One New Dem leader down, another one to goI just got back from a post-election rest in Istanbul. On Saturday I was still there and I dashed off a post about how Blue America is going about looking for 2020 congressional recruits. That generated a ton of e-mails like this one [in part] from Melissa in Houston:
My husband and I have faithfully contributed to the Blue America candidates you guys recommend for almost 10 years. That's because we are never shy in pointing out the short-comings of the conservative Democrats who refer to as "the Republican wing of the Democratic Party." We have found your "Primary A Blue Dog" Act Blue sight especially helpful and we and our friends gave money to Marie Newman, Kara Eastman, Alexandria Ocasio and Kevin de Leon there. I hope when you are recruiting for 2020, you will not just be doing the DCCC's job for them but also looking for alternatives to Democrats who act like Republicans.
No need to worry about that! We have already been talking with several candidates interested in taking on some of the worst of the Blue Dogs and New Dems in 2020. You may have seen this tweet I posted Saturday:It was in response to a couple of Ocasio-Cortez staffers:Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the most spectacularly successful progressive to challenge a bad Dem this cycle. Spectacular for three reasons.
• She is the whole package, one of the sharpest and highest calibre candidates to run anywhere-- someone whose politics are in historical and personal context• Joe Crowley was a quintessential villain: an ambitious, opportunistic poster child for everything-- no, really, everything-- that is wrong with congressional politics, even beyond being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street.• She accomplished all this right under the nose of the mainstream media, which had basically never heard of her until the day after she beat the "next Speaker."
Alex Thompson, writing for Politico took a look at her suggestion that progressive groups put some real energy and resources into cleaning up the Democratic Party brand by encouraging and supporting candidates who primary bad Dems. "Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday threw her weight behind a new national campaign to mount primaries against incumbent Democrats deemed to be ideologically and demographically out of step with their districts," he wrote. The incoming star congresswoman from New York again put the Democratic establishment on notice that she and activist groups on the left aren’t content with a Democratic-controlled House: They are determined to move the party to the left."On a video conference call with supporters Saturday, she said "All Americans know money in politics is a huge problem, but unfortunately the way that we fix it is by demanding that our incumbents give it up or by running fierce campaigns ourselves. That's really what we need to do to save this country. That's just what it is." She added that people who take money from the special interests their committees oversee, should not be on those committees. "I don't think people who are taking money from oil and gas companies should be drafting climate legislation."
The incoming congresswoman's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, a co-founder of Justice Democrats, was blunter."We need new leaders, period," he said on the call. "We gotta primary folks."...[I]t is unusual for freshmen Democrats to throw their support behind an organization that is threatening to wage primaries against their new colleagues. And it’s unclear whether it could trigger a backlash from incumbent lawmakers who want to take advantage of their newfound majority to get things done, rather than sweating a primary challenge.But Ocasio-Cortez has already made clear she’s looking to break the mold. During her first week in Washington, she joined a protest in Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s office, supporting calls for a “Green New Deal."”It wasn’t a very polite move to do," Chakrabarti said.Ocasio-Cortez said at the sit-in that she was not there to protest Pelosi but to support the activists and their agenda.“Should Leader Pelosi become the next speaker of the House, we need to tell her that we’ve got her back in showing and pursuing the most progressive energy agenda that this country has ever seen,” she told them. “This is about unity. This is about solidarity.”
When Blue America started looking for someone to primary Crowley, Ocasio had just turned voting age. We never found anyone; she found us after she was already well on the way to winning (with the help of the Justice Democrats).Taking into account ideology, the districts themselves, corruption, voting records, etc-- though not identity politics-- the House districts Blue America is trying to recruit in for primaries are below, listed alphabetically by state [Note: if we find one or two on this whole list, it will be a miracle.]:
• CA-07- Ami Bera (New Dem) D+3• CA-16- Jim Costa (Blue Dog) D+9• CA-29- Tony Cardenas (New Dem) D+29• CA-31- Pete Aguilar (New Dem) D+8• CA-46- Lou Correa (Blue Dog) D+15• CA-52- Scott Peters (New Dem) D+6• CT-04- Jim Himes (New Dem) D+7• FL-23- Debbie Wasserman Schultz (New Dem) D+11• IL-03- Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog) D+6• IL-10- Brad Schneider (New Dem) D+10• MD-05- Steny Hoyer D+16• MA-06 Seth Moulton (New Dem) D+6• MA-08- Stephen Lynch D+10• MN-07- Collin Peterson (Blue Dog) R+12• NJ-01- Donald Norcross (New Dem) D+13• NJ-05- Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog) R+3• NY-04- Kathleen Rice (New Dem) D+4• NY-05- Greg Meeks (New Dem) D+37• OR-05- Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog) PVI is even• TN-05- Jim Cooper (Blue Dog) D+7• TX-15- Vicente González (Blue Dog) D+7• TX-28- Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog) D+9• TX-34- Filemon Vela (Blue Dog) D+10
There are no newly elected freshmen on the list, even though some really terrible ones are about to take office. Let's give them a chance before we go after them.By the way, when I tweeted the original off-the-top-of-my-head list up top, one of the biggest responses was "What about Hoyer?" He's Crowley times 10 but we're always looking for someone willing. I spoke with someone (while I was still in Istanbul) who said "maybe... but not now." Reporting for Common Dreams on Friday, Julia Conley wrote that "While progressives have been focused this week on pressuring House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to embrace bold initiatives, an interview with Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) served as a reminder that the second-ranking Democrat's vision for the party is sorely lacking, as it heads into a new term with control of the House."
On NPR's Morning Edition early Friday, Steve Inskeep asked Hoyer about Medicare for All, which 26 newly-elected Democrats support. Outspoken support for the plan helped progressive challengers including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib win their elections, while 84 percent of Democratic voters-- and 70 percent of Americans overall-- now back the proposal.The skyrocketing support for Medicare for All, however, appears to have gone unnoticed by Hoyer, who replied with familiar promises of "affordable, quality healthcare" but gave no sign of backing the proposal which even a Koch Brothers-backed study estimates would save Americans $2 trillion in overall healthcare costs....Hoyer's interview served as a reminder that the congressman, who has served since 1981, poses as much if not more of a threat to the passage of progressive policies as Pelosi. As Jonathan Tasini, host of Working Life podcast, noted on Twitter, Hoyer has threatened other broadly popular social programs as one of the Democratic Party's most powerful members.
One fairly senior Democrat in Congress-- a Pelosi supporter-- told me he would never vote for Hoyer to lead the party. "That would be a disaster," he told me last night. "Every single bill would go through K Street. It would be like John Boehner all over again."Meanwhile... an oldie but goodie-- as true today as it ever was-- if not more so: