New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan’s effort to dodge a difficult vote against Big Tech has turned into its own political liability.

The bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act would bar major tech companies from favoring their own products on their platforms above competitors. Last week, according to a report in Politico, Hassan’s chief of staff Marc Goldberg joined the Senate’s weekly chief’s call and urged his colleagues not to push the bill forward to a vote, characterizing the move as risky in the face of upcoming midterm elections.

Goldberg’s remark, which was sourced to five people familiar with it, led to a tense exchange with the chief of staff for Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., the lead sponsor of the contested legislation.

On Tuesday, one of Hassan’s Republican opponents, Don Bolduc, used the incident to come after Hassan, undermining her claim that the vote was a political liability. “Pushing back against Big Tech is necessary to build American Strength back. @SenatorHassan continues to sell out to these companies by cowardly opposing bipartisan legislation that would hold sites like Google and Facebook accountable,” Bolduc tweeted.

The way that Washington works, it’s also impossible to know from what perspective Hassan’s aide was speaking. Goldberg also works on Hassan’s reelection campaign, specifically providing “campaign strategy services” to her fundraising committee, as well as “strategic and fundraising consulting services” to the Hassan-linked Granite Values PAC, according to Federal Election Commission records.

And Hassan’s campaign has been on the receiving end of contributions from numerous employees of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, including the maximum $5,800 from Amazon’s general counsel, David Zapolsky. On Wednesday, Zapolsky tweeted out a link to a new post on Amazon’s website decrying Klobuchar’s antitrust legislation.

Amazon’s blog pushes the recurring complaint that the reform unfairly targets just a handful of Big Tech companies and will threaten Amazon’s low prices and its popular fast delivery service, Amazon Prime. The warning touches on a sensitive issue for Democrats, especially those like Hassan who are up for reelection in swing states. Inflation is one of the biggest struggles voters are dealing with today, and it’s likely to influence their decisions come November.

Hassan won’t have to worry about provoking Amazon if the bill stays away from the Senate floor. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has said he plans to bring it for a floor vote in early summer, Axios reported, though Hassan and others looking to avoid the vote are hoping he’ll back off.

Neither Goldberg nor a spokesperson for Hassan responded to a request for comment.

The legislation faces fierce opposition behind the scenes, but when pressed to take a position in the daylight, most senators don’t want to be seen publicly siding with Big Tech.

Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., noted that the bill’s 16-6 bipartisan vote came after senators were forced to go on record. “Sen. Klobuchar worked overtime on this bipartisan bill, and a lot of the opposition to it melted, melted away,” he told The Intercept in April.

On Thursday, a coalition of 24 organizations — including Public Citizen, Our Revolution, and Greenpeace — urged Schumer to press ahead with the vote.

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On Tuesday, as news emerged of more and more elementary school children killed in a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said he would do “anything I can” to prevent it from happening again. Anything, that is, except reforming the filibuster. “The filibuster is the only thing that prevents us from total insanity. Total insanity,” he said, immediately deflating any hope for comprehensive gun reform.

But while Manchin has ruled out altering the filibuster rule to allow an up-or-down vote on gun-related legislation, some elements of gun violence prevention agenda would be eligible to move through the upper chamber under the rules of budget reconciliation, which only requires a simple majority vote.

Among those projects, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told The Intercept, are community-based programs that aim to interrupt potentially violent situations before they spiral out of control. And though the media focuses on tightening gun laws, Murphy said, communities wracked by violence are often more likely to speak out on behalf of such community-based interventions. Murphy represented Newtown, Connecticut, in Congress at the time of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that killed 20 children.

“The president’s original proposal had significant funding in it for $5 billion for anti-gun-violence initiatives, for community-based anti-violence programming,” Murphy noted to The Intercept. “Frankly when you spend time in places like the east side of Bridgeport or north end of Hartford [in Connecticut], that’s what people are looking for. They want tougher gun laws but they also want help reaching out and doing outreach to at-risk kids.”

Murphy said that the budget impacts of the program would make it plainly eligible for reconciliation. “Reconciliation clearly can be used for anti-gun violence programming,” he said. “And Senator Manchin, who is the key negotiator on the reconciliation package, cares deeply about the issue of gun violence. So I would hope that he would look favorably upon including some investments in gun violence.” Back in 2013, following Sandy Hook, Manchin co-sponsored an amendment with Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., that would have required background checks, a measure that had 90 percent approval among Americans. The amendment was rejected 54-46 in the Senate.

The type of programs Murphy is referring to aren’t flashy, but, he noted, they tend to have bipartisan support. But there is serious evidence that community-based interventions, if adequately funded, can be both life-changing and lifesaving. And they are endorsed by prominent gun safety groups. “The Biden-Harris administration understands that in order to build back better, we need to build up community-based programs designed to stop the shootings before they start,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, in a statement in November.

These programs seek to deter gun violence by identifying and intervening in the lives of people — mostly young men — who are at highest risk. Richmond, California, a blue-collar industrial town outside of San Francisco, is well known within the community policing world for its success in pioneering programs that radically brought down the gun homicide rate and reduced the use of deadly force by police officers.

In 2007, under the leadership of Green Party officials, the city set up the Office of Neighborhood Safety. The office, staffed largely by ex-convicts, worked closely with police, faith-based organizations, local businesses, and community groups to find men most at risk of committing violent crime, and provide them with mentoring, job training, and eventually, monthly cash stipends. In addition to stipends, ONS sponsors group trips to other major cities and to Mexico and South Africa. Rival gang members are paired together to see one another as human beings.

In tandem with ONS, Richmond reformed its police department with new deescalation training seminars and a push to integrate officers into everyday community events and organizations. The program appears to have had significant success. Six years after its launch, in 2013, Richmond had 16 homicides, which the Christian Science Monitor noted was the lowest number in 33 years for the city. Police violence also plummeted. The use of deadly force in Richmond was far lower than neighboring Oakland and San Pablo.

Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said that reconciliation was an available option for gun violence legislation. “Anything can be done through reconciliation, within reason. You have to deal with the parliamentarian and legalisms and so forth and so on. But it just seems to me that, given what’s going on in this country, we should use every tool available to pass the most serious gun safety legislation that we can. And we don’t have 60 votes,” he said.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said that negotiators previously explored reconciliation for wide swaths of the gun safety agenda but concluded that much of it would be ruled out of order by the parliamentarian.

The Senate’s reconciliation bill known as Build Back Better was spiked several months ago by Manchin, but is being revived in a pared-down form that focuses on using government buying power to drive down drug prices, rolling back some of the Trump tax cuts on the super rich, energy and climate subsidies, and deficit reduction.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., said earlier this week a handshake deal was possible by Monday, and Manchin, speaking from Davos, allowed that it was still alive. “I believe there’s an opportunity, a responsibility, an opportunity that we can do something,” he said.

Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock, and Jeanne Shaheen — up for reelection in Arizona, Georgia, and New Hampshire, respectively — each told The Intercept today they were hopeful that reconciliation would get back on track in order to pass drug pricing legislation before their competitive midterms. “As I travel around Arizona and meet with seniors, prescription drugs are so expensive. We should look for every opportunity to try to bring down the cost, whether it’s prescription drugs, energy, child care, other things. So we’re discussing multiple avenues for doing that,” Kelly said. “I’m always optimistic. Almost always.”

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Last summer, a group of Democrats organized by New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer derailed President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda by successfully decoupling it from a bipartisan infrastructure bill.

The group was dubbed the “Unbreakable Nine.”  The bill, known as the Build Back Better Act, was paid for in part by tax increases on the wealthy and on private equity, and was opposed by the dark-money group No Labels, funded by private equity moguls and the extreme rich.

Though the opposition was clearly related to the class interests of the super rich, the public-facing argument was that Build Back Better was too large and that it was dragging the party to the left, threatening its hold on power. “This Unbreakable Nine is showing America that we can still do amazing things,” said a national ad paid for by No Labels last summer.

Instead, voters are tossing them out.

By Tuesday night, three of those nine had been ousted in primaries, with a fourth having already quit Congress for K Street, and a fifth having second thoughts about the scheming. The Unbreakable Nine’s numbers are now dwindling, and after Tuesday’s races, they may be down to just four or five.

On Tuesday, Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux lost to Rep. Lucy McBath in a member-on-member race Georgia prompted by redistricting. And in Texas, as of this writing, Rep. Henry Cuellar is trailing his opponent, Jessica Cisneros.

McBath, whose 17-year-old son was shot and killed in 2012 in a dispute over loud music, first ran in 2018 in the Atlanta suburbs as a proponent of gun control with the support of Everytown for Gun Safety. Her son’s killer was acquitted under “stand your ground” laws. In her run against Bourdeaux, McBath benefited from an influx of spending by American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Democratic Majority for Israel, as well as Protect Our Future PAC, which is funded by crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.

Congratulations to Third Way honorary co-chair Lucy McBath. On this somber day of senseless tragedy and political cowardice, her voice has never been more important.

— Jim Kessler (@ThirdWayKessler) May 25, 2022

Last week, Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., was beaten, despite more than a million dollars in outside support from a super PAC linked to the pharmaceutical industry, along with another $1.5 million from a super PAC founded by Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman.

Though the races can be viewed through a progressive-centrist prism, Democratic primary voters are also famously fixated on electability — and it wasn’t always obvious that the centrist candidate was more electable. In Oregon, voters and local party officials regularly expressed concerns that Schrader’s ties to Big Pharma and his conspicuous votes in their favor would make him a general election liability. In Texas, voters were nervous about the FBI investigation clouding Cuellar’s future, though his longtime popularity may overcome those concerns.

Schrader, Cuellar, and Bourdeaux also may have torched their careers in vain. A pared-down version of Build Back Better is now being revived, with Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois saying Tuesday, “We’re going to get reconciliation done,” putting the chance of a handshake deal by Monday at 50/50. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., speaking from Davos (where else?), said that getting the bill done represented “a responsibility and opportunity that we can do something.”

Texas Democrat Filemon Vela announced last year he would retire from Congress at the end of his term, and then quit the House early in March so that he could join one of Washington’s largest law and corporate lobbying practices, Akin Gump. (By leaving in March 2022 rather than waiting until January 2023, Vela accelerates the one-to-two-year period before which he can legally lobby his colleagues by nearly a year. Until then, he can only provide “strategic advice” to corporate clients.) Vela’s resignation triggered a special election that Republicans could claim in June.

In a private meeting last summer with donors to the dark-money group No Labels, which financed the effort to kill the package, Gottheimer and Schrader celebrated their successful decoupling. “Let’s deal with the reconciliation later. Let’s pass that infrastructure package right now, and don’t get your hopes up that we’re going to spend trillions more of our kids’ and grandkids’ money that we don’t really have at this point,” Schrader said.

The strategy to ensure passage of Build Back Better by coupling it to the bipartisan infrastructure bill originated with Democratic leadership and was embraced by the White House, but it later became associated with the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which sought to implement the strategy by refusing to vote on one without the other.

After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in June that she wouldn’t move the infrastructure bill before reconciliation had moved through the Senate, Biden infuriated Republicans and centrist Democrats by backing her and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “I expect that in the coming months this summer, before the fiscal year is over, that we will have voted on this bill, the infrastructure bill, as well as voted on the budget resolution,” Biden told reporters. “But if only one comes to me, I’m not signing it. It’s in tandem.”

When Republicans reacted angrily, the White House stuck by the plan. “That hasn’t been a secret,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. “He hasn’t said it quietly. He hasn’t even whispered it. He said it very much out loud to all of you as we have said many times from here.”

Democratic leaders, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, were concerned that if the bipartisan infrastructure bill were signed into law, centrists in the House and Senate would bail on the rest of Biden’s agenda. Their fears, which turned out to be well-founded, stemmed largely from the influence of private equity and the pharmaceutical industry, both of which would be gently dinged to pay for the package.

Gottheimer’s gang responded by refusing to support either package unless they were decoupled, and the bloc was eventually able to win a promise to vote on the infrastructure bill by September 27. They used the intervening months to coordinate with Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., to undermine support for the reconciliation bill, and progressives were still refusing to support one without commitments toward the other.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus managed to delay the vote, and on October 1, Pelosi met privately with her broader caucus. Frustrated, she ripped Gottheimer’s nine in a scene recounted in Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns’s new book, “This Will Not Pass.”

“We read in the paper that there are members of our caucus joining with members of the Senate that reject the 3.5,” Pelosi said, referring to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. “The very same people who are demanding a vote on a certain day are making it impossible for us to have a vote on a certain day.”

Gottheimer’s gang had been texting, and their chain lit up. As Martin and Burns reported:

Carolyn Bourdeaux, the Georgia freshman, texted the other eight members of the Gottheimer-led moderate bloc before the meeting adjourned. “Oh dear lord this whole thing is going to collapse,” she wrote. Kurt Schrader, the Oregon centrist who had voted to keep Pelosi as Speaker because he saw her as a safeguard against the far left, wrote back in biting language. The former veterinarian had never intended to vote for a multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill at all. Pelosi’s claim was absurd. “Truly a terrible person,” Schrader said of the most powerful Democrat in the House.

The Unbreakable Nine eventually managed to split the two bills apart, and once the infrastructure bill was safely signed by the president, the centrists killed Build Back Better, as had been predicted and as had been the plan all along. Manchin pronounced it dead on Fox News in December.

At the height of the Unbreakable Nine’s effort to force Pelosi’s hand, Bourdeaux and another of the nine, Rep. Vicente González of Texas, were scheduled to appear in California at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser hosted by Pelosi. No Labels urged them to cancel, offering to raise $200,000 each to make up the lost revenue. Bourdeaux attended the fundraiser; González canceled.

With Build Back Better off the table, Biden’s approval rating nosedived. Centrists have taken to blaming progressives for demanding too much of the administration. Democratic voters, however, seem unimpressed by the Gottheimer group’s scheming.

Gottheimer does not face a primary challenge, but he may see a credible Republican opponent in the fall. The nine’s other three survivors are Ed Case of Hawaii, Jim Costa of California, and Jared Golden of Maine.

Golden was always an odd man out in the group, as his criticisms of Build Back Better were generally shared by progressives rather than the other eight obstructionists. He wanted a billionaire tax included in the package, demanded tougher drug pricing legislation, and opposed the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction giveaway. Unlike Vela, Golden has sponsored multiple efforts in the House to prevent former members of Congress from becoming federal lobbyists.

González is running in Vela’s old district, as his own was drawn to become more Republican, and he won his primary in March. Case has drawn a progressive primary challenger, Sergio Alcubilla, for an August election, but Alcubilla reported less than $10,000 cash on hand at the end of the most recent quarter; Case appears safe for now.

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Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman came to the rescue of embattled Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat who remains the party’s most strident foe of abortion rights, in the final stretch of a primary campaign that goes to the polls Tuesday.

On May 2, Politico reported that the Supreme Court had decided to strike down Roe v. Wade, injecting new urgency into the race between challenger Jessica Cisneros, who supports reproductive rights, and Cuellar. (The race headed to a runoff after neither reached the 50-percent threshold needed to end it in the first round in March.) That same day, fortunately for Cuellar, Hoffman’s political action committee Mainstream Democrats dropped its first expenditure for Cuellar, with just three weeks left in the race, spending $178,000 on a mailing to the district, using the firm Sisneros Strategies (no relation).

A week later, the PAC dropped $64,000 in digital ads and spent more than half a million dollars on television ads, bringing their three-week binge of Cuellar support to more than three-quarters of a million dollars.

Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, says he personally supports the right to abortion, but Cuellar’s is among just two other Democratic primaries his organization has weighed in on this cycle. The PAC spent $150,000 successfully opposing Nina Turner’s bid for Congress against Ohio Rep. Shontel Brown, and $1.5 million in what looks to have been a failed attempt to defend Rep. Kurt Schrader in Oregon.

Defending an opponent of abortion rights is a challenge in a Democratic primary, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court news, and the Hoffman PAC has squared the circle by suggesting that Cuellar is actually on the right side of the issue. The newest ad warns voters “with women’s rights under attack by extremists, Democrat Henry Cuellar has made it clear he opposes a ban on abortion. Let’s send Henry Cuellar back to Congress, so he can keep standing up for us.”

The ad bases the claim on a U.S. News and World Report story, written by the Associated Press, from May 4, 2022. The article in question, though, is headlined “House Leaders Stick With Rep. Cuellar Despite Abortion Stand.” The subheadline hits the same theme: “Just a day after Democrats recommitted to protecting abortion rights, a U.S. House leader on Wednesday campaigned in Texas alongside Rep. Henry Cuellar, one of the last anti-abortion Democrats in Congress.”

Rep. Jim Clyburn, the aforementioned Democratic leader, didn’t attempt to muddy the waters on Cuellar’s opposition to abortion and is quoted in the article as saying, “I would ask anybody, which is more important: to have a pro-life Democrat or an anti-abortion Republican? Because come November, that could very well be the choice in this district.”

Cuellar, in the same article, dismissed concerns that the draft opinion would undermine him in the campaign. “There’s always issues that come up,” Cuellar said. “Every time you have an election there’s always things that happen. You just go with your position and move on.”

(Another issue that “came up” for Cuellar was an FBI raid of his home and campaign office in January in connection with a federal investigation into foreign corruption. Cuellar’s attorney said in April that Cuellar was informed he was “not a target” and that he is cooperating fully, though the FBI has not officially cleared Cuellar of wrongdoing ahead of the runoff.)

So how does Hoffman’s PAC justify using that article to call Cuellar a defender of abortion rights? The AP notes that Cuellar felt the draft opinion overturning Roe “goes too far and that there must be exceptions in cases of rape, incest and dangers to the life of the mother.” Technically, then, Cuellar opposes a ban that does not make such exceptions, but he does support a ban. In 2021, Cuellar was the lone House Democrat to vote against codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law.

The race holds another draw for Hoffman, however; Cuellar is being challenged from the left by Justice Democrats-backed Jessica Cisneros. Hoffman’s camp argues that progressive ideas like a Green New Deal and Medicare for All and slogans like “Abolish ICE” or “Defund the police” are dragging the Democratic brand down and are not ultimately popular with either Democratic voters or the electorate at large — so it’s best to wipe them out in the primaries before they tar friendly, moderate Democrats.

Dmitri Mehlhorn, Hoffman’s top political adviser, told The Intercept that while Hoffman may be financially invested in defending Cuellar, he’s not personally invested. “Our money is going to the Mainstream Democrat coalition, which we trust to identify the candidates who are most likely to convey to Americans broadly an image of Democrats that is electable,” Mehlhorn said. “And if they chose Cuellar, then I trust them. I think Brian Goldsmith, Mark Mellman, they tend to know that stuff.”

Goldsmith is a media consultant; Mellman runs Democratic Majority for Israel, which similarly targets progressive Democrats, and is head of the polling firm the Mellman Group, which Mainstream Democrats uses for research and analysis. Federal campaign disclosure records show that Hoffman’s PAC shares an office and other services directly with DMFI.

Mehlhorn added that as a funder, Hoffman and the backers of the PAC provide general strategic guidance but don’t weigh in at a granular level. “This is another thing about being a funder in this space: All you can do is give guidance, talk to people, get a theory going. And the application may or may not be exactly what you would want, but that’s the theory that we operated with, in this case,” said Mehlhorn.

DMFI has not spent in support of Cuellar, but the super PAC put together by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has so far spent nearly $2 million in the race, nearly all of it on attack ads against Cisneros.

Hoffman’s intervention in the race comes as the faction is jockeying for position within the coalition and swapping accusations of blame for a coming midterm wipeout. Mehlhorn discussed the anti-progressive strategy with The Intercept. A version of the argument, known as “popularism,” argues that if candidates just run on messages that poll the highest, they will perform the best.

“If you look at America as a whole, and you want the fascists not to take power, what you need to do is trade a little bit of your enthusiasm in urban districts [and] transfer some of that enthusiasm and energy, just trade it for people who are actual swing voters who vote but make up their mind kind of at the last minute,” said Mehlhorn, arguing that defeating a candidate like Nina Turner in Ohio helps Democrats by preventing Fox News from using her to scare their base.

By backing a candidate like Turner, he said, “you’re going after the populist turnout by going for a populist, and you’re also handing a message that is going to motivate the shit out of the other side — because remember, they’re already amped to be motivated out of fear. If Nina Turner would have won that race, she would have been 20 percent of Sean Hannity’s chyrons out of the gate.”

Whether that’s true or not, Hoffman’s approach also relies on stacking the Democratic caucus with centrists who then actively work against the party’s legislative ambitions. Both Cuellar and Schrader were a key part of the so-called Unbreakable Nine organized by the dark-money group No Labels, with the intent of undermining the party leadership’s two-track strategy of passing President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act.

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Rep. Mondaire Jones ended a week of redistricting turmoil in the New York state delegation early Saturday morning with an announcement. Bullied by Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney out of his own slightly redrawn congressional district — the 17th, which covers Westchester and the lower Hudson Valley — Jones decided instead to run in the newly created 10th District, which covers parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

That decision sidesteps a primary against Rep. Jamaal Bowman, which Jones had been eyeing seriously and even polled last week. But it also sets up a contest for Jones in a district he’s never represented against former Mayor Bill de Blasio and a potential run from Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou, who told The Intercept she’s exploring the possibility.

Jones leaned into his status as the first queer Black member of Congress. “I have decided to run for another term in Congress in #NY10,” he said. “This is the birthplace of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. Since long before the Stonewall Uprising, queer people of color have sought refuge within its borders.”

I have decided to run for another term in Congress in #NY10. This is the birthplace of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. Since long before the Stonewall Uprising, queer people of color have sought refuge within its borders.

— Mondaire Jones (@MondaireJones) May 21, 2022

Underneath the district shuffling and refuge seeking is a dire warning for Democrats: Maloney is the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. His entire job is to make sure that Democrats hold their narrow House majority or else the Biden legislative agenda will be completely dead. When the new lines were released, Maloney’s district became one that Joe Biden had carried by 8 percentage points. Jumping into Jones’s district gave him just an extra 2-point advantage. The DCCC chair signaling nervousness about his own district is less than confidence inspiring.

Equally concerning, perhaps, was Jones’s reaction. The freshman member of Congress told allies that he wasn’t necessarily concerned about losing a primary to Maloney, as Jones is popular in the district with primary voters and would have had the full support of the party’s progressive wing. But his polling, he told multiple people late in the week, showed him narrowly trailing in the general election in what is shaping up to be a brutal election year. “That’s his concern, but we’re screwed if we lose Biden plus-10 seats,” said one Democratic member of Congress who spoke to Jones.

On Monday, after a New York judge threw out the congressional map drawn by the state legislature, a court-appointed special master released the preliminary outline of a new map. All hell broke loose.

Maloney was the first to storm out of those gates, announcing not long after the map was released that he’d be leaving his own district and running instead in the one represented by Jones.

While the process to draw these maps without the legislature is against the will of voters, if the newly-announced maps are finalized, I will run in New York's 17th Congressional District. NY-17 includes my home and many of the Hudson Valley communities I currently represent.

— Sean Patrick Maloney (@spmaloney) May 16, 2022

Maloney’s move may be the most brazenly selfish district hop in American political history. That’s not said lightly, given that Maloney is operating in an industry — politics — that is populated almost exclusively by some of the most craven, attention-seeking people in our society.

Jones did not appreciate it. “Sean Patrick Maloney did not even give me a heads up before he went on Twitter to make that announcement. And I think that tells you everything you need know about Sean Patrick Maloney,” he said.

Maloney’s district, which hugs the Hudson north of New York City, was slightly redrawn but still leans Democratic by at least 8 points and includes about three quarters of the 18th District he already represents. But Maloney’s own house was drawn into the 17th District.

There’s no law in New York that you have to live in the district you represent, and Maloney living nearby would be fine, especially since he’s well known there, having defeated a popular moderate Republican, Nan Hayworth, in 2012.

While the process to draw these maps without the legislature is against the will of voters, if the newly-announced maps are finalized, I will run in New York's 17th Congressional District. NY-17 includes my home and many of the Hudson Valley communities I currently represent.

— Sean Patrick Maloney (@spmaloney) May 16, 2022

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi threw her support behind Maloney, saying his move wouldn’t hurt Democratic prospects in the House. The only way that’s conceivable is if Pelosi and Maloney are confident he won’t actually have a primary.

Maloney didn’t want to primary Jones; he wanted Jones to step aside for him. When Jones’s staffer sent a Maloney staffer a pissed-off text message after Maloney’s announcement, the Maloney staffer shot back, “you guys live in 16 right?”

There’s an extraordinary amount of subtext in those texts. First, as the Jones aide notes, last year, Maloney was supporting a liquid natural gas project in Maloney’s district near a predominantly Black community; Jones had promised to oppose it during his campaign. Jones prepared a letter expressing opposition as one of his first acts in Congress, and Maloney exploded, a source familiar with the conflict said. That Jones’s staff hadn’t given Maloney a heads-up was considered a major breach of protocol on top of the substance of the opposition. Some Jones staffers feel that Maloney has held the grudge to this day.

And, yes, Jones technically lives in the new 16th, but he represents most of the 17th and has spent most of his life in the area. He was raised in the Village of Spring Valley by a single mother who cleaned houses in the district. He went through East Ramapo public schools, before going to Stanford and then Harvard Law School. When he was sworn in, he was the first openly gay Black member of Congress.

The reference to Jones living in the 16th is the DCCC chair’s hope that Jones would run there and challenge Squad member Jamaal Bowman, who is a Democrat in poor standing for having unseated an incumbent, former Foreign Affairs Chair Eliot Engel, a top ally of Israel in Congress.

Jones’s polling showed him narrowly trailing in the general election in the 17th District in what is shaping up to be a brutal election year.

According to sources familiar with Jones’s campaign strategy, he’s been preparing for a potential primary challenge with Bowman for the last year. He has regularly told donors that he needed to build up a war chest to be ready, though he didn’t say he wanted it to happen.

After the preliminary, court-drawn maps were proposed, voters in the 16th began seeing polls testing a race between Bowman and Jones. Bowman’s campaign was not running the poll, they told The Intercept. No similar poll in the 17th testing Jones against Maloney has been discovered. Multiple Democratic members of Congress who spoke with Jones before the survey results came back got the impression that he was leaning heavily toward challenging Bowman.

Bowman didn’t mince words in his statement on Thursday confirming that he’s running for his seat in the 16th.

But let’s also be clear about this: two Black men who worked hard to represent their communities, who fight hard for their constituents in Congress and advocate for dire needs in our communities should not be pitted against each other all because Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney wants to have a slightly easier district for himself. The Democratic Party should not tolerate or condone those who try to dismantle and tear down Black power in Congress. I’m proud that many of my Democratic colleagues have stood up and made clear that this is wrong, and I encourage more to do the same.

The solution is simple. Congressman Maloney should run in his own district. I’ll be running in mine.

Maloney dialed up the racial tension by having allies spread the idea that Jones was “ideologically better suited for another district.” That’s incorrect on the face: Jones won comfortably in a very competitive primary in 2020. Then in the general election Biden carried the district by 20 points, but Jones carried it by 24 points. That makes him more in step with the district than Biden.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, who represents the 15th District, mostly in the Bronx, slammed Maloney. “The thinly veiled racism here is profoundly disappointing,” he said, a statement made even more notable by the fact that Torres has been in an open war with the left for several years and was a close ally of Engel. “A black man is ideologically ill suited to represent a Westchester County District that he represents presently and won decisively in 2020? Outrageous.”

The thinly veiled racism here is profoundly disappointing.

A black man is ideologically ill suited to represent a Westchester County District that he represents presently and won decisively in 2020?

Outrageous. https://t.co/u56HjKbbO7

— Ritchie Torres (@RitchieTorres) May 18, 2022

Torres had his own motivation, though: He didn’t want Bowman jumping into his district.

With Jones’s own polling in the 17th District showing him slightly behind in a general election, a bruising and expensive primary against Maloney wouldn’t help those numbers. Jones also knew that Maloney would have endless resources. And if he beat Maloney, he’d then have to appeal for support in the general to the same organization Maloney now runs.

The alternative, running in the 16th against Bowman, was tantalizing. Jones had a much larger war chest than Bowman and could expect outside help, likely from the same pro-Israel groups that spent $2 million against Bowman in 2020. And the district is much safer, so winning the primary would lock in a seat in Congress.

Yet after the results of the Bowman-Jones survey came in, the offer started to look even worse, multiple Democrats who spoke with Jones said, and Jones’s interest in challenging Bowman began to wane. “He was jarred by whatever those Bowman numbers told him,” said one Democratic member of Congress who spoke to Jones.

The challenge to Bowman had little upside for Jones: In one scenario, the well-liked Bowman could plausibly fend Jones off, making Jones not just disloyal and opportunistic, but a loser. In the alternate scenario, Jones could beat Bowman, but it would be tarred by the fact that Jones had needlessly challenged a popular member of the Squad. His only route forward in politics would be further into the belly of the establishment. The party establishment, in the form of the DCCC chair, was offering permanent membership in the club, but Jones would have to prove his loyalty by handing over the district he fought for and heading off to execute his ally. For the rest of his career, he would know that what he had amassed was built on that decision, and his statewide or national aspirations might have a ceiling, as the progressive wing wouldn’t forget his betrayal.

Into this dilemma yawned the wide open New York 10th District, covering lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. Colleagues who spoke with Jones said he only began entertaining the possibility Friday morning. The final maps had been expected Friday afternoon but were pushed to Friday evening and then well into the night. Democrats were holding out hope that the special master would fix the situation in those final maps, drawing Maloney’s house back into the 18th District and Jones’s back into the 17th. It didn’t happen and surveying the new maps after midnight, Jones decided Manhattan would have to do.

The post DCCC Chair and Rep. Mondaire Jones Flee Blue Districts, a Bright-Red Warning for Democrats appeared first on The Intercept.

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The White House told The Intercept that it rejects the characterization of the war in Ukraine as a proxy war between the United States and Russia, an assertion recently advanced by Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., during a Fox News appearance. “We’re not just at war to support the Ukrainians. We’re fundamentally at war, although somewhat through a proxy, with Russia, and it’s important that we win,” Moulton said.

Asked if the White House shared Moulton’s view of the nature of the conflict, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates was blunt: “No,” said Bates in a statement to The Intercept. “President Biden has been clear that U.S. forces are not and will not engage in a conflict with Russia. We are supporting the Ukrainian people as they defend their country, which is exactly what President Biden told Putin we would do if he invaded.”

The question of whether the U.S. is fundamentally at war against Russia through a proxy in Ukraine was raised as well by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who was asked during a press conference what the U.S. considered a success in the war. He said that the goal was for “Ukraine [to] remain a sovereign country, a democratic country, able to protect its sovereign territory.” But, he added, “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Press secretary Jen Psaki later walked back the comments, saying Austin was talking about the U.S. objective to prevent Russia from taking over Ukraine and countries beyond it.

On Monday, President Joe Biden said he was worried that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been left without a way out of the war. But whether Putin has a way out depends to some extent on whether the U.S. is determined to wage a proxy war against Russia or whether the U.S. decides to push toward a negotiated end to the conflict launched by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

According to Ukrainska Pravda, sourcing its report to those close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the Ukrainian leader that even if Ukraine wanted to sign a peace deal, the West remained committed to confronting Russia. Biden’s own statements calling the war a genocide and for Putin to be tried for war crimes could also foreclose an easy exit.

When asked about the White House’s response, Moulton said “Whatever you want to call it, this is a new type of conflict and it is bigger than just Ukraine” and pointed to his op-ed for Fox News. “However this ends,” he writes, “we cannot make the mistake – again – of believing that Putin will stop here. We’re witnessing the first days of a new world order.”

The U.S. media and political class have been sending increasingly escalatory messages toward Russia in recent days. Moulton’s “fundamentally at war” comments followed a New York Times article in which government officials claimed credit for intelligence sharing that led to the killing of multiple Russian generals. That was followed the next day by a Washington Post article similarly claiming credit for the sinking of the Russian flagship Moskva. The Biden White House responded by saying that it was disturbed at the links and found them counterproductive. Which direction the heat travels, up or down, could determine whether we all end up dead and the planet left a nuclear wasteland.

Biden has been urging Congress for a quick infusion of $33 billion to fund Ukraine’s not-a-proxy war, agreeing to separate the package legislatively from Covid-19 relief so that the needs of the American people don’t slow down the war effort.

This isn’t the first clash that Moulton has had with Biden. Last year, Moulton called the withdrawal from Afghanistan a “disaster” — and the Biden administration heavily criticized Moulton for secretly freelancing his way into Afghanistan to survey the situation. “It’s as moronic as it is selfish,” an anonymous senior administration official told the Washington Post. “They’re taking seats away from Americans and at-risk Afghans — while putting our diplomats and service members at greater risk — so they can have a moment in front of the cameras.”

The post White House Rejects Rep. Seth Moulton’s Characterization of a “Proxy War” With Russia appeared first on The Intercept.

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Over the past several years, as the nation has reckoned with racism, misogyny, and other forms of bigotry, progressive institutions and campaigns have sought to construct mechanisms for resolving internal conflicts with an eye toward a more just society. The process of restorative justice shifts the focus away from mere punishment and retribution. It brings the victim and the perpetrator together in conversation, talking out why the aggrieved was wronged and how the assailant can take accountability before not just the person who was directly harmed, but also in some cases before the entire affected community.

Nobody was better positioned to model such a process than Brandy Brooks, a racial equity and environmental justice consultant running for an at-large seat on the Montgomery County Council in Maryland. She’s the founder and CEO of Radical Solutions LLC, a consulting firm that offers “training, coaching and consulting for progressive organizing leaders who are working on multiracial, cross-class, movement-building electoral and issue campaigns.” The firm’s “focus [is] on supporting and centering the leadership of women and femmes of color.”

On March 14, Brooks learned that she herself was the subject of a complaint of a hostile work environment from a member of her campaign staff. What made the process feel especially difficult — but also resolvable through a restorative justice process — was the source of the complaint: a person she considered a longtime close friend. We’ll call them Sam.

Serving on the county council is a serious job — its nine members set policy for a county of roughly a million residents — but bordering a city that serves as the world’s power center, it is not, without being unkind, a position that Washington’s power brokers spend much time thinking about. Still, it would be a foot in the door for the rising democratic socialist movement in the area, positioning Brooks for a future run for county executive, a statewide position, or even Congress. She was a contender from the start, having run previously in 2018. The top four finishers in the Democratic primary go on to win council seats, and she fell 1.5 percentage points short, or less than 6,000 votes, of making the cut.

In 2020, as Brooks explored a second campaign for a council seat in the well-to-do suburb of Washington, D.C., she naturally turned to her closest friends and family to form a “kitchen cabinet” of advisers. First among them were her sister and mother, followed by Sam.

Sam, who uses they/them pronouns, is, like Brandy, a fixture of the MoCo activist scene. They have worked for local labor unions for years, and served on the steering committees of both the MoCo chapter of Democratic Socialists of America and the umbrella chapter, Metro D.C. DSA. Brandy, a tenants rights activist in addition to her work as a racial and environmental justice consultant, first met Sam in 2017 and developed a close friendship beginning in 2018. Sam volunteered for Brandy’s 2018 campaign, while working professionally for a county executive candidate. (Though they spoke publicly at a widely attended DSA meeting, Sam asked the Washington Post not to use their name. The Intercept reached Sam, but they declined multiple opportunities to be interviewed, and we’re also not publishing their name. Brooks’s recollections are central to this article, but The Intercept reviewed all key documents and messages and talked to multiple people who knew them both.)

“They’ve just been really super, super close friends, and even like playful physical close friends,” said one mutual friend of Brandy and Sam, who asked to remain anonymous because of the fraught situation.

The Campaign

In December 2021, Sam told Brandy they were excited to fill out the questionnaire for the DSA endorsement. The region’s DSA chapters have quickly built themselves into a political force through the dint of their shoe-leather work on behalf of candidates they support: phone banking, door knocking, and otherwise putting in crucial volunteer hours in races often decided by just a few thousand votes. Given Sam’s standing in the organization, and the fact that Brandy was also a member, the endorsement was a slam dunk.

With Sam’s help, Brandy put together an unusually broad coalition for a democratic socialist. She earned the backing of the powerful Montgomery County Education Association; CASA Action, an immigrant rights group; and Jews United for Justice. The small campaign staff quickly formed a union, with Sam serving as shop steward.

Text messages the two exchanged over the years provide a window into the type of witty banter mixed with emotional connection that characterizes so many friendships forged in the political world, whether it was rehashing a day trip to the beach at Sandy Point State Park on the Chesapeake Bay, or joking about reality TV shows or movies they both watched, or gossiping about other local political figures.

Brooks shared years’ worth of the messages with The Intercept on the condition that Sam’s not be reproduced. Tracing them through the years, it would be hard for an outside reader to distinguish between when Sam was on the campaign as an unpaid member of the kitchen cabinet (starting in December 2020), a part-time deputy campaign manager (June 2021), and a full-time deputy campaign manager (January 2022). The banter and emotional depth remained roughly the same, with ups and downs.

In the fall, a plumbing leak kept Brandy out of her home for six weeks, and she went through an emotionally rough patch. Sam invited Brandy during that time for a day trip to Sugarloaf Mountain in western Maryland, but the day before it, Brandy offered Sam an out, telling them she was feeling down and was “not going to be engaging or fun company.”

Brandy suggested instead that they just play board games in her hotel. “I’m kind of in that mode where I want to talk with someone else deeply about the hard things in our lives and cry together and hold hands and just be really vulnerable with one another. And I want to respect that might not be your vision of how you want to spend Sunday afternoon,” she said in a text that later appeared in the Washington Post.

Sam bowed out, and Brandy invited over a female friend for the type of evening she was looking for: tears, hand-holding, and self-exploration. That Sunday night, just after midnight — technically Monday morning — Sam reached back out to start a long conversation about the virtues of wool dryer balls.

Sam later said — to the Washington Post and others — that they understood the request for mutual crying and hand-holding as an unwanted romantic advance. Without invalidating Sam’s perspective, a mutual friend said that she had seen Brandy say similar things to people of all genders, not meant in a romantic way. “That’s how she interacts with her very close friends, and I felt it was really taken out of context,” the friend said.

As the head of the campaign, she had suggested something inappropriate either way, Brandy has since acknowledged. That the relationship was already unprofessional is not in dispute, and Sam hadn’t even joined the campaign full-time yet.

That happened in January, and the two also talked about a potential job in the event of a victory. “Either I asked or they indicated that they would have an interest in working in my council office and I was like, ‘OK, what kind of things would you be interested in doing?’ And they talked about doing policy work, which is what they were doing on the campaign already. And we talked about the position of chief of staff, and we talked a little bit about this, and I said, ‘Yeah, you know, I would definitely be interested in exploring this with you. And we should keep talking about this,’” Brandy said. “And that was our conversation, maybe 15 minutes.”

On January 18, Brandy and Sam talked about how working together full time would affect their friendship, with Brandy lamenting they’d be able to spend much less time together socially.

Sam agreed with the concerns and cautioned that they should remember that the campaign was temporary but their friendship would endure, Brandy said — a sentiment that is confirmed and repeated in messages they exchanged.

After nearly two years of a pandemic, the mood in the campaign office was warm and close, people on the campaign told The Intercept, and the closeness between Brandy and Sam was often on display. “We would goof around and joke and laugh and make memes and be sarcastic with each other,” Brandy said. Sam “had a stuffed animal that we would toss around and play with and they would make faces at me with. And as good friends also do, we hugged each other. They gave me back rubs.”

“And then there are also things that in the face of a campaign environment, when you’re in that kind of proximity, where we would be sitting really close, next to each other — and neither of us would move away from that situation.”

On January 24, Brandy and Sam had lunch at a Chipotle in Rockville, a check-in that evolved into one of their long discussions that ranged widely from the personal to political to emotional to professional and back again.

“We were talking about being glad that we’re friends with each other, and that we can talk and have these deeper conversations. And one of the things that I said is, it’s often harder for me to be in emotionally vulnerable relationships, because I feel a lot of vulnerability and a lot of anxiety about that. And then I also said, I think that’s increased, unfortunately, in cases where I experience romantic and sexual attraction.”

In context, it was clear she was talking about Sam, and she instantly wished she could take it back. “I regretted it as immediately as I said it, because it wasn’t planned. It was something I blurted out. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is like, not the time or place for this conversation.’ And then I kind of tried to shut down that part of the conversation and move on to other stuff, because I felt really embarrassed that I had said it.” Brandy asked Sam not to respond and changed the subject.

In hindsight, she said, giving voice to her feelings flowed from her approach to relationships. “One of the things that I try to do is be really intentional in my friendships and my working relationships. And when there’s an issue or a thing going on, to try and name it,” she said. “I didn’t know if they knew [my feelings] or not. I think I had a thought that they might, especially with some of the kinds of contacts that we both exchanged in the office.”

She never went beyond merely sharing her feelings and never asked Sam out nor otherwise made any physical advance. “I fully knew they were in a relationship with someone else. I wasn’t asking them to not be in that relationship. I wasn’t asking them to be in a relationship with me. I wasn’t asking them to have any kind of sexual contact with me,” she said.

As she reflected on their relationship, realizing things had crossed a line, Brandy told Sam they needed to draw boundaries — that the professional and social blend needed to be filtered out.

They set up time to talk on February 7. “I think maybe we need to consider our relationship more of a comradeship, where it’s about the work and we that value each other as organizers and we have so much we want to accomplish in the public realm. Maybe the personal stuff just isn’t the right fit,” Brandy recalls telling Sam. They also communicated by text about the same idea.

Sam pushed back, Brandy recalled. “They said they didn’t like that binary, that they blended friendship and working relationships and didn’t want to separate it.” Indeed, blending friendship and working relationships is a central component of progressive organizations such as DSA, where happy hours, canvassing, and phone-banking are all social as well as political activities. Successful community building can hardly be done absent socializing, and all successful movements have been cauldrons in which lifelong friendships and other relationships are forged. But they have also been the birthplace of animosities that can last for generations.

A few days later, on February 11, Sam responded, saying they no longer wanted Brandy to communicate with them outside of work. To Brandy, it looked like Sam was wounded by her attempt to draw a boundary and responded by drawing a firmer and brighter one. But Sam also routinely broke it, sending memes and other missives to Brandy at off hours. Brandy said she abided by the agreement, but said it seemed like Sam was only honoring it when they felt like it.

According to Brandy, she told Sam that the firm boundary married with frequent incursions across it felt like a “betrayal of trust” — another phrase that would later appear in the Washington Post. After Sam sent Brandy and Michelle Whittaker, Brandy’s sister and campaign manager, a goofy meme after 8:00 p.m. one evening, Brandy reminded them of the boundary they had drawn. Brooks said Sam apologized and thanked her for the reminder. “I indicated to them that I wasn’t OK with setting this really hard boundary, which felt really hard and hurtful to me, and then continuing to try and engage me emotionally in a way that felt really good. They were trying to use my emotions, but not be in a mutual relationship with me. And so it felt like a betrayal of our friendship.”

More hourslong, emotionally fraught conversations followed. In one, Brandy talked about her tortured relationship with men or people who present as masculine, and Sam told her that suggesting they presented as masculine “wasn’t affirming of their gender identity.” Brandy apologized.

The next day, in another long conversation, Brandy again said that they needed to stick to professional boundaries. According to Brandy, Sam asked two questions. First, did she regret hiring them? And second, was the chief of staff job still on the table?

To the first, Brandy said absolutely not. Sam is a well-regarded and well-connected organizer in Montgomery County, and the work they’d done to bring endorsers on board the campaign had helped build the broad-based coalition behind Brandy that was poised to elect the first countywide democratic socialist representative in the contemporary era.

To the second question, she recalled saying, “I don’t know. It was a question before, I think it would be an even bigger question, given how difficult these last few weeks have been for us. So it’s something that we would have to really talk about, before we made that decision.” This answer has since become central to a public indictment of Brooks, who is accused of rescinding a job offer in retaliation for a staff member rejecting her romantic advances. But Brandy said she had never made a firm job offer and also never took it off the table.

“I didn’t say, ‘No, you can’t have this,’” she said. “At no point during this was their current job in jeopardy.”

Hope for a Just Resolution

On March 14, Sam came to Whittaker, Brandy’s sister and campaign manager, to make a complaint of a hostile work environment. Whittaker asked if they wanted to file a formal complaint, and they said no. Whittaker took steps to cease contact between Brandy and Sam and recommended mediation to them both.

They both agreed, and the campaign brought on the Conflict Resolution Center of Montgomery County to mediate two sessions. The pair came to an agreement, one they both signed, which rested on Brandy drafting an “accountability statement” that she would read to her full staff and kitchen cabinet — only after Sam had approved it.

Versions of restorative justice have roots in a variety of Indigenous cultures on multiple continents, but in the contemporary era in North America it began percolating around the 1970s. Mediation, conversation, and accountability are at the core of restorative justice. Progressive institutions, meanwhile, are badly in need of more effective and more just conflict-resolution mechanisms in an era of increasing hostility and toxicity amid a crisis of mental health. The movement is attempting to reconcile sometimes competing values: On the one hand, the abolition of prison and the deconstruction of the carceral state, a radical move away from strictly punitive or retributive justice. On the other hand, an all-out assault on racism, misogyny, and other forms of bigotry — a crusade that, in its more vulgar form, is derided as cancel culture. Restorative justice offers the promise of reconciling those two values, while also allowing communities to emerge from conflict and crisis stronger and healthier, rather than riven with animosities or left with a feeling that one party was wronged.

Mediation gave both Sam and Brandy a space to share the ways in which they felt they had been harmed by the other, and it was a place where Brandy was able to see from the perspective of Sam the way she had put them in an untenable situation by not immediately drawing professional boundaries. Whether those boundaries ought to have been drawn when Sam joined as a kitchen cabinet informal adviser, or later when they came on as part-time staff, the conclusion was clear: The interactions had been inappropriate, and Brandy took responsibility.

It seemed like the kind of thing a sophisticated progressive movement invested in the concept of restorative justice could handle through good-faith mediation.

The sessions helped Brandy craft her statement of accountability. At the second mediation, Brandy read a draft of her statement to Sam, who told her, according to Brandy, that it was beyond what they had expected, and they accepted it without amendments. The two jointly signed a mediation agreement on March 22, 2022. “[Sam] and Brandy Brooks agree to keep mediation discussion and written products confidential except for a limited circle of close advisers,” reads the agreement. “[Sam] affirms that the campaign and Brandy Brooks handled this situation in good faith with a clear intention of restorative justice and will not make any further requests of Brandy Brooks or the campaign pertaining to the complaint of March 14.”

She read it aloud to staff on March 26. “Brandy spoke for a grueling 10 minutes about how sorry she was,” said one of the roughly nine staffers in the room.

“One person cried. Everyone else who made a comment put it in chat and thanked her for a transparent process. [Sam] then said thank you everyone for coming together and listening to this.”

Brandy shared the statement with me, wanting to counter the charges that were circulating about her handling of the situation, and it is shared below — minus a bullet that involves Sam’s personnel records and a portion that is deeply private to Brooks, the inclusion of which was unnecessary to make its point. “This is a deeply personal document, meant to be shared in confidence with my close community,” she said. “I’m sharing it now because of how thoroughly the letter and spirit of the mediation agreement has been broken by the other party, and to be clear how seriously I took my responsibility to be accountable.”

Over the past 15 months, since the end of December 2020, I have been working with friends and colleagues to build out my campaign. One of those colleagues, who I consulted and engaged in the process from the outset, [Sam] was a non-binary socialist and labor organizer who also lives in the County. [Sam] and I first met each other in 2017 during my first run for office, and in 2018 began a personal friendship as well. I invited [Sam] to be part of my Kitchen Cabinet in December 2020, and hired them as a staff in the spring of 2021.

On Monday, March 14, 2022, [Sam] outlined for Michelle documentation of a harmful workplace environment caused by me. Michelle informed me of the issues raised and immediately made arrangements around campaign meetings and work activities so that [Sam] and I had no further contact with one another. It is my understanding that Michelle suggested voluntary mediation to [Sam] as an option for seeking to resolve the situation and that [Sam] consented to voluntary mediation; Michelle also made the same recommendation to me, and I accepted. That same day, Michelle contacted the Conflict Resolution Center of Montgomery County to handle our mediation.

The following agreements resulted from our mediation sessions on March 18 and March 21:

• Brandy and [Sam] will not communicate without a 3rd party present, and will only discuss professional issues for the next 12 months at least.
• Brandy Brooks will convene a meeting of her staff and kitchen cabinet at which she will read in full the statement shared with [Sam] in mediation, without amendment.
• [Sam], if able, will attend that meeting.
• Brandy Brooks will also be responsible for seeking to ensure all staff and kitchen cabinet attend the original meeting, or, failing that, a follow up meeting, with [Sam] notified and in attendance.
• Brandy Brooks will share a copy of her statement with [Sam] in pdf format, via email, with Michelle Whittaker copied.
• [Sam] and Brandy Brooks agree to keep mediation discussion and written products confidential except for a limited circle of close advisers.
• [Sam] affirms that the campaign and Brandy Brooks handled this situation in good faith with a clear intention of restorative justice and will not make any further requests of Brandy Brooks or the campaign pertaining to the complaint of March 14.

Per these agreements and my own desire to pursue a healing process for both [Sam] and myself, this statement shares my accountability for the workplace incidents that led [Sam] to experiencing sexual harassment.

I made a grave error in not putting an immediate stop to the escalating pattern between [Sam] and me of exchanging physical affection in the workplace. It is clear now, and ought to have been manifestly clear to me at the time as a supervisor responsible for the wellbeing of my employees, that this behavior should have been halted; it was my responsibility as a supervisor to do so. In addition to creating a damaging pattern between a supervisor and an employee, where power dynamics and lack of full consent could not help but to be experienced by [Sam], it was also creating deep emotional confusion and distress for me.

Although I was aware of the fact that these interactions were resulting in feelings of romantic and sexual attraction that I did not feel were healthy, as well as the fact that I was repeatedly welcoming of these interactions and unwilling to stop them, the powerful emotional validation that these interactions provided became an overriding need, and I continued to both permit and engage in them.

In many aspects of my life, I consistently struggle with the belief that I am not good enough — not worth being loved, listened to, or followed. The extreme public vulnerability of running for office exacerbates these fears; while at surface levels I am able to project a high degree of confidence and sometimes actually believe in myself and my leadership, I have not conquered these fears at their root. They most frequently manifest as regular self-doubt with periodic bouts of depression and suicidal ideation, but in this case the harm was externalized through my relationship with [Sam].

Beyond our physical interactions, [Sam] and I also engaged in deeply personal conversations outside and inside the workplace. These conversations included discussion of our perspectives on childbearing, our relationships to our parents and friends, and our dating histories and current dating situations. These conversations occurred in personal social contexts on the phone on nights and weekends or while riding public transit together after work; however, there were also conversations that occurred as social chat during canvassing events and deeper conversations during mentorship meetings in the office. In particular, a conversation on January 24 clearly crossed boundary lines by combining a performance check-in, deeply personal conversations held in a highly public setting, physical contact, and a confession of romantic and sexual feelings; regardless of intent, this conversation constituted sexual harassment.

It’s impossible to state how deeply I regret these interactions. Reflecting on them grieves me deeply. The actions I both took and failed to take have resulted in the destruction of both a deeply valued professional relationship and a friendship that was important to me, and both of those losses are profound. I have expressed my deep regret to [Sam] directly in mediation, and I apologize for how I have caused them harm.

This experience has led me to understand how clearly and deeply gendered trauma from past familial and other relationships continues to impact me. It’s something that I had recognized as impacting romantic relationships, but failed to recognize how it could operate within professional relationships — and especially a supervisory relationship — to create an extremely toxic dynamic. I was also very naïve about how power and privilege dynamics around positional and perceived power, age, gender identity and expression, and sexuality all remain operative in a workplace, regardless of how close a friendship existed prior to the employment relationship or how collaborative a work culture we sought to create within the campaign.

It’s difficult not to simply respond to all of this with shame and self-loathing. However, I believe that shame and self-loathing from a sense of past abandonment due to my perception that I am not worth enough for people to love me are the root of how we got to this situation, and resolution requires a different path. To start, I acknowledge the seriousness of this trauma and its impacts on me and others, and I will take the following actions and precautions:

• I will refrain from physical contact with staff members, with the exception of my mother and sister, regardless of any personal relationships we may have outside of the office.
• During the remainder of the campaign, with the exception of my sister and mother, I will not discuss any sensitive personal issues with staff members or with volunteers outside of my Kitchen Cabinet and Sanity Circle.
• If I wish to discuss sensitive personal issues pertaining to my emotional or mental health, my experience of romantic and sexual relationships, my gender trauma, or any topic that invites emotional intimacy with any members of my Kitchen Cabinet or my Sanity Circle, I need to inform them of the nature of the conversation in advance and ask for their express consent.
• I will share this document with my staff, active Kitchen Cabinet members, and Sanity Circle members.

I do not believe that people who have committed sexual harassment are irredeemable or unfit for leadership. Trauma affects each of us in many ways, and I believe in trauma-informed practice with the goal of healing and restoration, not casting people out of the community. I believe the keys to this are:

1. Creating ways for people to be honest and reflective, without shame, about the traumas they have experienced and the impacts that those traumas have had and continue to have on themselves and others;
2. Creating restorative justice spaces where people can acknowledge, be accountable for, and repair harms they have done without fearing that such acknowledgement will automatically result in them being removed from or shunned by their communities (personal or professional);
3. Ongoing community training around trauma-informed and restorative justice practices within communities so that we know how to create and hold these spaces and shift from existing models of retribution and throwing people away.

This is what I wish to create and model for myself and for others. It feels particularly important for me because of the way that anti-Blackness operates in our willingness to recognize people’s trauma and support them in navigating it rather than punishing and discarding them. Black people are automatically considered by our society to be dangerous and criminal in their character. This manifests in a wide variety of ways, including but not limited to: fearing to raise issues or offer critical feedback to Black people in the workplace; requiring Black people to exhibit perfect behavior in order to be worthy of support and punishing them more severely than others who exhibit damaging behavior; and reducing Black people to their worst moments or faults. Black people are also often treated as if they do not experience harm or pain, whether physical or emotional, at a severity that may account for either their struggles to show up or their need for support.

Additionally, when it comes to Black women’s sexuality, they are either expected to be asexual carers (the “Mammy” stereotype) or, if they display sexuality, considered an immoral seductress (the “Jezebel” stereotype). The mere existence of Black women’s bodies and sexuality are regarded as problematic unless they are tightly controlled and only accessed as others deem beneficial to them — regardless of the cost to the woman herself. I name these things because I believe that they both impacted the development of this situation and may impact people’s response to this document, and I want us to be honest when that is showing up.

These are complex, incredibly challenging conversations that are ultimately about us fighting against oppression on multiple fronts. They are not easy, and I don’t know how well we will accomplish restorative justice in this case. But I hope that this process offers us all some insight about what our collective liberation can look like.

Shortly afterward, Brandy and the campaign began to field calls from people who had endorsed her, or others in the progressive community, saying they had heard damning stories about her behavior on the campaign, specifically that she was offering jobs to staff in exchange for sexual favors, and retaliating when the overtures were rejected. Montgomery County’s rumor mill was running wild, and Brandy tried to tamp down the speculation.

Sam, meanwhile, stepped away from the campaign, according to campaign sources. Brandy, citing personnel rules, wouldn’t discuss the departure. “When we first entered mediation, I’d hoped we could find a way to continue working together. To not only lose a close friend but also a key staff member was very hard, for me personally and for the campaign,” Brooks said.

On the night of April 7, a Thursday, Brandy’s campaign learned that the local Jews United for Justice chapter was discussing the situation and considering dropping their endorsement. The next day, Brandy called her endorsers to let them know as much as she could: There had been a complaint of a hostile workplace environment, and it had been resolved in mediation.

On Saturday, April 9, Brandy got a call from a member of the Metro D.C. DSA steering committee, its leadership body, inviting her to join a call on Tuesday, April 12, to respond to what they said were disturbing allegations they’d been hearing.

That Monday, Brandy did a second reading of her accountability statement to two kitchen cabinet members who had missed the first meeting. Sam was present for that too and told Brandy afterward that the statement was no longer acceptable and more accountability was needed. Brandy said she offered to reenter mediation, but Sam told her the only way they’d do so would be if Brandy withdrew completely from the race. It’s an open question what, exactly, prompted Sam’s change of heart, but Brandy calling her endorsers to tamp down the rumor mill may have played a role. Brandy said Sam couched her departure from the campaign not as a demand but simply a necessity. “I’m not asking you to do this, I’m just saying this is the only way,” was the posture, according to Brandy.

Dropping out, Brandy responded, was not an option, for a number of reasons, including her faith that her campaign was best positioned to serve the million people of Montgomery County she would represent. Beyond that, the campaign was publicly financed to the tune of $175,000 from local taxpayers. Ending the campaign early would mean Brandy would be personally on the hook for that amount, plus interest.

A Show Trial

Brooks was told on Tuesday evening at the DSA chapter meeting that the steering committee would vote soon on whether to unendorse her campaign, and would halt work on her behalf for the time being. The committee told her it was aware of evidence that she had confessed to sexual harassment — presumably a reference to her accountability statement — and Brooks again took responsibility for what she had done but denied actively seeking sex or retaliating in any way. Losing their ground support would be hard, Brooks knew, and a public denunciation would be difficult to overcome. “Out of respect for the privacy of those who informed us, and in accordance with mediated agreements, we cannot provide additional detail, but want to affirm that the evidence gave us significant concern,” a statement Metro DC DSA would release on April 14 explained.

Our full statement on the Brandy Brooks campaign: https://t.co/Yloo91c6kY pic.twitter.com/O0LQDSm6V9

— Metro DC DSA (@mdc_dsa) April 14, 2022

On Wednesday, DSA convened a meeting of other local progressive organizations — including Jews United for Justice and CASA Action, the immigrant rights group, among others — which some of those who attended saw as an attempt to organize a mass rescinding of the endorsement. “The purpose of the meeting was to inform our coalition partners that we were beginning our unendorsement process, and explaining what that looked like as a membership organization. It was not to get everyone on board with unendorsing at the same time, as Metro DC DSA had not yet made that decision,” said Carl Roberts, a spokesperson for Metro D.C. DSA.

Brooks’s campaign posted a statement Wednesday afternoon saying that “increasingly inaccurate and malicious reports of my behavior are spreading within our community,” a reference to rumors that Brandy was attempting to trade job offers for sexual favors.

Starting today, I am taking a period of two weeks to care for myself and reflect with my trusted advisors about an ongoing issue.

My team and I are seeking to be as transparent as possible in light of this sensitive personnel matter. You can reach out via email or phone. pic.twitter.com/PpqR6RihgR

— Brandy Brooks for County Council (@brandy4moco) April 13, 2022

The next day, DSA put forward a resolution to unendorse Brooks, arguing that the only way for her to be held accountable was for her to end her campaign. “Whereas,” reads the resolution, “evidence has been brought forward that while an internal campaign mediation process was undertaken in an attempt to seek accountability from the candidate for the harm caused, the outcomes of the process were insufficient and it is our belief that true accountability cannot occur amidst an ongoing campaign for office.”

A steering committee meeting was held that evening to discuss the resolution. Sam spoke at the steering committee meeting, laying out the allegations. One attendee asked by chat if Brandy, as a long-serving DSA member, was entitled to due process. “Endorsement is a privilege, not a right of membership,” a steering committee member said in response. Brandy was not so privileged.

From the time DSA first reached out to Brandy and the time they called for her to end her campaign, five days had elapsed.

Much of the public condemnation of Brooks was organized around the straightforward power dynamic at work between a boss and an employee. While the dynamic was painted as black and white in this instance, in others, the left has been able to construct increasingly sophisticated power maps that get at the gradations of power differentials at play in different relationships. Race and gender are significant factors, yet there’s no evidence DSA examined the potential for implicit bias at work against Brandy or in the favor of Sam.

“We’re disappointed to now see her twist the language of abolition and restorative justice to try to deflect from her actions,” DSA’s public statement read.

“My work to be vulnerable and accountable and transparent, and show up the way that we want our leaders show up, absolutely got weaponized,” Brooks said.

While it’s true Brandy was Sam’s employer and admitted to creating a hostile workplace for them, the power dynamics aren’t as straightforward as a rigorous boss-employee analysis would conclude. If power is considered to be held by the person who can destroy, and therefore exert control over, the other without harming themselves, the well-connected senior staffer on a short-term campaign for a relatively unknown candidate holds significant power. As the liaison between the campaign and outside endorsers, and as a high-level activist in both the MCO and Metro DSA chapters, Sam held in their hands the power to control the narrative around what happened, likely dooming the campaign, and to heavily influence Brandy’s personal and professional reputation in the long run. Sam would have known that as a Black woman, Brandy would face a much more hostile public as she attempted to move forward from any scandal. And while Brandy indeed held employment sway over Sam through the primary on July 19, or through the general election in November, Sam, given their relationships, quickly landed a new job.

That the dynamic between the two on the campaign was inappropriate isn’t in dispute. But in real-time and in hindsight, it seemed like the kind of thing a sophisticated progressive movement invested in the concept of restorative justice could handle through good-faith mediation. Indeed, if something like this can’t be resolved through such a process, what can? Instead, Brooks’s agreement to enter mediation became the very evidence against her and formed the foundation of the DSA’s resolution for unendorsement. “I cannot emphasize enough that Brandy Brooks admitted to sexually harassing her employee in a meeting before her entire staff. Those facts are not in dispute,” posted one DSA member who co-sponsored the resolution on Twitter.

“My work to be vulnerable and accountable and transparent, and show up the way that we want our leaders show up, absolutely got weaponized,” Brooks said. “There’s a lot here that has to do with how we weaponize Black women’s emotions and bodies all the time. And when I think about why it’s so hard for women and people of color, for Black women in particular, to decide to step into these leadership spaces, it’s this. This claim is being made, that for six months, someone was in a nonconsensual social relationship with me. And what that claim implies is that not only am I responsible for any actions that I took, but that I’m responsible for every call and text and action and touch that they made. Because I somehow forced them to do it. And it made me think about the stereotypes, these cultural stereotypes that we have about Black women, and there’s this way that I’m being cast as this Jezebel, with voodoo power to compel people to take actions that they don’t, that they aren’t in control of, and don’t have responsibility for. And it’s such a combination of terrible, awful stereotypes that are weaponized against Black women that it almost takes my breath away.”

Enter the Washington Post

The next day, the Washington Post entered the fray, with a story by Rebecca Tan, a former Vox writer, headlined, “Brandy Brooks pauses campaign amid sexual harassment allegations.”

The story was immediately devastating to Brooks’s campaign. In fact, only one allegation had been leveled:

Brandy H.M. Brooks, a progressive activist running for Montgomery County Council, is taking a two-week break from her campaign amid allegations that she sexually harassed a member of her campaign staff. She said she behaved inappropriately with an employee but denied perpetuating a “pattern of sexual harassment.” She says she does not plan to withdraw from the election.

Brooks, 45, said she told a full-time paid member of her campaign staff that she had a “romantic and sexual attraction” to them in January, adding at the time that she did not want them to respond because she wasn’t ready to be rejected.

The now former employee, who is 27 and uses they/them pronouns, said Brooks’s behavior continued for months and that Brooks eventually told them that she did not know if they could continue working together, though she had earlier indicated that if elected, she would consider them for her chief of staff. …

“For her to say there’s no pattern is completely false,” said the former employee. “This was a pattern of abuse and manipulation that centered about sexual harassment.”

The Post had interviewed Brooks and had access to her accountability statement and the mediation agreement showing Sam had initially found the agreement acceptable. In survivor justice circles, a “pattern of sexual harassment” is understood to mean multiple accusers, though only one was quoted anonymously in the article. (In insisting on a “pattern,” Sam, quoted in the Post, accuses Brandy of a pattern of behavior toward them, not a pattern toward multiple people.)

The Post, which leaned heavily into their age differential of 45 and 27, including it in the second paragraph, referenced Brandy’s text in October, while Sam was part-time, offering to cancel the Sugarloaf trip if Sam wasn’t in the mood for an overly emotional day. Readers of the Post would no doubt have found the text disturbing out of the context of their yearslong close relationship, evidence the Post referenced only fleetingly, writing, “The former employee had been friends with Brooks since 2018 and was among the first people she asked to join her campaign last year.”

The article embedded DSA’s full statement against Brandy and made multiple references to power dynamics, while omitting the reality that Sam was a longtime figure in both the MoCo DSA chapter and the regional umbrella. Instead, DSA’s response was presented as merely the concerns of those committed to social justice.

The Post also made much of Sam’s claim that losing the chief of staff job amounted to retaliation. But Brandy thoroughly denied rescinding the offer. There had never been a firm offer, merely the willingness to entertain the possibility. When approached by Sam again, she had continued to insist that it remained a possibility, if a more distant one. The accountability statement that Sam signed off on as more than sufficient included no reference whatsoever to retaliation.

“When we entered mediation I had hoped one of the outcomes would be finding a way for us to continue working together,” she said.

At a public DSA member meeting on April 21, Sam spoke again, thanking everyone for their support and noted that even “elected officials” had reached out to support them. “[Sam] has hated all the elected officials forever. That was the first time [Sam] has ever spoken positively about them,” said one DSA member, a supporter of Brandy’s who joined the call. “There’s a reason they’re reaching out to [Sam]. They’re running for office.”

One member, noting that he had done employment law previously, said that he was concerned about the process and wanted more evidence in order to make a decision. He was cut off. “How dare you ask who the aggrieved person is?” a former Brandy staffer and ally of Sam’s cut in. “The evidence is all there in the Washington Post article.”

Nobody spoke on Brandy’s behalf.

On April 25, the Post weighed in again: “Brandy Brooks says she has no plans to withdraw Montgomery council bid.” This time, the Post called organizations and prominent people who had endorsed her and asked if they would be distancing themselves. The Post even pressured a renters group she’s part of, though the group told the Post they weren’t weighing in:

Brooks, a longtime tenant, continues to serve as a board member at the Montgomery County Renters Alliance, executive director Matt Losak said. The harassment allegations, he added, are “an issue between her and her campaign.”

The Post also referenced the mediation agreement. “Brooks, in turn, has accused the employee of violating the terms of a mediation agreement that they both signed earlier this year. (They said they have not.),” the paper reported.

On the night of April 25, DSA’s vote concluded, and the chapter overwhelmingly moved to unendorse Brooks, saying in a statement:

The vote followed multiple internal discussions in the chapter that began after the Steering Committee was notified on April 9 of credible allegations of sexual harassment and retaliation by Brandy Brooks towards one of her former campaign employees. We were also informed that Brandy walked back the accountability process that the campaign had internally set up. The Steering Committee met with Brandy Brooks on April 12 where she did not deny the allegations. Following this meeting, a Washington Post article was released on April 15 where Brandy is quoted confirming the allegations of sexual harassment and professional retaliation against the aggrieved party, including the rescinding of a job offer.

Those claims are either contested or untrue. Mediation documents show the process was completed to the satisfaction of both parties. Brooks did not “confirm the allegation” of “professional retaliation” in the Washington Post and continues to deny the charge. If DSA has evidence to the contrary, the organization has not presented it.

Jews United for Justice has suspended its campaigning for Brooks, and the local teachers union, which had endorsed Brooks, unendorsed her this week. CASA Action rescinded its endorsement. DSA has never explained how “Brandy walked back the accountability process,” nor has it presented evidence to back up the vague claim.

The campaign against Brandy continues. On April 26, a local activist emailed Sam’s defunct campaign account, which automatically forwarded the missive to the main campaign inbox. “If you get a sec, could you give me a call?” the activist asked. “Just want to get straight on future options vis-a-vis Brandy.”

Future options for Brandy, at the moment, appear increasingly foreclosed, as the public condemnation has not just hampered what looked to be a front-running campaign, but has badly damaged other areas of her professional and personal life. What future options Sam is considering against Brandy remain unclear. “What exactly is the definition of ‘accountability’ and ‘restorative justice’ that such efforts would be based on?” Brandy wondered.

DSA declined to comment, referring instead to its public statement announcing the unendorsement. “We are proud to be part of such a strong democratic organization,” the statement reads, “with clear processes for both endorsement and the revocation of endorsement.”

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On Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders will visit Amazon workers at a Staten Island sorting center, known as LDJ5, who will vote soon on whether or not to join their comrades across the street in organizing into a union.

Their neighbors’ victory at the JFK8 warehouse earlier this month shocked the corporate world. And while Democrats have been faceplanting in Congress, the Amazon victory by a ragtag crew with just $120,000 from GoFundMe has raised the question of what value there really is in electoral politics. Should people just focus on building power for a base of working people instead, and abandon the duopoly?

A closer look at how Chris Smalls — who led the organizing effort after being fired from Amazon — and his allies put this win together, and are threatening to win again soon, shows that you actually can’t have mass organizing without electoral victories. The two very much work together, not as an either/or.

One of Joe Biden’s most aggressive appointments as president was naming Jennifer Abruzzo general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. With pushes to make unionizing significantly easier, she might be the only person that bothers the Wall Street Journal editorial board more than Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.

In December, under pressure, Amazon agreed to a critical settlement with the NLRB, in which they agreed to allow workers to organize inside their facilities, just not on the shop floor.

“This settlement agreement provides a crucial commitment from Amazon to millions of its workers across the United States that it will not interfere with their right to act collectively to improve their workplace by forming a union or taking other collective action,” said Abruzzo in a statement at the time.

President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement talks a big game about being pro-worker, but when it came to their material and economic interests in the form of unionizing, they were nowhere to be seen. Trump’s NLRB absolutely would not have reached this settlement with Amazon.

Trump’s NLRB absolutely would not have reached this settlement with Amazon.

Distinguishing it from a Big Labor-led union drive, the Amazon Labor Union, or ALU, effort was driven by workers and former workers, who had access to the facility that professional organizers lack. Smalls said their ability to organize inside the plant was key to their success. “They try to install that fear into these workers, they try to tell them that they talk to us, they get fired,” Chris Smalls told Jordan Chariton of Status Coup. “But the difference is this is completely worker-led. These workers that are on the inside get that information in real time. And that right there has been a huge success for us.”

During a union drive by professional organizers at a Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, Amazon hired union-busters who would walk the shop floor and talk to workers, telling them how awful unions are. The initial vote, which was prior to the NLRB settlement, failed. A redo is still being counted but looks bad for the union. In Staten Island, workers were able to fight back by exposing them from the get-go.

As HuffPost reported, they created flyers identifying the most prolific union-busters in the warehouse, listing where they’re based (typically far away), and how much money they had earned on union-busting campaigns. They would put stacks of the flyers in break rooms throughout the facility so everyone would see them and know how much Amazon was spending to fly anti-union consultants in from around the country.

Conor Spence, an Amazon worker, told HuffPost’s Dave Jamieson he would follow consultants around the warehouse, handing workers copies of their Labor Department filings that showed their $300-per-hour fees. It was an extremely powerful tactic, he said. If it was worth it to Amazon to pay somebody that much to convince workers not to join a union, the union must be pretty powerful.

Spence also told Jamieson that there was one extremely effective female consultant who would chat the male workers up: “All the guys in her department were in love with her,” he said. The men defended her when union organizers called her out. But when they produced copies of her disclosure filings showing she had made nearly $20,000 for just one week of union-busting, they felt betrayed.

Outside the warehouse, the Smalls crew set up tents where they’d feed workers lunch, help them with any issues they were having, talk shop, hang out, and even share weed. Amazon complained to the NLRB about the free pot, but ALU’s lawyer defended it as no different than passing out T-shirts, as far as labor law was concerned.

Without that work inside the warehouse, and without all the organizing in that tent outside the warehouse, there’s simply no way they could have successfully organized the union. And without the NLRB forcing Amazon to allow that organizing to take place, that organizing wouldn’t have been able to happen.

None of this would be a surprise to Eugene V. Debs, the legendary Gilded Age railroad union organizer. The massive worker uprisings from the 1870s to 1890s were ruthlessly crushed not just by bosses, but by bosses working hand in hand with National Guard troops and police forces. Only with the New Deal did the state become either neutral or supportive of organizing. In 1936, when Ford workers engaged in a sit-down strike, the company appealed to the federal government to help them break the strike. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Ford that it was their problem and to go work it out. FDR didn’t help, but by not crushing the workers, he gave them the chance to win, and they did. In the 1980s, that reversed, with President Ronald Reagan actively siding with companies to crush unions.

So it’s not that electing Democrats magically brings about a union movement or will get your own workplace unionized. But what it did here was give the workers a fair shot.

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Progressive congressional candidates are waking up to a new variable that is upending the electoral calculus of races across the country: cryptocurrency. Some candidates are finding it advantageous to take crypto-sympathetic positions, while others are facing an onslaught of crypto spending that is reshaping their primaries.

In a 2021 special election, former state Sen. Nina Turner faced more than $2 million in outside spending by the super PAC Democratic Majority for Israel, swinging the race for Shontel Brown in the closing weeks. In her rematch, Turner faces a new obstacle. A super PAC bankrolled by crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, Protect Our Future, has already spent more than $1 million backing Brown, according to Federal Election Commission reports. And this week, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC endorsed Brown after having backed Turner last year.

In Oregon’s newly drawn 6th District, a handful of local candidates were vying for the nomination before Carrick Flynn barreled into the race with an ungodly amount of support from Bankman-Fried’s super PAC.

So far, the super PAC backing Flynn has dropped some $6 million on the sleepy race, followed by a startling $1 million cash infusion on the part of House Majority PAC, the super PAC linked to House Democrats themselves. In the process, they have undercut multiple progressive candidates — three of them women of color — with deep roots in the area and political bases of support that would make them formidable general election opponents. (House Majority PAC did not respond to a request for comment.)

The party’s intervention was met with a rare joint statement from the field, which condemned the intervention “at a time when the cryptocurrency industry seeks to increase its influence in Washington.”

The candidates raised the question of whether they were witnessing the result of a quid pro quo, suggesting that the source of the $1 million to HMP must want something in exchange. “With so much needed to defend the House, how can they afford involvement in a primary? Why is this happening? Where is this money coming from? And what does its source want in exchange?”

So much crypto is flooding into campaigns that the surge in Oregon’s 6th threatens to wash out a crypto bro already running in the race. Cody Reynolds explained to Willamette Week that after four previously failed attempts at federal office, he developed a new strategy and set out to work in the crypto world, hoping to translate new wealth into political power. “Before, I naively thought I could do that with ideas and passion,” Reynolds said, “but the political system is no longer a marketplace of ideas. It’s also about reach and money.” Reynolds loaned his new campaign $2 million to get off the ground.

In a normal year, the district — which leans Democratic by 6 points — would be a relatively comfortable blue seat. But in a year with headwinds for Democrats, the seat is very much in play. And while millions in crypto can power a candidate through a little-watched primary, the general election is a different story, particularly against a well-funded Republican able to blast his opponent as a tool of the crypto industry. In other words, according to Democratic operatives from the area, House Majority PAC may well be spending heavily to support the candidate who will ultimately make the weakest general election candidate.

The 2011 Citizens United decision, implemented on a 5-4 party-line vote, legalized the spending of unlimited money in congressional campaigns. The result — an explosion of cynicism that has threatened democracy itself — was predictable, even if the pace of collapse has been surprising. For the last generation, progressive candidates looking to challenge the Democratic power center knew they had to run a gauntlet of obstacles, most of them connected to the big-money interests they were up against.

Some have run the gauntlet by simply saying yes to the crypto agenda. State Rep. Jasmine Crockett, running in a Texas district to replace Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, had no history as either an outspoken advocate for crypto or an opponent of regulation but facing the question in the campaign, she sided with the policy positions favored by crypto PACs. The two major crypto super PACs came in with $1 million each, helping to put her over the top.

Protect Our Future PAC, the one linked to Bankman-Fried, has also spent $2 million boosting Georgia Rep. Lucy McBath in her member-on-member contest forced by redistricting. The PAC is also backing Nikki Budzinski in Illinois and has endorsed New York Rep. Ritchie Torres, a crypto supporter.

One of the most outspoken Democratic critics of crypto in Congress is California Rep. Brad Sherman. This cycle, he’s being challenged by Aarika Rhodes, a school teacher organizing her entire campaign around the defense of crypto and opposition to Sherman’s critical approach, and has drawn support from crypto advocates. Whether the spending against Sherman will unseat him or not, other incumbents and challengers are observing the dynamic: Opposition to crypto risks an onslaught from the industry, and support of crypto invites a tsunami of supportive spending.

Yet the reverse is not true: Opposition to crypto is not rewarded by any organized constituency, and support of crypto is not punished by any organized constituency. That type of asymmetry has long shaped niche policy debates in Washington. Supporters of agricultural subsidies, for instance, spend heavily to get their issue noticed, but there is little in the way of organized opposition to those subsidies — because nobody cares enough — so the subsidies sail through Congress.

It’s also reminiscent of a previous relationship Democrats built with a constituency that could be by turns hostile or supportive. In the early 1980s, as Democrats transitioned toward big-dollar corporate fundraising, the party eyed Wall Street cash in ways that both parallel the relationship with crypto and in some ways are fundamentally different. Prior to the S&L crisis of the late 1980s, banking had become a boring industry, one that didn’t attract much public ire. Whereas unions would object to Democrats getting in bed with auto industry executives, and environmental groups would complain about polluting industries, there was little political cost in taking money from the banking industry.

Similarly, the public might be broadly skeptical of the path crypto is on, with increased skepticism among progressive voters, but it’s not an issue that competes in importance against health care, wages, climate change, or civil rights. What could go wrong?

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Former Austin City Council Member Greg Casar is within striking distance of a first round knockout in his Democratic congressional primary on March 1, according to a new survey by Public Policy Polling. The poll, which surveyed 520 likely Democratic voters in Texas’s 35th District — stretching from Austin to San Antonio — from February 18 to 19, was paid for by the Working Families Party and Justice Democrats, both of which have endorsed Casar in the primary. United We Dream Action, a pro-immigrant organization, also chipped in for the poll.

The results put Casar at 42 percent, shy of the 50 needed to end the primary in the first round, but well ahead of his closest competitor, state Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, who sits at 13 percent. A third of voters in the poll remained undecided, meaning that if a quarter of those break Casar’s way, he should be able to win on March 1. A Casar poll from early December put the former council member up by 42-17 percent over Rodriguez. In the final week of the primary, Working Families Party and Justice Democrats are launching a new ad boosting Casar, aiming to end the contest in a single round.

New ad going up for Greg Casar in Texas's 35th, from Working Families Party and Justice Democrats. Polling has him within striking distance of a first round knockout next week. Story soon. pic.twitter.com/c098k9Lne4

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) February 22, 2022

If Casar comes in under 50 percent, a runoff will be held on May 24, giving outside money nearly two months to take down the frontrunner. Casar has the backing of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as well as more establishment figures like former gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, who backed Hillary Clinton for president, and the Texas AFL-CIO.

Casar was elected to Austin City Council in 2014, with a general background in activism and a specific focus on immigrant rights. He’s been a controversial figure on the council, a leading progressive who successfully championed reallocating some of the police budget to social services and clashing with the police union. An effort to overturn the move by the local GOP and the police union — lumping it in with other “defund the police” efforts across the country — was ultimately unsuccessful at the ballot, losing by more than 2-to-1.

Another high-profile effort Casar led was ultimately rejected by voters. Casar pushed for the city to lift its ban on the use of tents by homeless people in Austin, and as soon as the new law went into place, encampments sprang up around the city. A backlash ensued and voters overturned the law, banning tents again. Casar’s more moderate opponents have painted him as the poster child for Democratic excess, coming at a time of extreme self-doubt and finger-pointing among Democratic leaders.

Casar, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, recently tangled with the group over his refusal to support a boycott of Israel over its ongoing and expanding occupation of Palestinian territory, and his pledge not to support cutting off U.S. funding to the country. Rather than changing his pledge, Casar withdrew his request for the DSA’s endorsement.

The outside group Democratic Majority for Israel has pledged to spend big money to stop progressive candidates from winning primaries. In the wake of Casar’s pledge, DMFI has not endorsed against him — an example of the ways big money can influence politics not only by spending, but sometimes only with the threat of the spending. Last summer, DMFI pumped $2 million into Shontel Brown’s Democratic primary campaign against Nina Turner in Ohio, fueling a narrow, come-from-behind win.

Voters too have so far shown relatively little enthusiasm for Casar’s competitors. Rodriguez, his closest rival, serves in the Texas House of Representatives, but his campaign has largely failed to catch fire, with the survey showing him losing support since December. Rodriguez has raised roughly half as much money as Casar. Rebecca Viagrán, a former San Antonio city council member, has similarly not caught on. She sat at 9 percent in the poll shared with The Intercept Tuesday.

Along the border, more attention is being paid to the race between Rep. Henry Cuellar and insurgent Jessica Cisneros, who lost to Cuellar by 4 percentage points last cycle. Cuellar’s home was recently raided by the FBI as part of a probe into Azerbaijani corruption. In the wake of the raid, a bizarre bot network formed to rally to Cuellar’s defense.

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House Democratic leaders indicated today that they are moving forward with legislation aimed at banning members of Congress from trading stocks, a sharp reversal from their years of previous support for the practice. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has reportedly dropped her opposition to the effort, opening the way for a bill this year.

Wide majorities have long considered it ridiculous that members of Congress are able to own and trade stocks even as they have the power to move the prices of those stocks with legislative action or inaction. After multiple trading scandals, Congress required disclosure of ownership and trades, though members frequently flout the rules.

Pelosi may simply be bowing to the inevitable and caving to broad public pressure, but there was a specific, internal push that may have made a difference: a discharge petition in the works from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

A House rule allows 218 members who sign such a petition to force a bill onto the floor for a vote. Last week, Ocasio-Cortez got that process started by filing a bill banning member stock trades with the Rules Committee filled with requirements that would make the committee very unlikely to pass it. The resolution would have required an immediate floor vote on the bill and barred amendments.

After seven legislative days without action, a discharge petition can be requested and filed, and today — Wednesday — was the seventh legislative day. Ocasio-Cortez’s move was aimed at putting pressure on Pelosi’s office not to simply ignore the issue and instead to push forward her own version of the legislation — a version that would be less onerous for members.

Pressure has steadily been building to ban members of Congress from owning and trading stocks. In 2020, sitting Georgia Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue came under scrutiny for stock trades. Loeffler was among a small group of senators who allegedly used special knowledge afforded by their positions to make trades (Loeffler has denied this), while Perdue, a prolific trader, made what have been called “well-timed” stock trades at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Both lost reelection. Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., is also under investigation for selling stock in the hospitality industry in March 2020.

Pelosi, one of the House’s wealthiest members, has long been dug in, however. “No,” she said simply when asked in mid-December if members should be banned from trading. “This is a free market.”

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sensed an opening in the Democratic resistance and has said that he would move to ban trading if Republicans take over the House majority. On January 20, Pelosi opened up to the possibility of a ban. “I just don’t buy into it, but if members want to do that, I’m OK with that,” she said.

On February 1, Ocasio-Cortez introduced her resolution with the Rules Committee.

The underlying bill, written by Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., and joined by Ocasio-Cortez and others, does not include a ban on the spouses of members trading stocks, though a spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez said she supports adding that restriction. The bill does ban senior congressional aides from trading stocks.

Legislation in the Senate introduced by Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., does ban spouses from trading. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., has also introduced a ban.

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On the night of December 16, 2010, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dialed President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. The Democrats had been shellacked in the midterms a bit over a month earlier, and Republicans were set to take over the House in just two weeks. That meant two weeks to finish what they could of Obama’s legislative agenda, and Reid and the White House had conflicting priorities. Obama wanted to see the Senate approve the New START Treaty, a nuclear arms reduction pact Obama had struck with Russia. Reid, meanwhile, wanted to see how far he could get with two other issues: repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which barred gay, lesbian, and bisexual people from serving openly, and taking a run at the DREAM Act, which would confer a path to citizenship to people who’d been brought to the country illegally as children.

The DREAM Act was struggling, but Reid saw a path to “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal and told Obama that he planned to put it on the floor. Obama made a strong case against it, convinced that it would fail and derail the remainder of the lame-duck agenda. It was a familiar argument from some of his advisers — that losing on one issue was contagious and would infect the rest of the agenda, and therefore it was better to put “points on the board” with certain victories. The DREAM Act was scheduled for a vote on the same day as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and the thought of two losses was just too much to bear. Reid heard him out before delivering his response. “Well, Mr. President, sometimes you just gotta roll the dice,” Reid said, and hung up, leaving Obama with the dial tone that routinely signaled his conversations with Reid were over.

When Reid saw an opening, he took it. Reid told me he promised the president that he’d also do what he could to get the treaty approved. “I told the president, I understand how important the START Treaty is, and I’ll do everything I can to help with that. But I said, I’m going to go ahead and ‘roll the dice,’ exact words, ‘roll the dice,’ on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ I said, I think it should turn out well for both of us, but I’m rolling the dice. It turned out well for both of us,” Reid said. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal was successful and the New START Treaty was approved, though the DREAM Act died.

Still, it was necessary for the DREAM Act to die for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, to live. The lame-duck showdown illuminated the gap between Obama’s cautious, high-minded approach to politics — we must not potentially, theoretically jeopardize the ratification of a nuclear disarmament treaty extension! — and Reid’s willingness to, in his words, roll the dice. But it might not entirely explain to people who came of political age after Reid’s heyday what a consequential figure he was. The repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” removed a key obstacle to marriage equality, paving the way for the Supreme Court to bless it in 2015. Had he failed to move in that moment, it’s impossible to see the subsequent Republican Congress take action, which then makes it extraordinarily difficult for the Supreme Court to rule the way it did. But consequential as that roll of the dice was, a Reid cynic could dismiss it as getting ahead of a culture war victory that was only a matter of time.

Pointing to his two signature legislative accomplishments — the Affordable Care Act and Wall Street reform, which included the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — can be similarly unsatisfying. Reid’s true accomplishment was in what he stopped from happening — combating conventional wisdom to save Social Security and Medicare and stave off an extreme round of austerity — and the way in which his confrontational approach reshaped elements of the Democratic Party in the coming years. That all of it wasn’t enough to reshape the country is a testament to the narrow possibilities available to any party leadership figure in such a desiccated political environment. But it’s also, in some part, at the feet of Reid, as he worked hard in the Nevada 2016 Democratic presidential caucus to suppress the very energy he had organized and helped unleash. Reid died after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer on December 28, retired, at the age of 82. After a private service in Nevada on Saturday, Reid will lie in state in the U.S. Capitol.

Following Reid’s death, Obama released a letter he had recently sent to Reid demonstrating that he still had calls like that one from 2010 on his mind. “I got the news that the health situation has taken a rough turn, and that it’s hard to talk on the phone,” Obama wrote. “Which, let’s face it, is not that big of a change cause you never liked to talk on the phone anyway!” In truth, Reid spent much of his day on the phone and knew the numbers of his Democratic colleagues by heart, checking in with all of them frequently. He just wasn’t one for small talk.

“That was a courtesy call,” said Faiz Shakir, a former senior aide to Reid who went on to manage the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020, on the latest episode of Deconstructed. Once Reid had settled on a legislative strategy, he was determined to see it through.

“I wouldn’t have got most of what I got done without your skill and determination,” Obama continued. Harry Reid was, ultimately, the man with the courage of Obama’s convictions.

In 1840, William Henry Harrison — Ol’ Tippecanoe — made his humble upbringing in a log cabin central to his presidential campaign, just as Abraham Lincoln would 20 years later. If anything, their legendarily impoverished childhoods would have been an upgrade for a young Harry Reid, whose home had no indoor toilet or hot water. When his brother Larry broke his leg, he screamed for days, unable to get medical treatment, recalled Ari Rabin-Havt, a former aide who did research for Reid’s memoir, on the most recent episode of Deconstructed. When a mentor gave Reid a $50 bill to cover the cost of taking the bar exam, it was the first time he had held that much money in his hand. At 14, Reid and his brother Larry finally attacked their father, a miner, to defend their mother against his repeated drunken assaults. When his father killed himself, Reid was called to the home, finding his father’s dead hand still holding the gun.

Reid’s childhood produced in him a hostility toward wealthy elites that he clung to until his dying days, yet that did not prevent him from wanting to become an insider. He chose to go to law school at George Washington University, and of all the places he could have worked to pay his way through, he chose the U.S. Capitol, becoming a police officer there.

Back in Nevada, he became the town attorney for Henderson and then, still in his 20s, won election to the Nevada Legislature. By 30, he was lieutenant governor. In 1974, the Watergate wave year, he tried to parlay that into a Senate seat but lost by less than 1,000 votes.

His run for Las Vegas mayor the next year was also unsuccessful, leading to his stint instead as chair of the gaming commission. Even there, his tenure is more complicated than the Eliot Ness, crime-fighter image that has since emerged. The FBI captured audio of mobsters claiming to have Reid under their thumb, and in his famous, later cinematically portrayed public confrontation with Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, he admitted to asking Rosenthal to help bury an unfavorable story. Reid himself wore a wire to take down a mobster trying to bribe him, and later a bomb was found under the hood of his car.

By 1982, with Nevada getting a second House seat, he won the district covering Las Vegas. Four years later, he finally won his first Senate race. Burrowing even deeper inside, he rose through the ranks of Senate Democratic leadership, ultimately coming out on top in 2005.

It’s hard to contemplate the scale of the destruction the former Senate majority leader averted for the simple fact that he averted it.

After arriving in Washington, Reid’s career largely consisted of defending gains amid retreat. Following the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004, the invigorated president declared bluntly that he had collected new political capital, and he intended to spend it on privatizing Social Security.

Bush proposed allowing workers to divert their Social Security tax money to Wall Street, in a complicated scheme that would have enriched the latter and impoverished the former. In Washington, the media clamored at its highest pitch for Democrats to get serious and offer their own counterproposal. That was how Washington was supposed to work. Rahm Emanuel, then a congressional representative from Illinois, floated a plan that would create private retirement accounts but would be separate from Social Security, but that was the kind of thing progressives warned would be the camel’s nose under the tent of Social Security.

But Reid was the new minority leader of the Senate Democratic caucus, and he and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi took an unusual tack for Democrats, accustomed by the last 40 years of retreat to compromise and preserve as many of the gains made under the New Deal as possible. They simply said no. They had no counteroffer. “President Bush should forget about privatizing Social Security,” Reid told reporters on Capitol Hill. “It will not happen — and the sooner he comes to that realization, the better off we are.”

Conventional wisdom said that this was not just a losing strategy but was also deeply irresponsible — and the press didn’t let up. Wall Street titan and Nixon administration alumnus Peter Peterson had spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeding Washington with austerity propaganda, and a large chunk of the Senate Democratic caucus, stacked with far more conservative members than today, had already called for “reforms” to Social Security. If a single one publicly broke with Reid’s strategy and sat down with Republicans to negotiate, it could have created a jailbreak.

The troops deployed by Reid were the nascent Netroots, a blogosphere of activists and writers dedicated to stiffening the spines of Democrats, many of whom had risen to prominence in the midst of Howard Dean’s challenge for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. Reid didn’t understand how this community worked — he called it “The Blog,” according to his longtime lieutenant Susan McCue — but he understood its potential.

Reid brought in Rabin-Havt and later Josh Orton, who had roots in the blogosphere and liberal talk radio, to bring him closer to it, fueling one of the most consequential political evolutions in a generation. (Both Orton and Rabin-Havt went on to work for Sanders.) Reid began regular conference calls with bloggers during which the lines were open, producing a genuine give-and-take. State-based blogs had started to spring up, but the national blogosphere had yet to fully flesh itself out. The site Talking Points Memo was in its infancy and a hub of activity, tracking the fight relentlessly.

When Reid got word that a Democratic senator was going wobbly and thinking of hearing Bush out, his staff would let the bloggers know, they’d write about it, and then the senator’s office would be flooded by phone calls and they’d quickly get back in line.

“I knew the strength of that networking was just starting, and I felt I should be in in the beginning rather than try to jump in in the middle.”

In 2006, the first national blogger convention, called Yearly Kos, was held not coincidentally in Las Vegas, and Reid gave the keynote address. “I remember I was at the first Daily Kos conference. I frankly — let’s see, how to phrase this? — I didn’t fully understand the impact, but I knew the strength of that networking was just starting, and I felt I should be in in the beginning rather than try to jump in in the middle,” Reid told me. I asked Reid why he was able to evolve with the time politically while many of his colleagues remained stuck in the 1980s. “First of all, I had a wonderful staff who was very — I listened to them,” he said. “My thought process changed on many different issues.”

The more the public learned about Bush’s scheme to privatize Social Security, the less popular it became, and he ultimately admitted defeat and shelved it. It was the beginning of his political collapse. Followed by scandals related to his mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, corruption, and chaos in Iraq, it led to a Democratic sweep of Congress, making Reid majority leader — a position he held until 2015, when chaos in Iraq would again flip control of the Senate.

Reid did not fall backward into the leadership of a Senate supermajority with Obama in the White House; he had methodically put into place each piece, beginning with the president. In the fall of 2006, Reid and his longtime friend Judy Hill, who did upkeep on his home in Searchlight, Nevada, were in Reid’s living room when Hill spotted a Time magazine graced with then-Sen. Obama’s image. That man, said Hill, should be our next president. “Good choice,” Reid told her, Hill says, clearly indicating with his smile that Obama was his pick too. Hill nearly fainted when Obama called her on her cellphone from the White House to thank her for her early lobbying of Reid. Reid’s payoff for his endorsement of Obama was a promise that Yucca Mountain in Nevada would never be used as a nuclear waste storage dump, and Obama followed through, naming a Reid aide to run the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Yet during the fight over the Affordable Care Act, Reid was often battling the White House as much as his conservative flank. After the election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts cost Senate Democrats their 60-vote supermajority, Reid turned toward the budget reconciliation process to get Obama’s health care law done. That way, it only needed 50 votes to pass, which meant a public health insurance option was also back on the table, despite the White House hostility to it.

In the House, Reps. Jared Polis and Chellie Pingree began circulating a letter calling for the Senate to add a public option through reconciliation. The blogosphere hounded House members until more than 100 signed on. Polis enlisted the support of Sen. Michael Bennet, a first-term Democrat from Polis’s home state of Colorado facing pressure from a progressive primary challenger and in need of some cred. New York’s first-term Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand also signed on, her first big break in the Senate with her Blue Dog roots in the House. With first-term Sen. Jeff Merkley and sophomore Sen. Sherrod Brown, the four put out a Senate version of the Pingree-Polis letter.

The effort caught fire in the Senate, where more than 40 senators eventually made the commitment and more than 50 said they would vote for it if it were on the floor.

The letter gave despondent grassroots Democrats something to organize around, and they began calling their senators and members of Congress and demanding that they sign the letter. As names piled up, the new endorsements created new stories, articles that then fed the outside activism.

As the number of senators joining the effort expanded, it generated leadership support, with Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez getting behind it. With genuine momentum behind the public option, Harry Reid was the next to jump on board.

“Senator Reid has always and continues to support the public option as a way to drive down costs and create competition,” read a statement his office put out Friday, February 19, 2010. “That is why he included the measure in his original health care proposal. If a decision is made to use reconciliation to advance health care, Senator Reid will work with the White House, the House, and members of his caucus in an effort to craft a public option that can overcome procedural obstacles and secure enough votes.”

The White House didn’t appreciate the new energy. A few hours after Reid’s office put out its statement in support of the public option, Obama’s chief of staff, former Rep. Emanuel, met senior Reid aide Jim Manley and a few reporters from the Washington Post and the New York Times for dinner and drinks at Lola’s, a Capitol Hill bar and grill. Seeing Manley, Emanuel offered a response to Reid’s gesture with one of his own: a double-bird, an eerie sight given his severed right finger.

As the final details of the bill were being worked out, a national public option was still alive; Reid and his aides were trying to work through the details of what type of public expansion would be agreeable to the caucus, and the two senators they needed to go through were Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman. Both would take the offers back to representatives of the insurance industry for feedback, Reid aides said.

Connecticut’s political economy has long been dominated by insurers, which were major supporters of Lieberman. Nelson, meanwhile, simply was the insurance industry. He had been an executive at Central National Insurance Group of Omaha, before becoming the state’s insurance commissioner. After his stint in public service, he went back to the insurance company, eventually becoming the firm’s president.

Privately, efforts by Reid staffers to persuade the White House to include the public option were rebuffed. “The word kept coming back, too many promises have been made. It’s over,” said one senior Reid aide. The public option was not included.

“We had the votes, it just didn’t last very long,” Reid told me years later. “We had the votes on public option for 24 hours, and a number of votes changed. Where the pressure came from, I don’t know, but it came, and we were unable to get it done.”

Reid’s major legislative push in 2009 and 2010 coincided with his own reelection campaign in Nevada. In 1998, Reid had survived by fewer than 500 votes and determined after that election to reshape Nevada’s politics to give himself bigger margins. He spent years building up the state party machine and poking holes in the opposition.

To survive, he had worked over the Republican field for years. Kristen Orthman, who worked on his 2010 campaign and served as an aide until Reid’s eventual retirement, said that Reid had identified then-state Sen. Joe Heck as a potential Republican opponent. Seeing the Obama wave coming, he recruited a serious challenger and knocked Heck out of the Nevada Senate in 2008, hobbling his rise through the ranks and taking him off the table for a 2010 Senate run. He relentlessly targeted the GOP front-runner, Sue Lowden, in the primary, making national news out of her infamous suggestion that health care reform was unnecessary because people could simply barter chickens for care. Sharron Angle, a tea party favorite, ended up winning the primary.

Reid’s hostility to the tea party bordered on the obsessive. An early convert to clean energy, he was building a wind turbine outside his Nevada home in early 2010. As it was being constructed, Sarah Palin, the late Sen. John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, announced that a tea party rally would be held in Searchlight, a town of about 500 people at the time. When Reid heard, he found his handyman, Richard Hill, and delivered marching orders. “He wanted it up before the Tea Party Express came through,” Hill told me. Reid made clear how important it was to have that wind turbine erected before Palin’s arrival, so that it could stand as a middle finger in the face of the rows of flag-waving RVs.

“We got it up the day before,” Hill said. He almost never bothered Reid while he was in Washington, where the senator stayed at a suite in the Ritz-Carlton, but decided that it was worth it and texted Reid that the deed was done. Reid instantly sent back his gratitude.

But it was by deploying his Senate power on behalf of a private development project that got him reelected. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the biggest urban development project in Las Vegas, CityCenter, was at risk of failure and could have brought the entire state economy down with it. Reid browbeat banks into refinancing the project and keeping it alive, then ran on the jobs it saved. Orthman, meanwhile, called a local radio station while Angle was on air and asked if she’d have made the same decision. “No,” Angle said, likely costing her the race.

Reid won by a convincing 6-point margin.

But after Democrats lost the House in the 2010 tea party wave, Obama vowed to “tighten our belts,” sitting down for major negotiations over what Washington called a “grand bargain,” a deal that would comprehensively slash Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while also raising taxes — ostensibly in the name of deficit reduction but effectively aimed at driving the final dagger of the Reagan Revolution into the heart of a functioning government. It was in many ways a rehash of the Social Security battle, and Reid fought it from the beginning.

Because it was a high priority for Obama, Reid worked delicately to undermine it, though the contest often burst into public. One weekend in 2013, during government shutdown negotiations, I published a story sourced to multiple Senate Democratic leadership aides critical of White House efforts to capitulate to a recent Republican demand. Obama picked up the phone and called Reid to complain and accuse his chief of staff, David Krone, of leaking. Krone himself was listening in on the call and surprised Obama by piping up and taking offense at the accusation. That year, Reid finally made it clear: “There is not going to be a grand bargain,” he declared. On another occasion, Reid famously showed his contempt for a list of White House concessions by crumpling it up and throwing it into his office fire — a gesture that quickly appeared in the press.

Reid famously showed his contempt for a list of White House concessions by crumpling it up and throwing it into his office fire.

Having beaten back the grand bargain, Reid joined with Sen. Elizabeth Warren in going on the offense, calling for Social Security not to be cut but to be expanded. The ground was finally changing, and though Reid had shown a willingness to betray the establishment, that willingness only went so far.

Reid had stiffened Democrats’ spines against Bush and later against Obama’s willingness to capitulate to the politics of austerity, but ultimately he was boxed in — or had no interest in breaking out of the box — by the politics of his era. In 2016, when the Clinton machine was challenged a second time, this time by Sanders, Reid stood by the Clintons. Obama versus Hillary Clinton was an intra-insider contest, the kind in which Reid felt comfortable bucking a faction of power. But Sanders versus Clinton was outsider versus insider, and Reid stayed true to his fellow insiders, deploying his Nevada machine against Sanders in the caucus.

Reid never revealed his role in forcing the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” onto the Senate floor while Obama was still in office. I learned about it through former Reid aides and confirmed it in an interview with Reid. After I reached out to Obama’s post-presidential office for comment in 2019, Obama called Reid to discuss the issue, and Reid said that he would talk with me again to clarify any potential misunderstanding. When we spoke again, he stuck by his original story.

“There is no doubt that — let me say this the right way — the issue was over the [START] treaty and ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ Now, Obama was always in favor of [repealing] ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” Reid said. “I had to make sure that I could pass both of them, and I wasn’t sure I could. So I decided what I was going to do is get what I thought was going to be the hardest out of the way first, and that was ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ I got that done, knew I had the votes for that, then I did the [START] thing, that’s how it worked. But please, I don’t want anyone to think that Obama did not favor ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ [repeal].”

I asked Reid: “So Obama’s concern was that it might not have the votes and it and the DREAM Act failing might then take down the START treaty, is that right?”

“Yes, and my job was to get both of them done, and when I got the votes to do it, I said, ‘Here I go, I’m gonna do it,’” Reid said, “and so that’s how it worked out.”

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A primary challenger to Rep. Betty McCollum raised more than $300,000 in the fourth quarter of 2021, marking the first major bid to unseat the Minnesota Democrat in her 21-year tenure in Congress. The challenge to McCollum comes from Amane Badhasso, a Democratic organizer and operative who arrived in Minnesota, like many others in the Twin Cities, as a refugee from Kenya, having been forced out of her home country of Ethiopia.

McCollum has been a reliable vote for House Democrats and a leader on the question of Palestinian rights, but she otherwise has largely kept a low profile and declined to join the Congressional Progressive Caucus. In an interview, Badhasso said she would raise few if any substantive objections to McCollum’s voting record. Badhasso said that she has long applauded McCollum’s advocacy on behalf of Palestinians but that the representative hadn’t done enough broadly. “I’m not challenging her on the basis of that,” she said. “There’s so much more that we need to do. We can’t just be a champion on one issue.”

Rather, Badhasso said, she was making the case that there is more to adequate representation than voting the right way. “Here in the progressive movement, we have to think about what ‘Democrat’ actually means beyond just who votes along a certain line,” she said. “Frankly, we need a leadership that just gives a damn about folks in the community.”

McCollum’s Middle East activism has failed to draw much national attention. A recent profile of her in HuffPost was subheadlined, “St. Paul’s Betty McCollum is radically progressive on U.S. policy toward Israel. Why don’t you ever hear about it?”

Though she aligns on many issues with Rep. Ilhan Omar, she and her fellow Twin Cities lawmaker have at times betrayed a frosty relationship. “Ilhan is on the other side of the Mississippi River, and we talk sometimes in the break room in between votes,” McCollum told HuffPost. When Omar was in the barrel over remarks in 2019 that critics deemed antisemitic, McCollum issued a statement: “Rep. Omar has the right to speak freely, and she also must take responsibility for the effect her words have on her colleagues, her constituents, and the policies Democrats seek to advance.”

McCollum’s chief of staff, Bill Harper, went further, telling HuffPost: “My own take on it is that she really derailed a lot of our work.”

Omar has not endorsed in the race and has collaborated on legislation with McCollum, but she had warm words for Badhasso. “She truly is one of the most impressive people I have ever met. She is incredible, and I have never met anyone who disagrees in [the] decade I have known her,” she told The Intercept.

Harper said that McCollum is taking the challenge seriously and is unwilling to cede the mantle of progressivism to Badhasso. “She’s the most progressive member of the Minnesota delegation,” Harper said of McCollum. Asked if that ranking included Omar, he said that it did, citing McCollum’s vote for the major infrastructure bill in November, which Omar opposed. (Omar opposed voting on the bill until the Senate had fully committed to passing the Build Back Better Act.)

“Change just simply for change’s sake is just shuffling the deck chairs. In Congress, seniority matters. The question I have to ask is why would progressives … want to throw away 22 years of seniority,” Harper added.

Badhasso’s challenge will be a window into how Democratic voters are viewing 2022: whether as a moment to push forward with an outspoken and unapologetic brand of progressivism and continue the fight for control of the party or focus more on defending against surging Republican energy, which threatens to seize the House and Senate.

Badhasso’s challenge will be a window into how Democratic voters are viewing 2022.

McCollum’s bet is that voters are in no mood for an intraparty contest this cycle. “This campaign in 2022 is squarely focused on stopping Republicans from taking the majority and continuing progressive leadership in Congress,” Harper said. “We’re looking at the mob being invited into the Capitol and at the table.”

Minnesota’s byzantine primary system gives Badhasso at least two shots at McCollum. The first will come in February at a caucus where 400 delegates will be selected to then vote at a later convention on who will go into the primary with the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party endorsement. The officially endorsed candidate nearly always wins the primary, but ultimately voters will decide the Democratic nominee at what is likely to be a low-turnout affair in August.

Badhasso’s background is likely to resonate in the Twin Cities, which has a proud tradition of welcoming refugees, who have in turn revitalized the area’s economy. Her family fled Ethiopia in the mid-’90s as a result of conflict between the Oromo Liberation Front and the country’s ruling factions. While a refugee in Kenya, she said, she nearly died of malaria, until a collection could be taken to pay for treatment at a hospital. On another occasion, she returned home to find that the dilapidated building she lived in had collapsed. At the age of 13, she finally arrived in Minnesota, home to a large Oromo community.

Badhasso, who is Muslim, is a well-known Twin Cities activist and was previously an organizer for former Rep. Keith Ellison, whose seat is now held by Omar as he serves as the state’s attorney general. In 2020, she worked on the coordinated campaign in Minnesota aimed at electing President Joe Biden, along with down-ballot candidates. (She said she supported the primary campaign of presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020.)

As a senior organizer with TakeAction Minnesota, she worked on a campaign, known as Yes 4 Minneapolis, to transform the George Floyd protests into a radical rethinking of the city’s police department. The ballot measure would have shuttered the police force and replaced it with a Department of Public Safety, but it was beaten back in a November landslide, 56-44. Two members of the City Council who backed the reform were thrown out of office.

Minnesota Democrats Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Rep. Angie Craig as well as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey campaigned against the ballot question. Omar supported it, while McCollum took a more neutral stance. “The Minneapolis City Council is free to defund or abolish its police department or ask to have federal COPS funding terminated. That will be their decision to make,” she said in a statement in June 2020.

In her campaign for the House seat, Badhasso broke from the model that has developed recently, with candidates releasing slick, two-minute biographical ads, and instead launched quietly in October and spent the next three months working her network to raise money and demonstrate her viability. To raise the eye-popping number, she canvassed the Oromo diaspora, in which she had built up substantial contacts through years of Oromo advocacy.

After The Intercept reached out to McCollum’s campaign for comment, she shared the news with a wide circle of elected officials and power players in Minnesota. “Friends,” McCollum wrote in an email to allies. “Earlier today my campaign received a call from a reporter asking for a comment. He said my DFL opponent has raised over $300,000 in the past three months in her effort to defeat me. The reporter also said my opponent could not articulate any issues or votes in which she disagrees with me, but she’s running to bring ‘new energy’ to the district.”

“Energy is important,” she went on, “but my energy is focused on governing and chairing the largest and most powerful appropriations subcommittee in Congress.”

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It started as an accidental dare. As House leaders met on November 5 in an effort to reach a final deal on both the Build Back Better Act and a bipartisan infrastructure bill, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., suggested the Congressional Black Caucus could be helpful in ending an impasse between a group of holdouts, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal.

The suggestion was dismissed out of hand by Gottheimer’s crew, Clyburn would later tell allies, with the Black Caucus being written off as irrelevant in a changing Congress. Once known as “the conscience of Congress,” the caucus, founded in 1971 by 13 members, drew its power from the legacy of the civil rights movement and its ability to speak with one voice and vote as a bloc. That unity had been chipped away over the past two election cycles, amid a generational and ideological struggle that played out in party primaries.

Clyburn took the diss as a challenge. After the meeting, a livid Clyburn summoned the CBC leadership, telling CBC Chair Joyce Beatty, Rep. Maxine Waters, and others about the disrespect put on the name of the caucus. It was incumbent on them to prove the doubters wrong, he said. How much disrespect was real and how much he was ginning it up to motivate the CBC is a matter of dispute, but the effect was clear. Beatty pledged the caucus would move swiftly. Shortly before 2 p.m. she, Reps. Steven Horsford, D-Nev.; Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas; and others left Clyburn’s office and told reporters that the caucus would support the effort to split the two bills, though the caucus had yet to meet on the question.

Beatty quickly scheduled a caucus meeting and urged the group to back the leadership strategy, telling members that the credibility of Clyburn and the CBC was on the line. The meeting overlapped with another gathering of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which was debating the same questions, with some members who served in both caucuses shuttling back and forth.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., made a motion that the caucus unify behind Clyburn and leadership, and Horsford, who’d also been in the Clyburn meeting, seconded it. Reps. Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and Ilhan Omar all pushed back against the strategy, asking the motion to be withdrawn, which it eventually was. No vote was held. “We were adamant that there was no agreement, but they put out a statement anyway,” said one CBC member.

Beatty journeyed from the CBC meeting to the CPC one, where the progressive caucus was still gathered. She told reporters outside in the hallway that she was acting on her own initiative, but was conspicuously accompanied by a senior aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

She stood outside awkwardly as she was refused entry under the reasoning that only CPC members could attend the meeting. “I think it was a mistake for CPC not to be in better dialogue with CBC and joint strategy. Having Joyce Beatty wait outside to address CPC was arrogant and wrong,” said one CPC member.

One nonmember was allowed to join by speaker phone, however: Joe Biden. A week earlier, after lengthy negotiations with Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin that had followed a successful CPC effort to hold the line and keep the two bills paired, the Biden administration released a new framework, which Manchin praised.

President Biden's framework is the product of months of negotiations and input from all members of the Democratic Party who share a common goal to deliver for the American people.

— Senator Joe Manchin (@Sen_JoeManchin) October 28, 2021

During the CPC meeting, Biden beseeched the caucus to give him a win on the infrastructure bill, asking them to trust that he had a commitment from Manchin to get Build Back Better done. The day before, Manchin had appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and said he was in agreement with a $1.75 trillion top line for the bill.

Progressives were also facing pressure from Democrats who blamed November election losses on the infrastructure bill’s delay, noted one progressive House staffer who requested anonymity to speak freely with The Intercept. Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia argued Terry McAuliffe, the party’s candidate, could have won the governor’s race if the framework was already signed into law.

“After the November elections, with establishment Democrats loudly blaming progressives for their losses, every faction of the party apparatus was arrayed against the CPC and determined to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill alone,” the source said.

Even after Biden’s call, according to people in the room, more than two dozen Democrats were still willing to vote no, unwilling to trust Manchin’s word. Jayapal, however, made the case that the CPC had taken it as far as it could and told those assembled that she was going to back the president’s play. Omar, the CPC whip, continued pushing for the caucus to hold the line, but with the caucus chair siding with Biden, resistance crumbled.

Whether House Democrats had the votes still remained an open question, however, and five members of the Squad — Omar, Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman — announced they would be voting no. “I’m a no,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept that evening. “This is bullshit.”

Without those five, Pelosi needed Republican votes, and GOP leadership had previously said it would force Democrats to pass the majority threshold on their own before Republicans would help. But not long after the vote opened, several moderate Republicans voted yes, assuring the bill’s passage. Rep. Ayanna Pressley ended up joining her Squad colleagues in their no votes.

In exchange for their votes, the CPC had won a commitment from Gottheimer’s crew that if a Congressional Budget Office analysis came in relatively close to the White House assessment, they would vote to move the bill to the Senate. Gottheimer’s gang made good on that pledge, and by mid-November, the bill was in the hands of the Senate. For the next month, Manchin negotiated with the White House.

Last Wednesday, the White House issued a statement blaming Manchin for the delay that The Hill’s Steve Clemons says set Manchin off. On Sunday, he took to Fox News and let the world know he was “done.”

On Monday morning, Manchin called Jayapal to talk. Later, in a conference call with reporters, she said that she had been blunt with Manchin. “That lack of integrity is stunning,” she said, particularly in a city where your word is everything.”

She said Manchin denied ever having made a commitment to Biden. “I don’t know what to make of that,” she said. “I still believe the president got that commitment.”

“Either the president did not have a commitment, or the senator made a commitment and went back. And I believe the president when he said he had a commitment,” she said.

“I don’t believe the senator actually wanted to pass Build Back Better.”

Asked if she regretted the decision to break the two pieces of legislation up and give away leverage, she said she has pondered it since. “This is the question I’ve gone over in my head a million times,” she said. But ultimately, she didn’t regret the decision because, she argued, there was no particular tactic that could have overcome what she now believes was always Manchin’s plan to walk away.

“I don’t believe the senator actually wanted to pass Build Back Better,” she said on the call. If Democrats had held the line again that evening and blocked passage of the infrastructure bill, she argued, Manchin would have used that moment as his excuse to bolt.

Ultimately, Biden and Pelosi pushed the progressive caucus to break with a two-track strategy they themselves had previously endorsed, based on a confidence in their own ability to move the final legislation through the process, born of decades of experience inside the system — experience that distorted their view of the situation and gave them an inflated sense of their own personal power absent sufficient leverage. They were successfully able to pressure Jayapal into going along, while the members of the Squad, peering in from the outside, could see the firm contours of the structure much more clearly.

It’s impossible to know what would have happened in a counterfactual situation, in which progressives would have continued to hold the infrastructure bill as leverage. Jayapal argued the leverage wouldn’t have worked on Manchin; the infrastructure bill was much more of a priority to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz. Yet the bipartisan bill was indeed something Manchin wanted, both for his state and for his reelection. Jayapal said the strategy worked as well as it could and “boxed him in” to supporting the framework, after which it was up to the president to reel him in.

“I think he was looking for a way to not do it, and that would have been the day that the Build Back Better Act died,” Jayapal said, referring to November 19, the day the infrastructure bill passed the House with majority support from the CPC.

“That would have also been the day that we turned the country against us,” she added, “so no. I don’t have regrets.”

Those who objected to the strategy in real time, however, saw Manchin’s move as the danger they predicted. “Alexandria warned it could happen,” read an email Ocasio-Cortez sent to reporters. “Yesterday, it did.”

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Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, attacked the organization founded by Jamal Khashoggi on Monday as linked to Al Qaeda, echoing allegations that Saudi officials have leveled to muddy the waters around the state-sanctioned butchering of the Washington Post journalist.

In a speech at Rutgers University, Gottheimer criticized the school for hosting Khashoggi’s organization for an event. “At another event, the same group hosted Democracy for the Arab World Now, DAWN, whose officials have connections to Al Qaeda and Hamas networks,” Gottheimer said. “Hamas sympathizers, or others with ties to other terrorist organizations involved in 9/11, have no place on college campuses. Associates of Palestinian Islamic jihad have no place on this college campus. I know we all believe that hate has no home here. It’s time we all practice what we preach.”

During his speech, Gottheimer also claimed that at an earlier protest organized by the Working Families Party, somebody had shouted “Jew!” at him. “Not long ago, I held an event in my district to talk about the benefits of the bipartisan federal infrastructure bill, only to have members of the Working Families Party disrupt the event by screaming ‘Jew’ at me,” he said. While he did not specify which event he was referring to, representatives from the Working Families Party say they only showed up at one, on September 20.

A review of video of the event provided by the Working Families Party suggests that Gottheimer is either lying or appears to have misheard the protesters. As he left an event out a back door, protesters urged him to engage in one of his regular constituent events that he calls “Cup of Joe with Josh,” in lieu of town halls that his constituents have demanded. “This is your Cup of Joe, Josh. This is your Cup of Joe,” yelled Lisa Schwartz of Teaneck, New Jersey. At the time of the protest, Gottheimer was under intense pressure at home and in Washington to get behind Biden’s Build Back Better Act.

“That’s the only time we saw him, and it was so ridiculous, he avoided us like the plague,” Schwartz, a retired social worker, told The Intercept. “We just wanted five minutes of his time.”

“What an outrageous allegation. I’m someone who’s Jewish. If I’d have heard that, I’d have been outraged and would have left right away, and so would most people there. He’s playing the antisemitism card, and it’s vindictive. I can tell you for certain, nothing like that was shouted,” she said. In a statement provided by the Working Families Party, Schwartz added: “At no time during this rally was Rep. Gottheimer called ‘a Jew’ as he falsely alleges.”

While Gottheimer was speaking on the topic of antisemitism, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was pursuing a resolution condemning anti-Muslim racism. On Tuesday, Rep. Scott Perry, R-Penn., accused Omar of being “affiliated” with “terrorist organizations” while the House debated her bill. The bill passed, and his words were deemed out of order by the House parliamentarian and struck from the congressional record. Gottheimer was speaking at Rutgers University, not on the House floor, and his remarks are posted on his congressional website.

The claims by Perry and Gottheimer that Omar and Khashoggi have links to terrorist organizations were offered without evidence, though both are likely referring to connections to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a prominent advocacy group in Washington that is routinely criticized by Saudi Arabia and its allies for having ties to terror networks. Perry had previously introduced an amendment to Omar’s legislation punishing CAIR, and Khashoggi’s group has links to people with ties to CAIR.

Nebulous terms like “networks” and “links” make it easy to claim connections between Middle East figures and terrorist groups while simultaneously draining these claims of meaning. That task was made easier in the wake of 9/11, when the FBI designated countless Islamic charities as potential fronts for financing terror groups, meaning that anybody connected with those charities in any way could then be said to have “links” to Al Qaeda. (The irony, of course, is that Saudi Arabia itself has actual links to the 9/11 attacks and is the subject of ongoing litigation as a result.)

“These are Saudi talking points.”

“These are Saudi talking points,” said Michael Eisner, general counsel for DAWN. “DAWN staff and DAWN board members represent a diverse group of people from different races, faiths, religions, and nationalities. Several DAWN staff members are political exiles, including former political prisoners and victims of torture. That these individuals now face some of the same tactics from the authoritarian governments that forced them to flee their home countries is deeply unsettling.”

Khashoggi founded DAWN in 2018 before he was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The group advocates for democratic reforms in the Middle East and has been heavily critical of Saudi Arabia under the rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Multiple intelligence services — including the Turkish, U.S., and British agencies — have concluded that the crown prince was responsible for the killing of Khashoggi.

“These accusations are false, baseless, and derive from Islamophobic, racist, and anti-Muslim tropes that have no place in the United States and in U.S. political discourse,” said Eisner.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, praised the talk as an “important speech” on the “rise of antisemitic rhetoric and the need for leaders to better support Jewish communities.” It was unclear if Greenblatt had noticed Gottheimer’s charge against Khashoggi’s organization.

Important speech from @RepJoshG at @RutgersU on rise of #antisemitic rhetoric and the need for leaders to better support Jewish communities: "If we stand together, support one another against hatred, I believe that our best days will always, always be ahead of us." https://t.co/22YTyKI8jZ

— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) December 14, 2021

Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., pushed back on Greenblatt for evidence. “In this speech Gottheimer claims, without evidence of course, that @DAWNmenaorg, an organization founded by murdered Saudi activist Jamaal Khashoggi, has ‘connections to Al-Qaeda and Hamas networks.’ Among other slanders,” Duss posted on Twitter. “Why is the ADL endorsing this defamation?” An ADL spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Gottheimer’s links to Saudi Arabia and its network of propagandists go back to his earliest days in politics. In the late 1990s, Gottheimer was a speechwriter for the Clinton White House, where he worked closely with Mark Penn, the president’s pollster. The two have remained close since, and Gottheimer has become a lead spokesperson for the organization No Labels, which Penn’s wife, Nancy Jacobson, runs with Penn’s close involvement. Penn went on to become CEO of Burson-Marsteller, one of the leading public relations fronts for Saudi Arabia, and in 2006, he hired Gottheimer as an executive vice president. Gottheimer spent the next four years at the firm, reporting directly to Penn.

“When evil needs public relations, evil has Burson-Marsteller on speed dial. That’s why it was creepy that Hillary Clinton’s pollster and chief strategist in her presidential campaign was Mark Penn, CEO of Burson-Marsteller,” said MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in 2012. (Penn rejected the characterization.) Gottheimer, who didn’t respond to a request for comment or additional information to back up his allegation, was elected to Congress in 2016.

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In the final year of the Trump administration, government attorneys expressed ethics concerns about a Medicare privatization scheme being set up by Adam Boehler, a former dorm-mate of Jared Kushner’s who was made director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, also known as CMMI or the Innovation Center.

In January 2019, ahead of the launch of a new direct contracting model, the Office of the General Counsel for the Health and Human Services Department warned, in comments on a draft of the proposal, that it appeared as if the new project was being set up to benefit specific companies.

“We are concerned based on [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services]’s regular references to organizations like Chen Med, Oak Street Health, and Verily in the comments and otherwise, that this model has been designed with specific private sector entities in mind. If accurate, this could create ethics concerns, as the creation of this model would give those entities a leg up in the market,” read the guidance, a copy of which was obtained by The Intercept.

The direct contracting model was announced publicly in April 2019 and began its implementation phase in October 2020. The project pays private companies a predetermined but individualized amount per year, per patient, regardless of what the company spends on care, and has persisted and grown under the Biden administration.

Boehler, prior to working in the Trump administration, ran a startup called Landmark Health, which was backed by venture capital money, including the firm Oxeon. Multiple Oxeon-funded health companies, such as Oak Street Health, were directly referenced in the documents setting up the new project, which drew scrutiny from the Office of the General Counsel. Under Boehler, CMMI contracted with Oxeon to recruit the noncareer staff for CMMI, who then went on to design the program. Once the project was set up, Landmark Health announced it would be contracting with CMMI to become a direct contracting entity — meaning Boehler’s model was shoveling money to the firm he had left. Boehler is now CEO of Rubicon Founders, a venture capital and private equity firm operating in the health care industry. (Before taking his position in the administration, he had divested from any Landmark, along with other healthcare-related investments.)

In May 2019, a calendar alert went out to staff reading “discussion with Landmark on the direct contracting model.” Career staff were appalled. “This shit is so fucking gross,” wrote one in a group text with other aides which was shared with The Intercept. “Ugh. What the fuck,” replied another, with a third sending a link to the Office of the Inspector General, suggesting it be reported. (It does not appear to have been reported.)

The payment model is designed to be lucrative for firms contracting with the government: The government pays a set amount of money annually per patient based on a risk score that is easily gamed by the health care company, and there is no requirement that a minimum percentage of the money be spent on care, a requirement known as a “medical loss ratio” that is typically used to constrain insurance firms or providers from eating the bulk of the funding.

Brad Smith, a recruit of Boehler’s who briefly served as director of CMMI after Boehler was appointed to an unrelated position by President Donald Trump, wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine in February of this year that was highly critical of similar payment models the organization was rolling out, noting with unusual frankness that “the vast majority of the Center’s models have not saved money, with several on pace to lose billions of dollars. Similarly, the majority of models do not show significant improvements in quality.” Smith identified “inflated benchmarks” — in which providers wildly overestimate what they expect a patient will cost — and providers’ ability to “game” the payment models as key drivers of losses for the government. Smith expressed hope for direct contracting as a fix, though the project’s critics note it has the same elements. 

Smith, able to spot a good business opportunity, launched a health care company, Russell Street Ventures, in June. That company is now directly contracting with Medicare. Smith did not respond to a request for comment. In October 2020, when the direct contracting program was in its early implementation phase, Smith indicated on a panel with Boehler and another former CMMI head, Patrick Conway, that in the program’s early stages the firms that had “come into that space that [were] running the program” were mostly “new and mid-stage companies” — like his firm and those founded by Boehler. Conway noted that he had recruited Boehler to the job, just as Boehler had recruited Smith. As Boehler added during the panel, the trend is bipartisan. Andy Slavitt, Obama’s head of CMS and an outspoken resistance Democrat, has now linked up with Oxeon – the same VC firm that was funding Boehler – for his own direct contracting enterprise.

The latest privatization scheme echoes the Medicare Advantage system, the private-insurer-run version of Medicare currently used by over 40 percent of enrollees.

Direct contracting uses a model that, in theory, pays firms for maintaining the overall health of a patient rather than billing Medicare for individual medical services. Critics argue that the latter model, which is currently used for standard Medicare enrollees, incentivizes unnecessary hospital visits and treatments. But the former model, which is referred to as value-based contracting, requires complex bureaucratic oversight to ensure that providers are not juking the system by unreasonably inflating the cost and difficulty of caring for a patient.

Medicare Advantage also currently uses a version of the value-based contracting model, but the design failures of the program have led to significantly higher costs than under the traditional Medicare fee-for-service model — with little evidence to support the claim that patients are receiving better care. This is because of the insurer payment formula for Medicare Advantage, which largely depends on the number of diagnoses each patient has received, or their “risk score.”

An entire cottage industry has popped up to help insurers and providers increase a patient’s risk score by scouring for potential diagnoses before patients enroll in Medicare Advantage plans. By finding more diagnoses, whether treatable or not, the annual reimbursement rate under the value-based contracting model increases. Experts have estimated that the resulting overpayments will lead to hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns over the next several years. While technocratic fixes to the formula could fix many of the problems plaguing the Medicare Advantage program, Congress and executive branch appointees have so far been unwilling to stomach the political risks posed by large-scale interruptions to the care of Medicare enrollees that would be necessary to combat the wasteful spending generated by privatization.

In a paper published in September, Richard Gilfillan, the head of CMMI from 2010 to 2013, and Donald Berwick, a former head of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, during the Obama administration, warned that many of the waste-generating elements of Medicare Advantage programs would carry over to direct contracting. While the direct contracting pilot adjusts the formula for payments to blunt the impact of risk-score gaming, it is unclear whether these adjustments are sufficient to end the practice. Adjusting each firm’s scoring downward by an equal amount punishes firms behaving honestly, they argued, and rewards the firms who hire consultants to game the coding exercise. That puts the government’s thumb on the scale of the most aggressive coders.

“In Direct Contracting, CMS established a stated aim of bringing ‘organizations that currently operate exclusively in Medicare Advantage’ into traditional Medicare, targeting the very MA insurers and investor-controlled provider firms that are driving the MA overpayments,” Gilfillan and Berwick noted, specifically mentioning Oak Street Health and Landmark Health, which Boehler previously ran, as examples of investor-controlled provider firms. (Gilfillan himself is CEO of Trinity Health, a major player in the healthcare industry.)

Diane Archer, founder of Just Care and a health policy expert, described a similar scenario in an email to The Intercept. “The way they make money is by spending as little as possible on patient care, while ensuring as best they can that they have all diagnoses possible for their enrollees in order to maximize government payments. The more diagnoses, the higher the government payments. Government payments are set upfront and unrelated to the cost or number of services people receive.”

“The incentive is to deny as much care as possible.”

“And, yes, the incentive is to deny as much care as possible,” she continued, “it’s also to delay as much care as possible and to create administrative and financial barriers that make it hard for enrollees to get care, even if the DCE does not delay or deny care,” she said, referring to direct contracting entities approved to participate in the program.

Aside from the looting of public funds and the depreciation of care, the shift toward privatization has profound implications for the political economy of health care. Every new private equity or venture capital-backed firm that grabs a bigger piece of the health care market becomes an incumbent corporate stakeholder and a well-funded obstacle to public-minded reform efforts.

Throughout the medical industry, physician practices, hospitals, and groups of specialists are being bought up by investors and consolidated. In the direct contracting space, much of the funding is coming from venture capitalists, but private equity has gotten involved as well.

CanoHealth, a private-equity backed firm, told investors in a presentation that as of April 2021 it had added direct contracting to its existing Medicare Advantage business model. More than half of Medicare recipients have declined to opt in to the privatized Medicare Advantage model, and CanoHealth noted that becoming a direct contracting entity massively expands the company’s potential pool of customers, saying it “triples the addressable market opportunity.” (More recent estimates put the number of Medicare Advantage enrollees higher, at 42 percent.)

The entrance of big private money can be damaging to patient health. A recent study of private equity influence in nursing homes found that residents under the care of a private equity-owned facility were a startling 10 percent more likely to die.

At the center of this privatization project now that Joe Biden is in the White House is Liz Fowler, who was previously the lead health care staffer for former Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who drafted massive chunks of the Affordable Care Act. Fowler was in the trenches battling progressives over the shape and construction of Obamacare, and before that, she had been a top lobbyist for the insurance company WellPoint. After that, she went on to work for Johnson & Johnson. Now she’s back in government, as the deputy administrator and director of CMMI, the innovation agency created by the law she helped write, and people involved in the fight over this project say she’s a strong backer of direct contracting. Fowler did not respond to a request for comment.

In May, four Democrats in Congress — Reps. Bill Pascrell, Mark Pocan, Katie Porter, and Lloyd Doggett — sent a letter to CMMI and to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who is himself a supporter of Medicare for All, asking for the program to be frozen due to concerns that “funneling people into Medicare Advantage-like plans not only eliminates beneficiary choice, but also erects more barriers and provides fewer consumer protections for beneficiaries.”

In a sign of how big direct contracting has gotten, it has its own lobby now. The Direct Contracting Coalition, which operates as part of America’s Physician Groups, sent a letter in response, arguing that the critics don’t understand how much it can help beneficiaries and cut costs for the government.

The Biden administration paused implementation of two of the three models for direct contracting earlier this year, but there is no indication the administration intends to halt the program altogether. Archer, the health policy expert, said that the path toward a full privatization of Medicare is now apparent if the Biden administration doesn’t change course. “The private equity takeover is short term,” she predicted. “PE will sell their DCEs to insurers. We’ll get fully privatized Medicare, unaccountable and far less cost-effective. Traditional Medicare will wither on the vine.”

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On Friday, a familiar pattern played out: The Labor Department released a very, very good jobs report, and the media continued hyping what a lousy economy President Joe Biden is overseeing. As the economy added 210,000 jobs, the unemployment rate fell nearly half a percentage point — down to 4.2 percent, a full point lower than the Congressional Budget Office projected a year ago. Wages were up nearly 5 percent year over year, with bigger gains most concentrated among the working class. Hourly wages for restaurant workers, for instance, were up more than 13 percent. This comes on top of the child tax credit and other subsidies in the American Rescue Plan, which, along with former President Donald Trump’s stimulus checks, have left people’s savings accounts fatter than they’ve been in a generation. It has practically never been easier to find a job; wages and hours are growing steadily; and people have more money in the bank.

Yet surveys show that the American people by huge margins say they don’t like the direction of the economy. So how can we explain this apparent paradox? Why do people keep saying that the economy sucks even as wages are rising and unemployment is falling?

It would be tempting to suggest that the answer lies in the fact that since the late 1970s, we went some 40 years without any real wage growth, and if wages had kept up with productivity, people would be making a lot more than they are now. That’s certainly enough to make people sour on the economy generally, but it doesn’t explain why they’re more sour now than at many other times over the last 40 years. What the paradox reveals is that our political system misunderstands how people identify themselves in relation to the economy. The American people — and importantly, American voters — think of themselves as consumers rather than workers.

For workers, the economy is going well. But for consumers, not so much. If people are asked how the economy is doing, the question they’re answering is: How well is it serving you?

If you order something on Amazon, is it in stock and showing up at your door the next day at the price you’re used to? Can you get a cheap Uber quickly? Are gas and grocery prices up? When people walk into a restaurant and one of the sections is closed because they’re short-staffed, that’s the kind of thing people mean when they say that the economy is going badly. It’s not serving them the way that they’re used to.

The transformation of the American people from workers to consumers goes back a long way, but it picked up its real strength right after World War II. During the war, workers had either left their jobs to serve overseas or were working long hours at home for much less pay than they could command in order to support the war effort. “Together we can do it!” blared one typical General Motors poster, showing two fists next to each other, one labeled “labor” and the other “management.” The poster commanded “Keep ’em firing!” above images of a tank and a fighter plane that needed the factory’s supplies of ammunition.

When the war ended, the pot boiled over, and workers demanded to be compensated for their sacrifices. They had been essential to the war effort, and now they wanted to be treated like it.

The great post-war strike wave of 1945 and 1946 saw millions of workers walk off the job, like nothing that had ever been seen in the U.S. Instead of sitting down with labor and constructing a new post-war social contract, corporate America organized against the workers and strikes, fighting them at every step and winning many of the contests. Voters handed Congress to the GOP for the first time in 18 years, and Republicans used the opportunity to pass the Taft-Hartley Act, which sharply limited union activities and helped destroy the labor movement. Instead of letting workers take control of their own destinies, American policymakers bought off the new veterans and the rising middle class — the white element of it, anyway — with a GI bill, the construction of endless suburbs and highways, and the advent of mass consumer society.

So this was the deal: The bosses would fully control the workplace, and you’d be miserable at your job, but you’d have a decent amount of security, and your paycheck could buy you a house with a yard and the endless stream of gadgets that this new economy would produce. You had no autonomy at work, but you did at home, and so the way you spent your money, not the way you earned it, became the way you identified yourself. You were a consumer, not a worker.

It’s as consumers that we make political judgments.

Fifty years later, after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush urged us all to do our true patriotic duty.

“One of the great goals of this nation’s war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry,” he said in the weeks following September 11. “Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida.”

And if we didn’t storm the aisles of Walmart on Black Friday, Bush warned, the terrorists would win. “We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don’t conduct business — where people don’t shop.”

And so we are both consumers and workers, but the pride we take is in our consumption. That’s where we believe we have autonomy. It’s as consumers that we make political judgments.

Democrats are frustrated that they’re not getting credit for rising wages and people’s fatter bank accounts, but they’re missing the psychological piece of this. If you’re in a union and it fights for and wins a raise, then you’re going to recognize that the union deserves credit for that. You and your colleagues fought for better wages, and you won. If there are politicians who supported you and helped enforce labor laws along the way, you share some credit with those politicians.

But if you’re not in a union, and your boss gives you a raise so that you won’t quit, why would you give the Democrats credit? From your perspective, you did that. You’ve been working hard, and you deserved that raise. And you’re right — but you were working hard in previous years too, and you didn’t get as much back then. The difference was full employment, which is a function of policy, but workers seldom connect their raises to those types of attenuated policy decisions.

They do, however, connect prices to policy. They deserved their raise, but higher gas prices and grocery bills? That’s something that somebody else is doing to them, and the easiest one to punish is the party in power.

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