’t one big socialistic protection for the biggest corporations in our country at the expense of ordinary families.”

Markey closed out by sharing how his working class parents put him and his brothers through college. All three of them went to Boston College and continued there for law school. Markey stated at BC in 1964, graduated in ’68, and finished law school in ’72. When he started, tuition was about $1,400 per year, the College’s student paper reported. Today, it costs almost $100,000 per year to go to Boston College, he noted. 

“If you have three kids, that’s $300,000 a year, times seven years to go through law school, that’s $2.1 million to go to Boston College. Who’s doing that from Malden anymore? We need free community college, we need to pass the Fair Share Amendment, we’ve gotta tax millionaires and billionaires, we’ve got to level the playing field,” he said. “These kids are just as smart and hard-working as any kid…and when Seth Moulton said, ‘taxing millionaires and billionaires, well that’s class warfare,’ no — that’s leveling the playing field.”

The MA primary election, where voters will choose whether Seth Moulton or Ed Markey will appear on the general election ballot, is slated for September 1, 2026. The general election is scheduled for November 3, 2026.