Thanks LD!

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/jamaal-bowman-dsa-israel/

The rise of the Squad in Congress has mirrored the explosive growth of Democratic Socialists of America. The leftist lawmakers, all of them national celebrities, have promoted DSA and partnered with the organization on crucial legislation. In turn, young socialists have flocked to the insurgent representatives, lending necessary volunteers for contentious campaigns.

Last week, for perhaps the first time, saw a fraying in this partnership. Select chapters of DSA and a number of socialist leaders called for the expulsion of Representative Jamaal Bowman from the organization. Bowman, a New York Democrat and DSA member who defeated Eliot Engel in 2020, ran afoul of these chapters for taking a recent trip to Israel and meeting with the new right-wing prime minister, Naftali Bennett. He also drew the ire of DSA members for voting to fund Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, and refusing to back the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Bowman is unlikely to be expelled from DSA—and other members and chapters have vigorously pushed back on efforts to drive him out of the socialist organization, which has nearly 100,000 members across the nation and more than 100, including Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in elected office. Supporters of Bowman in DSA organized a letter, titled “For Unity, not Unanimity,” that garnered dozens of signatories from local DSA chapters. The DSA chapter in Bowman’s own district did not call for his expulsion.

“As socialists, our concern is with making material progress towards justice, not simply with messaging about what justice is,” the letter read. “Forcibly expelling an elected official whom DSA helped put in office may seem like an act of power, but it reflects weakness, not strength. Strong movements can shift allies and comrades towards their positions.”

David Duhalde, vice-chair of The Democratic Socialists of America Fund—DSA’s sister educational nonprofit—and a signatory of the letter, said that he saw an “erosion of democratic norms” taking place in DSA and argued the calls for Bowman’s expulsion lacked due process. “This effort is excessively punitive and isn’t being done in a way that would give him a fair hearing. It wouldn’t empower the organization to advance the cause of Palestinian liberation.”

Bowman’s office declined to comment on the debate. Defenders of the congressman noted, however, that he took the trip with J Street, a progressive organization that supports Zionism but speaks in support of Palestinian rights, unlike the more powerful American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Bowman and the delegation attempted to visit Gaza but were denied permission, though he was able to meet with the Palestinian grandmother of Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan representative and Squad member, in the occupied West Bank.

Bowman is not the only leftist member of Congress to withhold support for BDS. Both Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, who is not technically a dues-paying DSA member, have refused to endorse the nonviolent boycott movement, which is opposed by large segments of the American Jewish community. Ocasio-Cortez also recently irked DSA and other progressives when she voted “present” for the Iron Dome funding instead of coming out against it.

There are political realities Bowman must contend with that are unique to his district. Engel, whose seat former public school principal now occupies, was the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a staunch Israel hawk. Bowman’s district, spanning the Bronx and Westchester County, is home to a sizable Jewish community. A progressive on foreign policy, Bowman has sought to limit the US military presence abroad, backing an amendment that would have pulled troops from Syria. He has also been willing to chide fellow members of the New York delegation who have unequivocally boosted Israeli violence against Palestinians.

For DSA, the spat and reconciliation with Bowman represents both the promise and peril of a decentralized socialist movement. The great autonomy conferred on individual chapters has led to a number of startling successes, like New York’s leftward swerve in the state legislature and the socialist takeover of the Nevada Democratic Party. It has also, on occasion, engendered infighting and alienation—Summer Lee, a rising state lawmaker now running for Congress, recently left Pittsburgh’s DSA chapter after disagreements with socialists there.

Unlike other organizing bodies on the broader left, DSA has resisted professionalization and consciously avoided becoming another Working Families Party or Sunrise Movement. On one hand, this is understandable because DSA is a mass-member, democratic organization in a way most nonprofit progressive groups are not. Decisions are reached through genuine member engagement and campaigns are supported only when there’s belief that a sufficient number of volunteers can be summoned to knock on doors, make phone calls, and raise funds. As a socialist organization, DSA ultimately seeks to make member elected officials accountable to local chapters and the principles they support, declining to endorse broadly or readily cozy up to politicians.

But the professional left organizations do have the advantage of employing more paid staff to meet with lawmakers regularly. Though DSA has worked with Bowman on the Green New Deal for public schools, socialists have rarely scheduled formal meetings with the left-wing lawmaker. The imposition of a litmus test over BDS raises a thorny question for DSA: What principles are de facto red lines that endorsed candidates must not violate—and what others can be massaged? Medicare for All, for example, appears to be far more nonnegotiable than BDS, which has long been controversial even among many progressives. Does threatening Bowman with expulsion make him more or less likely to embrace the cause of Palestinian rights and BDS? Will future Democrats seeking DSA endorsements pull closer or further away from the greater struggle for Palestinian liberation?

It can be argued that in the northern Bronx and Westchester, leftists can do no better than Bowman, who replaced a Democrat that supported the Iraq War and Likud. Purging him from DSA would, in the short term, probably do more damage to the socialist organization than it would to Bowman’s political career. Unlike the 2018 Ocasio-Cortez campaign, DSA did not engage heavily with Bowman in 2020 and only endorsed him close to Election Day. Their leverage over him, for now at least, may be limited.

As DSA continues to grow and more leftists like Bowman enter office with their support, debates over how grassroots socialists should relate to those in power—and what policy disagreements should trigger censure or outright expulsion—will likely rage again.

“It is a reflection of a maturation of our politics,” said Chris Kutalik Cauthern, DSA’s communications directer. “A lot of people like to talk about DSA as a party surrogate or a party within a party. As DSA gets its legs and become a mass organization, we’ll have to deal with these issues.”

A sadly fitting pairing with https://t.co/M8dyucXoUP

— Mark Shatraw (@09mshatraw) November 30, 2021

Bernie wants to use the $ to expand Medicare. Menendez wants to use the $ to provide tax breaks to the wealthy ($400,000-$550,000 in income).

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-29/salt-cap-talks-falter-as-sanders-menendez-negotiate-details

Negotiations in the Senate over expanding the state and local tax deduction hit a new snag with two key lawmakers at odds over whether the plan should raise revenue for other spending priorities in President Joe Biden’s economic agenda.

Senator Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, told reporters Monday that Senator Bernie Sanders has “walked away” from a previously-agreed-to plan that changes to the deduction be revenue neutral over the 10-year budget window, which would allow for a more generous tax break.

Sanders said on Monday he wants the reworked SALT deduction to raise revenue — which he says could amount to a couple hundred billion dollars — to pay for expanding dental and vision health coverage under Medicare.

“We said that we believe that the SALT should be whatever is revenue neutral,” Menendez said Monday. “And that’s what I thought we were doing. Now it seems that he has desires of using some of that revenue by cutting back.”

Sanders and Menendez last month had agreed on a proposal that would allow unlimited deductions for SALT under a certain income cap and phasing out the tax breaks above that limit, but have yet to iron out the specifics. Sanders says he wants to set that threshold at $400,000, but Menendez has floated a higher limit — as much as $550,000.

Menendez said that estimates from the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation show that allowing unlimited SALT deductions for individuals earning as much as $550,000 and married couples earning roughly double that amount won’t add to the deficit over the course of the decade-long budget window.

The disagreement over SALT introduces new complications to one of the most controversial aspects of Biden’s economic agenda. Democrats say expanding the $10,000 cap on the SALT deduction is a key priority, but doing so also means cutting taxes for many high-income households.

The cap was imposed in the 2017 tax law, but is currently set to expire at the end of 2025. The expiration means that congressional budget analysts have to assume that the cap would be fully lifted after 2025 because that is current law. As a result, if Democrats impose some sort of limit on the SALT deduction from 2026-2031, that counts as revenue for budgeting purposes.

The House-passed version of Biden’s economic bill would allow for up to $80,000 in SALT write-offs. Sanders said that would do too much to help millionaires, so the Senate version must be scaled back significantly.

obviously that strike in Kabul was a complete disaster but I see a lot of people just assuming it's going on as before and that just isn't true (at least for the moment)

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) November 30, 2021

Ugh for Jeffries.

https://prospect.org/politics/succession-hakeem-jeffries-nancy-pelosi/

The octogenarians are on the way out. Some combination of Pelosi, Hoyer, and Clyburn—House Dems 1, 2, and 3—are likely to retire at session’s end. House Democrats instituted rules at the end of 2018 limiting the chamber’s top three leaders to no more than four terms, a number all three will have reached by the end of 2022. Add to that Dems’ portentous defeats in the November 2021 elections and the possibility of many years in the minority, given historical trends and successful red-state gerrymandering, and you can see why a bunch of 80-year-olds might finally be willing to step aside.

So, for the first time since 2002, Democrats have a legitimate succession drama on their hands. Replacing Pelosi will be one of the most important battles for the future of the party.

Until recently, that torch-passing seemed to be all but a formality. Jeffries has long been seen as a rising star, and at just 51 years old, he’s a relative youngster compared to the rest of the leadership. A number of progressive groups that have vocally criticized Jeffries in the past declined to comment for this story, a possible indication of the presumption of his ascension.

In the case of a coronation, it might make sense that Jeffries has spent the past year-plus absent from the defining battles of the party. He would be expected to serve in the good-soldier role, letting the Speaker preside over her final act. But both the battles he’s chosen to sit out and the ones he’s chosen to wage signal otherwise.

While the CPC haggled with conservatives over health care, paid leave, drug pricing regulation —Biden’s agenda and Pelosi’s personal priorities—Jeffries, a CPC member, was publicly silent. While the CBC took on an outsized role in electioneering and crafting the police reform bill, Jeffries’s contribution was marginal, campaigning for New York’s Eliot Engel, a white moderate, and Missouri’s Lacy Clay, a Black moderate, both of whom fell to Black progressives in primaries, and staying away from those negotiations. When all New York City House Democrats sent a letter to Pelosi urging her to protect all $80 billion for public housing in the BBB, Jeffries was the only member not to sign that missive, especially surprising given that New York Dems are known to act as a bloc.

His signature maneuver in 2021 has been to start Team Blue PAC, a committee to protect Democratic incumbents from progressive primary challenges. Given that Dems are likely to lose the House in 2022, the next leader’s job will be to win back seats from Republicans, not protect safe blue seats from internal contests. And those right-leaning incumbents in safe seats were already most likely to support Jeffries in his campaign for the top job, all of which adds up to signal that the formation of Team Blue was less about winning potential votes for Democratic leader than about settling scores with young Squad-adjacent progressives. It’s made stranger by the fact that Jeffries insistently self-identifies as a progressive.

That he created Team Blue with Problem Solvers Caucus co-chair Josh Gottheimer was even more striking. Gottheimer went on to become the head of the band of corporate Democratic holdouts who imperiled the Build Back Better agenda, which Pelosi has called her legacy. “It should come as no surprise that the chair of the House Democratic Caucus plans to support the reelection of Members of the House Democratic Caucus who are working hard to enact President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda,” Jeffries’s office told The Washington Post at the time of the PAC’s creation, in a statement that was almost immediately proven false.

Jeffries is a mute member of the CPC, the largest caucus in the party, but has recently chosen to ally himself with its more conservative factions. And while the party’s moderate wing has moved left on everything from foreign policy to social welfare, Jeffries has not moved with it. Is he the great unifier willing to find common cause with all Democrats, or a score-settler, out to quash an ascendant leftward bloc? More importantly: Is he the next face of the Democratic Party?

As fast as Jeffries moved up, so too did the political ground beneath him shift in those crucial years. On financial services, on education, on Israel, many of his best-known positions rapidly became retrograde in today’s Democratic Party, both statewide and nationally

Jeffries was the leading congressional recipient of hedge fund money in 2020. He banked $1.1 million from the financial sector, real estate interests, and insurance industry in the 2019–2020 cycle. Everyone from JPMorgan Chase to Goldman Sachs to Blackstone contributed. Zimmer Partners, a hedge fund, is one of Jeffries’s top donors in 2021.

From the outset, he has governed with those interests at heart. While Democrats were reconsidering their coziness with Wall Street, he broke ranks to vote with the financial services world, including on a high-profile measure literally written by Citigroup lobbyists in 2013 that killed the Dodd-Frank “swaps push-out” rule, allowing banks to engage in risky trades backed by a potential taxpayer-funded bailout. Reporting by The New York Times found that “Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill.” His former chief of staff Cedric Grant left Jeffries’s office for a job as an H&R Block lobbyist.

Meanwhile, Jeffries has remained a vocal advocate of charter schools while the party has backed away from them. He was a top priority of Democrats for Education Reform, a pro–charter school PAC that was critical of teachers unions, which named him to their “hot list” immediately upon his announcement of a congressional bid in 2012. He has spoken at fundraisers and rallies on behalf of charter schools across New York City.

On Israel, Jeffries not only started out as an unequivocal hawk, but has maintained that position even as more and more Democrats have shown a willingness in 2021 to condition aid to the country after the siege that followed the evictions of Sheikh Jarrah. But not Jeffries, who signed a letter opposing making aid conditional as recently as late April. Two years prior, he supported the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which would impose criminal penalties on companies that supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

Those positions, though conservative, do have a home in the big-tent Democratic Party. But Jeffries is also one of the rare Democrats to have received donations from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp PAC, the political-donation arm of Fox News. Jeffries banked donations from them just a few months ago, as well as in 2016.

His presence in state politics has been similarly out of step with a rapidly realigning party. Jeffries has placed numerous protégés in the State Assembly over the years, but recently has seen a number of his acolytes downed by progressive insurgents. In the state’s 57th District, the seat he himself once held, socialist Phara Souffrant Forrest toppled four-term incumbent Walter Mosley, a well-known Jeffries ally; in the 25th District for state Senate, also his home turf, his hand-picked candidate Tremaine Wright fell to Democratic Socialists of America–backed Jabari Brisport. “In his own district, his constituents have shown they don’t want more of the same Democratic politics,” said Sumathy Kumar, co-chair of the NYC DSA.

Jeffries lobbied for Amazon to establish its HQ2 in New York City despite high-profile protests over proposed tax subsidies and labor concerns, in a battle that affixed Ocasio-Cortez in the national spotlight. At the same time that showdown was raging, Jeffries turned to Joe Crowley, the conservative congressman and once number four ranking Democrat whom Ocasio-Cortez defeated, for guidance on how to beat out Lee for caucus chair.

Jeffries returned the favor two years later by staging an ambush on Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign for a sought-after seat on the all-important Energy and Commerce committee, helping to install New York Rep. Kathleen Rice instead. Rice immediately used that promotion to torpedo the party’s signature drug pricing reform legislation and knock it out of early drafts of the Build Back Better Act.

Jeffries’s commitment to the old Democratic machine was seen, too, in his outstanding loyalty to Gov. Andrew Cuomo. As noted by Dovere in The Atlantic, Jeffries was “the only New York power player” not calling for Cuomo’s resignation following sexual harassment revelations, after Cuomo had raised money for him and repeatedly endorsed him in the past.

IF IT WASN’T JEFFRIES FOR LEADER, who would it be? The name that’s gained the most momentum throughout the course of the year is Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal. After Jayapal overhauled the CPC, now the largest caucus in the entire party, and formed it into a voting bloc, her ability to lead on policy priorities shared by current leadership and the White house may have put her in a better position than even a few months ago. Given that Jeffries’s signature contribution this year has been to arm the party’s breakaway faction, there’s a stronger case to be made that Jayapal has been more committed to its core ambitions. She’s hardly a betting favorite, but she’s on the board, and according to people familiar with her thinking, interested in the role.

Part of the allure of a Jeffries nomination is its historical import; never has there been a person of color at the highest rank of the House of Representatives, and the Biden administration has made a signature out of appointing members of historically underrepresented groups to top posts. But that standard would pertain to Jayapal as well, a woman of color born in Chennai, India. And because she’s foreign-born, and cannot aspire to the presidency, the role would be a crowning achievement more than a stepping stone for another of the party’s rising stars. Add to that the fact that Jayapal is well liked, and shares an aptitude for tactical negotiation that’s Pelosi-like.

Contested elections yield concessions, and if the last 12 months have muddled Jeffries’s case enough to make the leader’s race a real contest, that could change the party as much as the eventual winner. The CPC, with nearly 100 members, could get any hopeful close to the 111 votes needed to win such an election. That means even a percentage of the caucus could trade their support for crucial priorities like the abolishment of PAYGO, guaranteed progressive representation on committees, or an overhaul of the notoriously opaque and powerful Steering and Policy Committee. Those things could mean more for Medicare for All or the Green New Deal than having a leader who supports them.

Will Bunch

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/11/29/these-so-called-moderate-centrists-are-nothing-corporate-extremists

Long ago, in a United States that now seems far, far away, the coming-to-America story of Saule Omarova would be hailed as a stirring endorsement of our nation as a beacon for democracy seekers. Born in 1966 under the Communist dictatorship of the USSR, and raised under her Kazakh grandmother who’d lost the rest of her family to Stalinist purges, she grew up with a passion for Pink Floyd and political dissent that caused her to stay here in the U.S. after the Soviet regime collapsed while she was a grad student in Wisconsin.

Not surprisingly, Omarova’s work as an American academic hasn’t focused on overthrowing capitalism but making it work better for everyday citizens. Inspired by the 2008 economic meltdown, she’s most recently proposed a scheme that would allow the Federal Reserve to take on the big banks’ monopoly on private deposits that caused a credit crunch in the Great Recession. Her research and resumé — she even worked for a time in the administration of George W. Bush — made Omarova seemingly an inspiring pick for President Biden, who tapped her to become the first woman and first nonwhite to oversee banking as comptroller of the currency.

“The irony is that while the Josh Gottheimers of the world think they are saving themselves by bringing back a big tax break for their rich but socially liberal college-educated districts, they are in reality trashing the Democratic brand, and the ensuing tsunami is going to swamp them as well.”

But Omarova’s feel-good saga was lost in translation when she hit the Senate for her confirmation process. Instead, the hearing became a public demonstration of everything that’s wrong with American politics in 2021 — beginning with Republicans who hid their unbridled support for the monopolistic power for Big Banking behind completely twisting Omarova’s life story in the worst display of Red-baiting on Capitol Hill since Joe McCarthy’s liver failed. It started with Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey — Wall Street’s man in the Senate — demanding a paper on Marxism required by her Moscow State University professors “in the original Russian language,” to kick off efforts to portray Omarova as some kind of Manchurian candidate for the job. It devolved into Louisiana GOP Sen. John Kennedy telling the nominee, “I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade” — a no-sense-of-decency moment even for today’s Republicans, at long last.But what happened next is much more revealing about what’s broken with American politics, and arguably matters a lot more as the nation backslides into 2022 midterms that could shake democracy to its core. Because if you think that Senate Democrats rose up to this shameful display of modern McCarthyism by rallying around President Biden’s nominee or her ideas that banking should work for the middle class, then you don’t know the soul of today’s Democratic Party. 

Instead, a so-called cadre of centrist Democrats — really extremists in defense of their wealthy donors on Wall Street, Silicon Valley and elsewhere — sneaked up from behind to put the dagger in Omarova’s political fortunes. In a scenario where all 50 Democratic votes were needed, five of these so-called moderates — including Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a flashpoint in the downsizing of Biden’s progressive ambitions — have reportedly told the White House they can’t support Omarova, which will kill her nomination. One of the five Democrats, Montana Sen. Jon Tester, had grilled Omarova on a prior comment that seemed critical of Big Oil and Gas.

The torpedoing of Omarova by her own party is hardly an aberration. Instead, it felt like the exclamation point on a recurring theme in Year One of the Biden administration — a new president’s determination to turn around the battleship of American politics to help the struggling middle class either slow-walked or increasingly blocked by an entrenched sliver of pro-Wall Street and pro-donor-class Democrats.

We’ve watched this process writ large as the centerpiece of the Biden agenda — the formerly $3.5 trillion social welfare and climate change package with the unfortunate name of Build Back Better — has been stripped of popular items like free community college and seen other key features like paid family leave and lowered prescription drug costs sharply whittled down. The cuts happened not because of Republicans — a hopeless bunch whose votes thankfully aren’t needed to pass this so-called reconciliation bill — but because of conservative Democrats like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the Chamber of Commerce lackey who with his family literally owns a coal company, or New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer — whose $450,000 in donations from private-equity firms last cycle is more than any House member, including any pro-business Republican. Even at a much lower $1.5 trillion price tag, it’s not even clear these divided Democrats can pass Build Back Better.

At the end of the day, it wasn’t Republicans but much of this same cadre of “ConservaDems” — including Sinema, whose sharp moves to the right on health-care issues have coincided with $750,000 in campaign contributions from Big Pharma and medical firms — that nearly killed the provision aimed at lowering drug costs (which had reemerged in a much downsized form). And it’s been these same Democrats — particularly Northeasterners like New Jersey’s Gottheimer who’ve benefited as Democrats become the party of college-educated white suburbanites — who’ve pared back politically popular new taxes on corporations and the wealthy but are bringing back a tax break for high-income homeowners, allowing Republicans to bash the party’s seeming hypocrisy. 

The gross irony here is that the pundit class — especially the centrists who fantasized about replacing Trump with a somehow popular but essentially do-nothing version of Biden — is now blaming “the Squad” of the furthest left Democrats and excessive “wokeness” for the sagging poll numbers of the Democrats and their president. But let’s get real. On the “wokeness” front, gridlock in Washington hasn’t happened because lawmakers are insisting on using the right pronouns or using the word “Latinx.”

But much more importantly, it’s been the left wing in Congress — especially the House Progressive Caucus led by Washington state Rep. Pramila Jayapal — that has worked most closely with Biden on formulating an actual social welfare policy for the middle class, and which has been willing to compromise again and again and again in order to get something, no matter how diminished and thus deflating, done for its voters. The representatives who dare to brand themselves as “moderates” have actually been the jihadists who’ve threatened to blow up the Biden presidency unless their demands — to protect Big Banks, Big Pharma and the owners of big McMansions who attend their fund-raisers — are met, time after time.

There’s two big problems here. The obstructionism of centrist Democrats has mostly squandered what could have been a brief two-year window — given the dysfunctional cycle of American politics — to take meaningful action on climate change and enact the kind of policies around higher education or paid family leave that are routine in every other developed nation. That’s bad news both for the future of both a civil U.S. society and the health of the planet.

But the schizophrenia of today’s Democrats — watching Biden and his new progressive allies run full-speed at the football of change, only to watch the Democrat-in-name-only Lucys like Gottheimer and Sinema yank it away again and again — has also left the average, not-on-Twitter, not-politics-obsessed voter utterly confused what the party really stands for. I don’t blame them. Many days I wonder myself.

The irony is that while the Josh Gottheimers of the world think they are saving themselves by bringing back a big tax break for their rich but socially liberal college-educated districts, they are in reality trashing the Democratic brand, and the ensuing tsunami is going to swamp them as well. In calling their billionaire donors and bragging how that blocked Biden from becoming the new FDR, they’re too money-besotted to see they are creating a Jimmy Carter scenario for Democrats that could end with their party again in the wilderness for decades. In driving away young voters and the nonwhite working class, these political geniuses don’t seem to understand that 37 — the percentage of voters with a college degree — is lower than 50.

Now, in failing to defend Saule Omarova against the brutal McCarthyism of her Republican critics, the Democrats’ centrist wing is hitting a moral low to coincide with their lack of political foresight — as the party melts down and an opposing party that no longer believes in democracy is advancing on the capital, again. In the smoldering ruins of the near future, maybe the right question for these Quislings who’d rather save JP Morgan Chase and Merck than the American Experiment is this: Are you now, or have you ever been, a centrist Democrat?

I'm proud to stand with @SBWorkersUnited in their fight for decent wages and decent working conditions. Starbucks is raking in record profits in 2021. They are not a struggling company. So why are they working so hard to defeat workers' efforts to form a union?

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) November 30, 2021