Barbara Lee started out as a Bay Area radical who didn’t believe that voting could make a difference in people’s lives. Shirley Chisholm set her straight, reminding the young Black woman from California that those in power preferred that advocates for economic and social and racial justice disengage from the electoral process. So Lee engaged, becoming a Chisholm delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention, an aide to California’s legendary Democratic US Representative Ron Dellums, and, in 1999, Dellums’s replacement in the House. Two years later, she cast the sole vote against authorizing President George W. Bush’s forever wars. She has remained a hero to peace activists since she cast that vote. But Lee’s epic tenure in Congress—now coming to a conclusion after 25 years—has seen her lead on issues including abortion rights, the global fight against AIDS, reframing US foreign policy, and efforts to cut the Pentagon budget to fund human needs. In early November, just days before the election, she talked with The Nation about her time in Congress and the ongoing struggle for peace and justice. This interview has been lightly edited for length and continuity.—John Nichols

JN: You have served with five presidents, voted on thousands of bills, and participated in too many debates and committee hearings to count. What do you want your time in Congress to be remembered for?

BL: Hopefully, that I pushed the envelope to the point where members of Congress who didn’t talk about poverty—and about lifting people out of poverty—now understand that we have to focus on the poor and the working poor. And we have to focus on lifting people out of poverty. I’m telling you, that was a big, heavy lift for me. And I finally was able to get the Poverty and Opportunity Task Force established [in 2013]. I’m the chair, and we’ve had over 100 members join. We’ve led the efforts on the child tax credit and other issues, working with Bishop [William] Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign. I just pushed, pushed, pushed, and they came and testified before the Budget Committee, Bishop Barber did. Now it’s OK to use the P-word—“poor.”

Then the other thing that I’m really proud of, and that I hope people will remember, is pushing the envelope on the Pentagon budget. You know, every year, not voting for it and talking about why we need to reduce defense spending and put more into domestic spending—how we need to support our troops at the same time that we are making sure that the military-industrial complex and the military contractors stop scamming the taxpayers. The Pentagon is the only agency that hadn’t been audited, John. So I worked with several Republicans in the House to audit the Pentagon. And nobody had done that before. So we got the Pentagon audited.

JN: That’s something a lot of people don’t know about you—you’ve often made alliances with Republicans on unexpected issues?

BL: Where there’s common ground, I’ve been able to figure it out. The bottom line is, the Pentagon has been audited six times, and it has failed every single audit. I hope people remember that.

JN: You’ll also be remembered for your work on PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a global health initiative to fund HIV and AIDS treatment and prevention.

BL: Yes, working with George W. Bush, Henry Hyde, and the really conservative members of Congress to develop the Initiative for Global AIDS, the Global Trust Fund, PEPFAR, and the Office of Vulnerable Children—all the issues that no one was dealing with before [Lee and a few others started focusing on them in Congress]. I’m really proud of the fact that, even though we don’t get a lot of attention on it, we’ve saved 25 million lives and are trying to get to the goal of [ending AIDS by 2030].

JN: You got your introduction to Congress as a longtime aide to US Representative Ron Dellums, an anti-apartheid campaigner who sought to reframe US foreign policy on a host of issues and worked to cut Pentagon budgets. He was a boss and a mentor.

BL: Yes, he influenced me and taught me. He was a mentor to me in many, many ways. First of all, he really showed by example. In my working for him, there were very few senior staff members on Capitol Hill who were Black women. He used to say that he was a feminist. He hired me to head up his office, and that said something about Ron right there. Secondly, he was one who always insisted that we don’t look at decisions and recommendations that we make for him through a political lens. He always said, “Ask yourself just one question: Is it the right thing to do?” That’s on casework in the district, which I pride myself on as a social worker. But also on legislation. He said, “If this is the right thing to do, then do it.” And that was an important lesson: Don’t squirm in the wind about the politics of something. You’ll figure that out later. If it’s right, go on and do it.

JN: Were you thinking about that counsel when you voted against the authorization of the use of military force in September 2001?

BL: I called Ron and talked to him. He said, “I’m not going to tell you what the right or wrong vote is because this is a very difficult vote for you, but I’m going to give you the pros and cons, and then you make up your own decision.” He said, “You’re a social worker.” I have my MSW, and he had an MSW. So we talked about decisions that are made when people are very emotional, and how they could be the wrong decisions based on our knowledge of human nature and human behavior. Then we talked about the fact that everyone was grieving in the country, and people were in mourning. And when you’re grieving and in mourning, that’s not when you can make good decisions—you have to wait until you can provide a little space so you can be rational and respond appropriately to whatever is taking place.

JN: I know that he also argued that, often, when you take a lonely stance, people come to recognize that you were right, and join you. That’s encouraging, but, ultimately, you ended up standing on your own in opposition to a rush to war.

BL: I wasn’t sure how I was going to vote, because I tried to get them to narrow the authorization, to change it. And there were other members who knew that it was bad. It was overly broad: 60 words that gave away Congress’s [authority] to the executive branch, to any president. So other members knew that. But it was that moment in time where it was so hard because of the grief and the anger—the weight was really heavy—and so Ron and I talked. I talked with my pastor and a couple of other people. I also talked to Marcus Raskin [of the Institute for Policy Studies], to my kids, to my mother and my father, who was a military officer—and I wasn’t sure. But the [deciding] moment, it was in the church, where Bishop Nathan Baxter, who was the head of the National Cathedral, at the memorial service said, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” That was when I was settled with voting “no.”

JN: History will record that you were willing to stand alone for peace. It is also true that, through much of your time in Congress, Democrats were in the minority, and you were in a smaller minority as a committed progressive. But you were still able to build alliances, to get things done. Why is that so?

BL: If you’re Black in America, and if you’re a woman in America, please, you got to figure it out.

Here’s a story I can tell you: When I lived in England [as a young woman], I realized then that America had tricked me into thinking I was a minority. I met people from the Middle East, from Africa, from the Caribbean who looked like me, and I realized then that I was really part of the world majority. So I never accepted a minority status again after I came back from England. Whether we’re politically in the minority or whether racially I’m in the minority, that mentality of believing I’m a minority just doesn’t exist.

JN: You took that consciousness to Congress. You also took a strategic sense about how to negotiate as a progressive.

BL: If you’re a real progressive, you have got to stake out the progressive position, because the right wing is going to stake out their territory and their position. And if you’re a progressive and you’re dealing with a right-winger, [you have to do the same thing]. I’m telling you, John, if you start in the middle as a moderate, you don’t have anywhere to go, so you end up caving to the right wing.

JN: That willingness to stake out a strong position is something we see with the new generation of young women who are now in Congress. You have worked with many of them, especially Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley, on abortion rights issues. So you’ve gotten allies for these progressive fights, right?