On Paper, A Threat To Moneyed Interests, But...

-by Brad Johnson
@ClimateBrad

A thought in response to David Dayen's response to a Pramila Jayapal interview, in which Rep. Jayapal-- the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a top endorser of Bernie Sanders for president-- told Ezra Klein that Democrats "are not getting rolled at all" on the coronavirus stimulus bills.

That is, quite frankly, either delusional or a bald lie, and offensive to the millions of American now in deadly peril from the Great Trump Depression while the 0.0001% has been given literal trillions of dollars.

Dayen is "tiring of what amounts to a bunch of excuses for how progressives have been functionally locked out of policymaking during this crisis," noting that House Speaker "Nancy Pelosi has run the House of Representatives by fiat for close to two months, and there hasn’t been a single word of protest as she locks every other member of the Democratic caucus out of policymaking and hands them take-it-or-leave-it legislation to rubber stamp."

Dayen continues: "[I]nstead of organizing around one thing, progressives supply 100-item wish lists that everyone knows won’t be fulfilled. This has two consequences: the wish lists show progressives are not completely serious about governing, and the leadership can always pick like 2 of the 100 out of the list and give members something to justify voting for a bad bill."

So how is that progressive Democrats in Congress can be so feckless? Here's one thought I had a while ago that may be applicable.

When the Democrats took control of Congress in the 2006 mid-terms, I began following the Hill proceedings obsessively, trying to understand the process by which they debated and developed policy on climate change.

I noticed a strange pattern: the Democrats in Congress with effective communications and policy coordination were corruptly aligned with business interests and the principled Democrats were strangely incompetent, seemingly unable to coordinate or align with activists or the news cycle, and poor at the game of politics.

It took me a while to understand that this divide was a natural result of the institutional pressures. There are many competent, progressive Democrats out there. But if they somehow manage to get elected (the first major hurdle), they are under a total barrage. They are a threat to moneyed interests-- as well as to other Democrats, who they make look "bad" (they make it obvious that the corrupt Democrats are corrupt and that the incompetent Democrats are incompetent). Their enemies-- i.e., most of Washington-- will spend whatever it takes to defeat, subvert, or overwhelm them. It's that institutional response which makes many good Democrats one-termers or disappointments or fatalistic back-benchers.

One interesting corollary is that this phenomenon isn't simply true of individuals-- it was issue-specific. That is, many of the Democrats were progressive champions on practically every issue except for the one for which they hold a position of power. I remember, for example, that Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank was far left except on finance and banking-- not coincidentally, he was chair of the House Financial Services committee.

And all of the institutional pressures have gotten radically worse in the past 14 years.

So what is to be done? The situation can be one that leads to despair, but I also think it helps to be understanding of how crushingly difficult it is to be an effective progressive legislator in Congress, and why the only possible answer is for greater engagement in the political process from those of us who support the common good-- and a continued commitment to solidarity, despite the drumbeat of disappointment.