I found the above photograph in Glamour Magazine. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted it to her Instagram account on November 12, 2018, six days after they each won elections to become freshmen members of the House of Representatives, with a one-word caption: “Squad”.
These happen to be the same four congresswomen who were singled out in Nancy Pelosi’s recent interview with Maureen Dowd, excerpts of which were included in one of Dowd’s trademark, pot-stirring columns:
I asked Pelosi whether, after being the subject of so many you-go-girl memes for literally clapping back at Trump, it was jarring to get a bad headline like the one in HuffPost that day — “What The Hell Is Nancy Pelosi Doing?” The article described the outrage of the Squad, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts are known.
Pelosi feels that the four made themselves irrelevant to the process by voting against “our bill,” as she put it, which she felt was the strongest one she could get. “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” she said. “But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
So what is it that these four congresswomen have in common that causes them to be singled out for Nancy Pelosi’s disapproval? They are all members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but so are 94 other Democratic members of the House. They are all freshmen, but so are 67 other members of the House. They are all both freshmen and progressive, but so are 25 other members of the House. They are all women of color. But so are 39 other members of the House. They are all freshmen women of color, but so are 8 other members of the House. They are all freshmen women of color who are in the Progressive Caucus, but so are 5 other members of the House.
It’s been suggested on this site that Pelosi has engaged in dangerous public attacks on elected WOC.
Ocasio-Cortez has suggested as much herself:
“When these comments first started, I kind of thought that she was keeping the progressive flank at more of an arm’s distance in order to protect more moderate members, which I understood,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Washington Post on Wednesday. “But the persistent singling out … it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful … the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”
But the thing that distinguishes The Squad isn’t that they are newly elected, or progressive, or women of color, or even that they are newly elected progressive women of color. One thing that distinguishes them are that they are self-identified members of The Squad. Another thing that distinguishes them is that they are the only four Democrats in the House who voted against the border funding bill. There are 98 members of the CPC. 94 of them voted for the border funding bill. And yet, the four who voted against claim to speak for the progressive flank. The only four Democrats who voted against the bill loudly denounce the Democrats who did.
The Squad wasn’t singled out by Pelosi. They loudly set themselves apart to a point where Pelosi was inevitably going to be asked to comment specifically on their actions.
But what else sets these congresswomen apart? What caused them to identify themselves as The Squad before they had even taken office? Is it just ideological sympathy?
No.
These four congresswomen have one thing in common that sets them apart from every other Democrat in the House of Representatives: they were all endorsed by Justice Democrats in the Democratic Primary and in the General Election. They are the only four freshman representatives who were endorsed by the Justice Democrats.
So who are the Justice Democrats? And why would their endorsement help to explain the antagonism between The Squad and Pelosi?
In March 2017, Mother Jones ran an article entitled The Young Turks Really, Really Don’t Want You to Compare Them to Breitbart And yet… :
[I]n the aftermath of the 2016 election, the 46-year-old [Cenk] Uygur, a longtime critic of the Democratic Party’s political establishment, has ventured into an unfamiliar and uncertain place in Democratic politics. Fed up with the “sellouts” in Washington, Uygur has emerged as a leader of a coordinated progressive effort to unseat incumbent Democrats en masse in House and Senate primaries next year.
“Andrew Breitbart, when he was on my show before he passed away, said they emulated us, not the other way around,” Uygur says.
In December, Uygur, Kyle Kulinski, a Young Turks network colleague who hosts “Secular Talk,” and a pair of top Bernie Sanders campaign staffers launched Justice Democrats, a political action committee that aims to recruit and fund a slate of primary challengers under an anti-corporate, progressive banner. Justice Democrats boasts 200,000 members and has raised more than $1.5 million. In March, it formally joined forces with another branch of the Sanders diaspora, Brand New Congress, which has vowed to run more than 400 progressive House and Senate candidates in 2018.
[snip]
Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress aren’t the only progressive outfits that have sprung up to challenge their party’s incumbents. Another group founded by Sanders campaign alumni, We Will Replace You, was launched in February with a similar intent. Unlike the other groups, We Will Replace You does not intend to recruit candidates; it is more focused on applying pressure on the Democratic lawmakers it considers most vulnerable, though it also plans to eventually aid candidates who fit its mold.
Co-founder Claire Sandberg, who was Sanders’ director of digital organizing, is bullish about the idea of replicating the decentralized model of the Vermont senator’s presidential campaign on behalf of other long-shot challengers. “We want to make it clear to Democrats that they need to pick which side they’re on,” she said. “They can either pick the side of Donald Trump and his Wall Street cronies, or they can pick the side of the people who are on the streets.”
For now, Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress are putting in the behind-the-scenes work, recruiting and grooming a slate of candidates who will be rolled out later this year. The groups solicited the names of potential candidates from TYT viewers and progressive activists and received 8,000 suggestions. After four rounds of vetting, that list was whittled down to about 70 people. Of those, 30 candidates are currently being trained by Sanders campaign alumni. The first candidate the groups endorsed is Cori Bush, a pastor and nurse from St. Louis, who is running in a primary against nine-term Democratic Rep. Lacy Clay.
As for the Senate, Uygur and his allies’ most immediate targets are moderate Democrats Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. (Manchin recently has dared progressive activists to primary him.) No progressive challenger has yet materialized to take on either of them, but Uygur is confident he will find contenders.
Early in her campaign, Ocasio-Cortez was candid about how significant Brand New Congress was in recruiting, training, and grooming her as a candidate, and how committed she was to their cause. Following is an excerpt from an interview with NHI (National Hispanic Institute) Magazine:
First of all, why you did decide to run for Congress?
Running for Congress was not a planned venture. My community engagement, activism, and life experiences led me here in a rather unexpected way. Years ago I worked for the late Senator Kennedy, but quickly exited politics after disliking the influence of money and dynastic power in our political system. I tried to focus on social entrepreneurship and community work instead. After the recession hit and my family was in danger of losing our home, I turned to the service industry to help make ends meet.
That all changed last year, when I helped organize the Bronx for the Bernie Sanders campaign. After the election some friends and I hopped in a car and began sitting down with everyday people across the country to explore pressing issues facing our communities: we went to Flint, MI; Standing Rock, South Dakota; and Puerto Rico.
To be honest, I didn’t quite know what doors I was opening then. I was following my instinct. When I got back from those travels, I got a call from Brand New Congress regarding my nomination for a congressional run. There would be no big money or backroom deals involved – it would be an all-grassroots effort to move the nation forward. It felt like exactly what the country needed and the right thing to do.
You’re part of the Brand New Congress movement — can you talk about that a bit and why you got involved with it?
Brand New Congress is a national effort to mount 300+ non-politician primary challengers in the 2018 midterm elections. We are grassroots, post-partisan, and accept no special interest or SuperPAC money. We do not run career politicians and are primarily driven by the need to get money out of politics. We seek to advance an ambitious, no-nonsense legislative agenda that has broad consensus among the American people. That means we are running Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike. So long as a candidate commits to our platform, we do not discriminate based on the party letter next to their name.
There is no way I’d be running without the support of Brand New Congress. My goal is to create impact, and the best way of doing that is by joining a national movement of people committed to a mutual goal. It emboldens me to run with individuals like Cory Bush in Ferguson, Paula Jean Swearengin in West Virginia, and Anthony Clark in Illinois. In a way I cannot imagine how a person can run a campaign all by themselves. With my fellow candidates and the BNC team, I feel plugged into a larger movement every day. I can celebrate their wins on my tough days and vice versa. We encourage each other. Once we get elected as a cohort, we will be able to wield power as a turnkey movement of honest, everyday people looking to make Congress accountable again.
Ocasio-Cortez’s affiliation with Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats has remained extraordinarily tight. Her Chief of Staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, was a founding member of both Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, her Communications Director, Corbin Trent, was Communications Director for Brand New Congress.
Trent’s description, in an interview from 2017, of Brand New Congress’s mission and methods goes a long way toward explaining why their would be animosity between The Squad and Pelosi:
Theo: How does BNC choose its candidates?
Corbin: There are a couple of different things that are consistent. One is that they’re 100 percent aligned with the platform and what we’re trying to accomplish. And, it’s part of their core beliefs, as opposed to someone who’s just willing to do it. Second, they’re not career politicians, in general. One of the thing we look for in their background is that they’re good at what they do. And that, in the best case, they’ve had opportunities to sell out financially, or at least do really well, but have made choices to do more good than make money. People who have been willing to sacrifice financial gain for the benefit of others—that’s something we look for. And then, they’re driven to serve. We’ve got a variety of ways to try to determine that. But that’s one of the most important characteristics. People who are willing to serve others, and who are excited about it.
[snip]
Theo: What is your relationship to the Democratic Party?
Corbin: Myself, personally? I have no relationship whatsoever. The organization has very little. We intend to run within their structures, and in their primaries, and we’re thankful that they’ve set up an infrastructure that’s going to allow candidates to run in primaries. But we think that the party has—a long time ago—stopped representing the needs of the American people.
Theo: Part of what BNC does is help candidates navigate the red tape involved in becoming a candidate, right?
Corbin: Right. BNC is also an LLC that actually hires staff for the campaigns and contracts with candidates. So, we’re the communications, the press, the Human resources and the operations.
Theo: For BNC candidates who do win, there will be a pull toward being absorbed by the two parties. Is there a mechanism for helping them remain independence once they’re elected?
Corbin: There’s infrastructure designed to support legislative training, to support orientation to Washington, D.C. That’s one thing about lobbyists. When a freshman class of Congress comes to Washington, D.C., there are lobbyist groups to help them find housing, to help them find schools, to help their spouses find jobs. And that develops a relationship. That’s something we’re going to have replicate and not ignore. And we want to do the same thing as far as providing fundraising throughout their incumbency. So, there’s support as they go forward. We’re going to try to get the caucus together as a unit, and hopefully there will be strength in numbers.
The relationships with Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress were the reverse of ordinary PACS and far more controlling than typical financial assistance. They chose the candidates, gave them their entire platform, gave them access to their email list and put their imprimatur on them to help them fund-raise, and then made them use the money raised to hire them and their chosen vendors to run their campaign for them. And then they followed them, or at least Ocasio-Cortez, to Washington to keep them in line.
The ironic thing to me is they sneer at politicians who make “backroom deals,” but their whole modus operandi is the backroom deal — it’s just a backroom deal with the “good guys”.
I read all of this stuff about Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress shortly after Ocasio-Cortez won the Democratic primary when I was trying to find out who she was and what she was about. I did not like at all what I was seeing. But since she took office, I’d been relatively pleasantly surprised by how she’s conducted herself. But there there are signs that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be feeling some heat from these guys who think they made her and that she belongs to them have been growing dissatisfied with her lack of intra-party bomb-throwing.
Take this from Vanity Fair last month: “THIS BEACON OF HOPE IS BEING CORRUPTED BY THE SYSTEM”: THE BATTLE FOR ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ’S PROGRESSIVE SOUL”:
Some of her closest allies think one of America’s most powerful progressives is being co-opted by the powers that be in Congress. “She’s being manipulated by these lawmakers,” says one. Says another: “You made promises and you need to do something.”
[snip]
“What has she brought to the floor of Congress? What has she brought for a vote? What has she really gone to war with Leader Pelosi to get on the floor? What has she really used her 4 million followers for other than some witty clapbacks? She’s talked a lot about the Green New Deal but hasn’t fought for it and achieved any substantive wins,” a source who works closely with AOC’s team told me. “I get it—once you’re in the halls of Congress, your job becomes immeasurably harder than when you were a candidate. You can’t just talk, you have to walk the walk and I know how much more difficult that is. But you made promises and you need to do something.”
[snip]
[T]he concern among her true believers is that Ocasio-Cortez has settled into a comfort zone where her principles will inevitably erode. “You had progressives ready to give their notice to work for her almost immediately because they thought she was the real deal that was going to bring change,” the progressive congressional aide told me. “They see that this beacon of hope is being corrupted by the system and the power that this place has to disorient those who want to change things.”
Who are these people working close with her team and progressive congressional aides eagerly dishing to Vanity Fair about their disappointment in AOC? Could it be her own aides?
Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress had a grand vision of tearing down the Democratic and re-building it in their image. In the end, they got four new representatives in, coincidentally (?) they are the four most headline grabbing members of congress. Is it any wonder that they have annoyed Nancy Pelosi?