Ilhan, Pelosi, and the Ghost of MLK-- Guest Post From The Progressive Primarying Nancy Pelosi, Shahid Buttar

-by Shahid Buttar

Over the course of the last several months, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been lionized by centrist voices promoting her as the face of our so-called “resistance" to President Trump’s corruption and incompetence. A closer look at the facts reveals a different picture: rather than resist President Trump, the leadership of the Democratic Party is enabling, emboldening, and ultimately supporting our criminal administration.

The Republican Party is actively complicit in supporting an unapologetic kleptocrat in the White House. We should not be surprised. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., however, it is the complicity of our friends-- Democrats-- that should concern us most. It is also the arena offering the greatest opportunity for progress.

The most visible example of Democratic complicity with the White House (if not impeachment, or the Pay-go rules) may be the DNC’s approach to foreign policy. A visionary member of the freshman class, Representative Ilhan Omar from Minnesota, has breathed new life into the forgotten legacies of presidents Eisenhower & Kennedy, who-- like her-- questioned the legitimacy of covert and other U.S. foreign policy programs that have undermined human rights around the world for decades, while evading domestic accountability to this day.

She forced war criminal Elliot Abrams to wither in his seat, confronting questions which no member of Congress has demonstrated the gumption to ask, about sustained human rights abuses for which most participants have never yet been held accountable.

For her vision and courage, Ihan Omar has been vilified, targeted by the president in an ad hominem attack that under the current climate-- which he has stoked-- places her life at risk. This is demagoguery in its purest form, a clear and brutal test for our democracy in the face of an aspiring autocracy that threatens it but has yet to consolidate itself.

When the president singles out a member of Congress for speaking their mind and incites violence towards her, it’s time for the opposition leadership to show solidarity with whomever the White House is targeting. Yet the Speaker of the House fails to name Rep. Ilhan Omar, and declines to defend her against our petulant and petty president.

I feel a tremendous affinity for Ilhan Omar. We’re both Muslims born in foreign countries who came to the U.S. seeking freedom and opportunity before running for Congress in 2018. I’m still working to replace in the incumbent in CA-12, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, but having emerged as her leading challenger from the left in the last election, I’m eager to finish the job in 2020 and join Rep. Omar in the House.

Asking questions about national security abuses is something I’ve been doing a long time, which is why I’m so proud of Rep. Omar and eager to support her voice, as supporters of our campaign did by setting up a joint fundraising portal.

After having been invited twice to brief members of Congress and their staff on proposed surveillance reforms in 2010 and 2011, I was arrested in a U.S. Senate hearing chamber for an act of journalism in 2015. I asked an Obama intelligence official about the double standard and unequal justice apparent in his evasion of any charge for perjury despite lying to the Senate about constitutional violations, while Eric Garner was killed in the streets of New York with neither charge nor trial.



Like Ilhan Omar, I’m eager to pose a few questions that it seems no one has been willing to ask.

It is a soul-consuming dedication to defend democracy that drives me into this race.

We should have learned from President Obama‘s election in 2008 that the American people favor peace and justice rather than militarism. But the Democratic Party leadership seems to prefer losing elections rather than resign its fealty to the military industrial complex that fuels it.

Pelosi has served in the House for 30 years. She has a storied legacy of which she can be proud. But make no mistake: her’s is not the voice of the future.

I stand with Ilhan because, like legions of Democrats from coast-to-coast, we heed Dr. King’s clarion call to resist racism, militarism-- not just a criminal president-- and the rule by corporate capital that has created our crises from climate justice to never-ending wars for profit.

Ilhan Omar and I may both be more recent Americans than Nancy Pelosi. But our defense of America in the face of our president’s demagoguery, contrasted with her equivocating ambivalence, makes clear that our patriotism runs deeper.

And while our aspiring tyrant in Washington race baits us, and demonizes us, we know their threats are merely signs of desperation. We-- and our supporters-- know that it is we who better represent what it means to be American.