Would You Ask To Join The Squad?

Daniel Marans put a bunch of statements by AOC together and wrote a post asserting she wants a bigger Squad. Are there dues and a secret handshake like The Blue Dogs and New Dems have? Will it be a side project of the Congressional Progressive Caucus that eventually swallows up that everyone-welcome caucus? AOC: "We have to change the people who are here if we are serious about delivering for working-class people." As Marans reminded his readers, Pelosi dismissed the Squad with a sneer: "They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got." Last time I looked, though AOC had 5.6 million Twitter followers to Pelosi's 3.2 million. Ilhan Omar has $1.7 million Twitter followers to Steny Hoyer's 121,300. Ayanna Pressley had 490,100 followers compared to Jim Clyburn's 5,171 followers and Rashid Tlaib has 824,300 followers to Cheri Bustos' 33,000 followers. I don't see any of them sneering at Pelosi or her geriatric leadership team.

Marans explained that AOC is trying to change Pelosi's calculation. "On Tuesday, she became the first sitting House member to endorse Jessica Cisneros, an immigration attorney challenging Rep. Henry Cuellar, a conservative Texas Democrat, from the left. She’s also endorsed Marie Newman, the progressive challenging conservative Democrat Rep. Dan Lipinski in Illinois."

“If we’re not going to pass ‘Medicare for All’ unless the [House Democratic] caucus changes, then I need to be a part of changing the caucus. That’s just how it is,” Ocasio-Cortez said, adding that her ambitious goals for climate action also require a different kind of Democratic Party in Congress. “I don’t want people to die, and I want to cut our carbon emissions by 50% in 10 years.”

“If we want to pursue an ambitious agenda that delivers for working-class America, the Democratic Party has to change who they answer to. And they have to answer to working-class people.”

Without ever mentioning Pelosi, she added: “And it’s not because of something I said. It’s because of something everybody else said: ‘You don’t have the votes, people here aren’t going to support that.’ Then we have to change the people who are here if we are serious about delivering for working-class people.”

Ocasio-Cortez, of course, came in with a reputation for taking on incumbents. As a political newcomer, she launched a long-shot bid against Joe Crowley, the powerful Democratic congressman from New York’s 14th Congressional District who was considered a future leader of the party. Her win shook up national politics, setting off a firestorm in Washington as party leaders grappled with what they had missed in the mood on the ground.

But the victory didn’t do much to endear her to some of her new colleagues. Ocasio-Cortez told HuffPost this week that she isn’t afraid of making new enemies by opposing Cuellar, Lipinski and potentially others-- because the ones who will be mad at her probably weren’t her fans anyway.

For one thing, Ocasio-Cortez maintains that many House members likely to take issue with her involvement in the race wrote her off from the moment she walked in the door.

“The reception that I got here was very chilly, and that was before I did anything,” she said. “There are folks who just weren’t going to work with me, and nothing I could have done would have changed that-- unless I fundamentally changed who I am.”

Realizing there is little she can do win over some of her fellow Democrats has freed her to pursue her vision of change with less fear of political blowback on the Hill, according to Ocasio-Cortez.

“If anything, it almost created more breathing room for me, because it... was really clarifying,” she said.

From the beginning, Ocasio-Cortez has pursued an “inside-outside” organizing strategy. She joined a climate change sit-in in Pelosi’s office on her first day on Capitol Hill, but she also recognizes that she needs to have allies in the halls of Congress to move her agenda forward.

She counts it as a sign of progress, for example, that the creation of a public health insurance option is now the default position of many of her moderate colleagues. And Ocasio-Cortez is quick to downplay any past differences she had with Pelosi. Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, left shortly after his tweets about other House Democrats escalated a spat between members of the Squad and party leaders.

“The whole idea that there’s a conflict was very overblown,” she said. “It’s about what we can accomplish given the limitations of a Republican Senate and Trump as president. People are pretty pragmatic and they’re open-minded.”

...Ocasio-Cortez told HuffPost that she is limiting her involvement in primary challenges against her colleagues to heavily Democratic districts where she believes that members of Congress do not have the excuse of justifying centrist positions as politically necessary. She is fond of noting that Hillary Clinton bested Donald Trump in Cuellar’s district by nearly 20 percentage points in 2016.

“I think it’s a pretty modest proposal, a pretty modest ask that we consider a D+20 district to be grassroots-supported, divested of lobbyist money, to support ‘Medicare for All,’” she said. “This district is almost as progressive as mine. So why is there such a huge difference? Why is it so conservative?”

Cuellar is frequently ranked as one of Congress’ most conservative Democrats. As of this Congress, he had an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association for opposing tougher gun regulations (though he has since voted to tighten background checks). He received a score of 15% from NARAL Pro-Choice America in 2018, having voted for legislation that would legally treat fetuses as people. And Cuellar has received over $5.5 million in corporate PAC contributions over the course of his career.

“If this is a D+20 district, what room do we give to people in a D+1 district?” Ocasio-Cortez asked.

With that in mind, the New York representative said she is equally interested in elevating Democrats in swing seats-- those in the party’s “frontline” program for vulnerable incumbents-- who have taken progressive stances that expose them to political risk. She singled out for praise Rep. Mike Levin, a California Democrat who unseated a Republican last November. Notwithstanding his “frontline” status, he is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a co-sponsor of “Medicare for All” legislation that would create a single-payer health care system. Levin is one of three vulnerable freshman Democrats for whom Ocasio-Cortez raised $30,000 apiece in an end-of-March fundraising appeal on Twitter.

“I’m very, very committed to not just Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, but transformational majorities in the House and Senate,” she said. “That’s where I want to dedicate a lot of my time.”

While Ocasio-Cortez said she is a “team player,” one thing she has no plans to do is pay the sum of $150,000 in “dues” that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee asks of rank-and-file House members.

“When I talk to frontliners about what they need, they just prefer that I give them the money,” she said.

Without so much as lifting a phone to call donors, Ocasio-Cortez has raised nearly $3.4 million for her reelection campaign. She may have to spend some of that money dispatching with local competition: She has already drawn 11 challengers-- eight Republicans and three Democrats. However, the prospects of another Democrat, let alone a Republican, prevailing in the heavily Democratic district where she is a household name remain scant.

Ocasio-Cortez declined to go into more detail about how she would use her financial resources to support people like Cisneros and Newman. A candidate’s campaign can, for example, directly transfer up to $2,000 to another campaign each election cycle.

“A lot of those decisions are based on evolving dynamics,” she said. “How much help would a given candidate need? Where can we expand the movement?”

Rather than setting her sights on 2020 or 2021, Ocasio-Cortez said she is trying to figure out how to shape what the country will look like in 2050.

“One of the benefits of being a younger member is that I have the luxury of looking at things in terms of decades. How do we turn Tennessee blue again? How do we turn West Virginia blue?” she concluded. “These are questions that seem impossible to some people because perhaps they are impossible in a cycle or two. But I think about the changes that I want to see in my life.”

Jamaal Bowman is a middle school principal in the Bronx, currently in a tough congressional race against an entrenched establishment incumbent. he told us he feels "that I am already part of the Squad. Being part of the Squad is not only about being elected to Congress, it’s about all of us, fighting for everyday Americans who struggle within the confines of immoral policy. It’s about finding like minded people and working together to change the oppressive status quo. We all can and must fight for Medicare for all, a Green New Deal, and getting big money out of politics. If you stand for justice and equality for all, you are already a member of the Squad.”

 

Eva Putzova's tweet alerted me to Marans' post. The Arizona progressive congressional candidate added that "We need to replace every single representative in Congress bought by corporate interests. AOC is fighting not only for the soul of the Democratic Party but also for the soul of this country and I will be honored to join her. Regardless of endorsements, I will continue doing what I’ve always done: putting people first."

Washington Democratic Socialist Rebecca Parson should be one of the first people anyone thinks of when it comes to expanding the Squad. "The Squad is an inspiration across the country," she told me last night. "They're fighting for truly progressive policies like the Green New Deal, and they're showing working-class people that we can participate in the political process, too. Democrats and Republicans who take millions of dollars from the Wall Street, insurance, Big Pharma, and real estate companies that are destroying lives don’t fight for us. They fight for their donors. All it takes is a review of their voting records to see that. When I'm elected to Congress, my focus will be on helping the people of Washington's 6th Congressional District and the country, so I would be proud to join the Squad." Snd one of the last people who would ever ask to join the Squad? Rebecca's reactionary opponent Derek Kilmer, New Dem.

Like Rebecca and Eva, Chicago grassroots activist Kina Collins, is as Squad-like as you're going to find. "Becoming part of the Squad," she told us this morning, "does not mean that any challenger candidate is running just to be an AOC clone. Each of us is running to be the best representative of our districts, and in IL-07 with a D+38 rating, our district should serve as a national model on moving the progressive agenda forward. Congressman Danny K. Davis has sat on the sidelines for too long, and he continues to take corporate PAC money from private insurance and pharmaceutical companies when we have the largest healthcare disparities in the country. If we want equity and justice for working-class people, we need someone from that community who will actually fight for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and to end gun violence."

Rachel Ventura's district is west of Kina's. THey're on the same page when it comes to building a new progressive agenda for Chicagoland. "Yes," Rachel told us without hesitation, "I would become a member of 'the Squad' and support growing progressive leadership in all committees, and within the party caucus. I see the squad as a team that each has their own unique skill set and area of expertise. I would bring my own skills as a mathematician and naturalist to the team. We are going to need to make arguments about re-prioritizing the budget from military spending to funding green investments in our communities. Additionally, we are going to have to make an argument that there are natural ways to sequester carbon without 'technological fixes' that perpetuate fossil fuels. Our race has the potential to show that AOC is not the exception to the rule, but a pattern that demonstrates where the Democratic Party is going."

Dr. Michael Owens was once a Democratic Party official working to turn red suburban counties southwest of Atlanta blue. Now they are-- and he's running for a seat currently held by a semi-Republican Blue Dog, David Scott. I asked him if he would join the Squad. "Absolutely, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad are what the next generation of progressive leaders look like. They are leading the way and fighting the fights I want to be in the middle of. America needs a squad as big as the challenges we are facing. As many policies that have been seen as too-far-left become mainstream the group will continue become larger and more influencial. Fighting for the dignity and well-being of our citizens and being committed to serve all people should not be the limited to a certain group.  It should be the goal of the entire Congress."

Earlier today, Kim Williams explains how she evolved from an Elizabeth Warren supporter to a full-fledged Berniecrat. It all about a commitment to solving real problems for real people. "As progressive presidential candidates surge in the polls, we need to ensure there are progressives in Congress who will advance Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and debt free college if we are ever going to realize the profound change we so desperately need," she said today. "We simply can not do that with the members of Congress we have now. My safe blue district is represented a conservative Democrat who spent last Congress voting with Trump 47% of the time, and during his eight terms, the median income in my county, when adjusted for inflation, fell. It is lower now than when he took office in 2005. Millionaires like him will never deliver change for working class families. It can only come from individuals who refuse to compromise their values for campaign contributions, who will unapologetically stand behind policies that can bring about real change, and who will proudly become a member of the Squad."