Is The DCCC Salvageable-- Or Does It Have To Be Dismantled And Begun Anew?

The joke's on us

I’d like to take at least a little credit for preventing Debbie Wasserman Schultz from becoming DCCC Chair after Rahm. If you ask her, she’ll tell you that I got her fired as chair of the DCCC recruitment committee. She actually asked a friend of mine in Congress what it would take to get me to stop writing about her. Her pathway to greatness was through the DCCC chair and she was absolutely a Rahmish fave— both being hard core corrupt New Dems beloved by the Wall Street bankster elites. Between she refused to embrace 3 Democrats running in her south Florida neighborhood against 3 GOP incumbents she was palsy-wallsy with— this as chair of the recruitment committee— even Rahm knew the pressure from the net roots wasn’t going away till she did. So she was demoted and told to stay out of sight.

In truth though, it was Pelosi, who hates Wasserman Schultz for her own reasons, not me, who blocked her path towards caucus leadership and kept her away from the DCCC chair. Obama rescued her faltering spirit though by making one of his worst decisions— and he made so, so many: making her chair of the DNC. Let’s not relitigate that right now. Instead, I want to stick with the DCCC. Many people always ask if Cheri Bustos is the worst DCCC chair ever. It’s too early to tell, but she’s definitely going down as one of the 3 or 4 worst. A complete protégée of Emanuel, she’s an ideological monstrosity, spending every working moment plotting how to disadvantage progressive candidates and how to discourage democracy itself. She shouldn’t even be in the Democratic Party, let alone leading one of its arms.

The DCCC has a long and sordid history of incompetence, corruption, failure and general disgustingness that goes right back to 1866 when it was founded. The first chairman set the tone for the impossibly incompetent organization House Democrats depend on today. Chairman #1, James Rood Doolittle of Wisconsin, didn't quite know what he was politically. He started as a Democrat, then switched to the Republicans and then switched back to the Democrats. He was also a prominent opponent of the Fifteenth Amendment, the one that gave former slaves U.S. citizenship. He was such a lousy chairman (1868) that they operated without one for a decade after.

During the Roosevelt years the Committee started gaining prominence and clout. Joseph Byrnes (D-TN) was chairman from 1928-1935, during which time he was also House Majority Leader. In 1935 he was elected Speaker and died a year later. After Byrnes became Speaker, Patrick Henry Drewry (D-VA) got the job and died 12 years later, still DCCC chair. If you think 12 years is long, Drewry was followed by Michael Kirwan (D-OH) in 1947, the first northern Democrat to get that job. He was also a liberal and-- no coincidence-- a gigantically successful DCCC chairman. They were back to conservatives after Kirwan died, although his successor, Michael Feighan (D-OH) was defeated in a primary almost as soon as he was named DCCC chairman. He was followed by the legendary Boston liberal Democrat Tip O'Neill (1971-1973). 1972 was the year of Nixon's landslide reelection and the Democrats lost 13 seats in the House (even though 37,071,352 voters picked Democratic House candidates and only 33,119,664 voters picked Republicans. Yes, the GOP has been surviving on gerrymandered districts for a long, long time). O'Neill was Majority Whip while he was DCCC Chair and became House Majority Leader right after the 1972 elections (and then Speaker 4 years later).

The congressman who turned the DCCC into an arm of Wall Street and Big Business was Tony Coelho (D-CA). He ran the committee from 1981 to 1987, after which he was elected House Majority Whip, a position he held until he resigned in a financial corruption scandal with a crooked bankster.

The DCCC gained a great deal of influence in 2004 when campaign finance reform gave party committees immense power over campaign cash. Since then, they have never had a good chairman. Rahm Emanuel set the authoritarian tone but stuck closely to Coelho's posture of scraping and bowing before Wall Street. Emanuel helped elect a lot of corporate whores from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party in 2006, as did Chris Van Hollen in 2008, almost all of whom were defeated in 2010. Democratic voters, having caught on to the bait-and-switch tactics, have been refusing to come out to vote for these conservative incumbents calling themselves Democrats. Many feel that Steve Israel was the culmination of that policy, the worst DCCC chairman since Doolittle. He trained the next disaster, Pelosi sock puppet, Ben Ray Luján, who did a wretched job and is now running for the Senate. And then came Bustos, well on her way to outpacing Luján and even Israel in terms of horribleness.

A congressmember asked me if there’s ever been a good DCCC chair— which is how I came to know about Michael Kirwan. That same member who asked me about the chairmen also told me that the DCCC had been pressuring him (this was in 2016)— or twisting his arm-- to endorse wealthy corporate Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi over progressive state Senator Mike Noland in IL-08. At the time, I warned progressives who were being asked by the DCCC to endorse Krishnamoorthi that they needed to be aware that, despite his willingness to say what anyone wants to hear, he is not, has never been and never will be a progressive. A DINO, Krishnamoorthi was a job outsourcer who was one of the authors of a white paper, The Pros and Cons of Privatization, for Government Finance Review (June 2011) in which it's literally impossible to recognize the voice of a Democrat at all.

  First off, he praised privatization under Ronald Reagan. The paper states:

The present wave of privatizations can also be viewed in the context of the broader liberalization programs ushered in with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and to a lesser degree by Ronald Reagan in the United States... Poorly run private businesses must fix themselves or perish; state-run enterprises face no such constraint... Reagan similarly made privatization a theme of his presidency, describing the 1987 divestment of Conrail, a large freight railroad, for $1,575 billion as "the flagship of privatization and the first of what we hope will be many government functions returned to their rightful place in the private sector."... Today, much empirical evidence supports the claim that private companies are generally more efficient operators than government entities. The reasons for this are various and include management incentives tied to performance, a better capacity to fund capital investments, greater operating leverage, the introduction of proprietary technology, and the de-politicization of pricing and other operational decisions (e.g., raising tolls or cutting money-losing routes).

Yeah, that's the candidate the DCCC was boosting in 2016— and that’s who the Democratic establishment is readying for the next Illinois U.S. Senate seat. Since getting elected, Krishnamoorthi, a New Dem, of course, has lived up to expectations. He represents a safe blue district west of Chicago from Elk Grove Village through Schumburg out to Elgin (PVI is D+8 and Trump only managed to win 36% of the vote there) but still earned a lifetime crucial vote score of “F.” He spends all his time raising money from corporations and business executives, even though he has no worries about reelections. In 2018 he raised $5,242,332, while his GOP opponent raised $54,520. His biggest contributors are from the Health Industrial Complex, from lawyers and lobbyists and from Wall Street. Back to his paper:

Private operators can do things that politicians are unwilling or unable to do, such as raise tolls or parking fees. This can actually work to the public's advantage because the price of a privatization deal reflects these additional revenues that will be recovered by the private operators." That's a perfectly Republican perspective and Raja continued that "The less obvious reality is that in the absence of those revenues-- if a privatization deal is not done-- a government must implicitly choose a different course... If the goal is to finance some level of spending, then whatever revenue does not come from privatization must come from somewhere else. One likely source of 'somewhere else' is higher taxes, which is both politically unpopular and can have adverse economic consequences in the long run... At bottom, [privatization] is just math.

Yeah, math that Grover Norquist— and Chuck Schumer— would just love.

Problem Solvers? Gottheimer und Trumpanzee

Sorry for the tangent. Back to the DCCC— kind of. There was a worse choice than Bustos the Dems could have made: Josh Gottheimer, Blue Dog, New Dem, an abusive boss, an unrepentant reactionary and chair of Mark Penn’s misnamed Problem Solver’s Caucus. There is a case to be made that Gottheimer is the worst Democrat in Congress, a nexus of corruption and reactionary politics. Friday, reporting for The Intercept, Ryan Grim and Aída Chávez, wrote that warned Pelosi and Hoyer that he had collected enough votes to kill a bill mandating better conditions for the kidnapped children in the Trump concentration camps. He didn’t have to twist their arms to hard for them to embrace his proposal and cave, screwing over the toothless Congressional Progress Caucus again.

The House amendment would have taken away money from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and increased protections for children, among other oversight provisions. The Senate passed its version of the $4.6 billion emergency bill on Wednesday 84-8. A vote on the House version of the spending bill was beaten in the Senate 55-37, largely along party lines, with the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders missing the vote. The Senate’s vote meant House Democrats would have had to hold out to pressure the upper chamber to accept its version, while Gottheimer’s move sapped the House’s leverage. “The quote-unquote Problem Solvers Caucus, I think, threw us under the bus and undermined our position to actually be able to negotiate,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ).

“Since when did the Problem Solvers Caucus become the Child Abuse Caucus?” asked Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “Wouldn’t they want to at least fight against contractors who run deplorable facilities? Kids are the only ones who could lose today.”

Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar joined Pocan in slamming the move, saying that a vote for Mitch McConnell’s border bill “is a vote to keep kids in cages and terrorize immigrant communities.”

When asked what Gottheimer’s objection to the House border bill was, Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal said it came down to “not giving as much ICE money as the Senate did.” She added that a bigger problem stemmed from the Senate Democrats putting them in a “terrible position” in the first place by voting on a bill that “does nothing to hold a rogue agency accountable for its cruelty,” doesn’t have any provisions to “ensure the money actually goes to the children,” or that “these for-profit agencies are held accountable.” She described herself as a “giant no” on the bill.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus also recommended the House vote against the Senate border spending bill, saying the Republicans “cannot force us to accept this bill, which does not provide necessary guardrails” and allows the Trump administration to “continue denying kids basic, humane care and endangering their lives.”

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted that the Senate didn’t even bother negotiating with the House. “We have time,” she said in a tweet. “We can stay in town. We can at LEAST add some amendments to this Senate bill. But to pass it completely unamended with no House input? That seems a bridge too far.”

The House failure led to widespread recriminations. Jayapal, Pocan, the CPC, and the CHC were blamed for urging House Democrats to pull out of negotiations with the Senate earlier this spring; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer took heat for agreeing to a weak bill that left children vulnerable to abuse; Pelosi was slammed for caving; and Gottheimer’s Problem Solvers Caucus was widely derided for its unhelpful intervention. “The capitulation by the Problem Solvers and the Blue Dogs gave us no leverage here,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva (R-AZ).

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, and DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos voted in favor of the bill, while other members of leadership, including Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries, and Assistant Democratic Leader Ben Ray Luján, who is running for Senate in New Mexico, voted against it.

“We need a bill that delivers funds to end the humanitarian crisis,” Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib said on Twitter. “Not funds to continue caging children & deny asylum seekers the help they need. Not funds to continue the harmful policies. If you see the Senate bill as an option, then you don’t believe in basic human rights.”

So, yeah, he might have been worse than Bustos— by a smidge. Anyway... any interest in fighting back? Despite Bustos' hysterical fits, more activists than ever are running in primaries against her vile pack of Blue Dogs. There should be at least a dozen viable contests this cycle and even more in 2022. The Blue America 2020 Primary A Blue Dog thermometer on the right is where you can contribute to vetted progressives who are challenging Bustos candidates. Expect more candidates by next month but, for now, please consider helping these progressive replace the garbage Bustos is flinging our way.