http://inthesetimes.com/features/dccc_left_progressive_challengers_laura_moser_campaign_finance.html
The latest attacks on left
challengers are no fluke: For decades the House Democratic fundraising body has
put corporate, big-money interests first.
In February, the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) attempted to undermine Democratic
primary candidate Laura Moser out of fear she’s too far left. The Houston
journalist and activist is running in Texas’s 7th District on a platform of
single payer, gun control and reproductive rights. In a move typically reserved
for Republican opponents, the DCCC—whose mission is to fundraise for Democratic
House candidates—posted opposition research it had conducted on Moser. Citing
her recent move to Texas from Washington, D.C., and her campaign’s payments to
her husband’s D.C. research firm, the memo portrayed her as corrupt and a
carpetbagger.
Despite these attacks, Moser
came in second in the primary, moving on to a May 22 runoff.
This could well be the year
the Democrats take control of the House for the first time since 2010. Of the
90 seats the party is targeting for November, just 24 need to turn blue, a
prospect made all the more exciting by the Bernie Sanders-inspired deluge of
progressive candidates around the country. But the DCCC is emerging as that
movement’s counterweight, if not downright enemy.
TURNING THE HOUSE PURPLE
The DCCC, chaired by Rep. Ben
Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), has teamed up with the House’s centrist Blue Dog caucus to
recruit candidates for the 2018 elections, attempting to replicate the 2006
strategy of then-DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel. Democrats did win back the House in
2006 (arguably due as much to George W. Bush’s historic unpopularity as to
Emanuel), but the influx of conservative Democrats contributed to a watering
down of the Affordable Care Act and Wall Street reform, a shift to austerity,
and, eventually, legislative stalemate.
That doesn’t seem to bother
the DCCC.
The Committee’s recruits are
heavily weighted toward military veterans and former national security
officials. Elissa Slotkin, a DCCC-backed candidate in Michigan’s 8th District,
worked for the CIA in Iraq under John Negroponte before moving to George W. Bush’s
National Security Council and then Barack Obama’s State and Defense
Departments. Slotkin was an architect of the failed “surge” strategy in Iraq
and continues to claim it as a success. As recently as 2014, she praised
Negroponte—whose claim to fame is covering up the atrocities committed by
Reagan-supported right-wing forces in Central America.
The DCCC’s candidates also
skew toward the well-heeled and well-connected. An heir to a liquor fortune, a
millionaire philanthropist, a furniture company heir and former State
Department official, the former executive of a shoe company once accused of
labor abuses: All appear on the DCCC’s 2018 roster. Angie Craig, running in
Minnesota’s 2nd District, was an executive of a powerful medical technology
company and spent her time there funneling money to mostly Republicans.
In Nebraska’s 2nd District,
the DCCC lent a hand to Brad Ashford—a former Republican who favors abortion
restrictions—at the expense of his more progressive primary challenger Kara
Eastman, who supports reproductive rights, Medicare for All and other
progressive policies. Over in Virginia’s 2nd, the DCCC swung in early behind
businesswoman Elaine Luria, a military veteran who twice voted for her
Republican opponent, over Karen Mallard, a union member who supports a $15
minimum wage and universal healthcare.
DCCC officials and alumni have
also reportedly stepped in to nudge progressive candidates out of several House
races. In Colorado’s 6th, a Democratic-leaning swing district where Republican
Rep. Mike Coffman is considered vulnerable, party officials are reportedly
trying to clear the field for DCCC-trained former Army Ranger Jason Crow. Levi
Tillemann, a progressive candidate whose campaign is managed by a Sanders 2016
alum, says he was asked in January by Minority Whip Steny Hoyer—a former DCCC
official and major fundraiser—to exit the race because Democratic leaders had
decided “very early on” to back Crow.
In Pennsylvania’s 7th
District, the DCCC pressured out a progressive because they felt their pick
would be a better fundraiser. In California’s 39th, it was to make way for a
lottery-winning lifelong Republican who switched parties because he believes
the Democrats are closer than the GOP to Reagan-era Republicanism.
The DCCC appears reluctant to support
progressives even when they present the only opportunity to flip a red seat.
Last year, the Committee largely stayed away from the special election for
Montana’s at-large district, spending a mere $340,000 on populist Rob Quist’s
surging campaign, compared to the millions it poured into centrist John
Ossoff’s bid for Georgia’s 6th district.
In the April 2017 special
election for Kansas’ ultraconservative 4th District after Mike Pompeo was
tapped as Trump’s CIA director, progressive James Thompson was frustrated that
the DCCC put its resources to work only at the last minute. Thompson still came
within seven points of flipping the district. Yet Thompson, who’s running again
this year, isn’t featured on the DCCC’s list of “Red to Blue” candidates to
support—those running in Republican-held districts ripe to turn.
For all this electioneering,
the DCCC’s hit rate hasn’t been stellar. In 2016, its preferred candidates lost
23 districts that Hillary Clinton won.
A LONG TRADITION
What explains the DCCC’s
allergy to progressives? Part of the story lies in its history.
The 152-year-old organization
has always been devoted to getting more Democrats elected, but its secondary
mission has increasingly become the courting of wealth. As campaigns became
more expensive with the advent of television, the DCCC began to alter its
fundraising strategy from a single annual dinner to a year-round program with a
full-time staff. In 1972, the Committee was used as a vehicle to funnel money
to moderate Democrats from donors “opposing or cool” to George McGovern, as
the Washington Post put it, but who didn’t want the donations to
appear on their financial reports. These included BankPac (the American Bankers
Association’s PAC) and the Mortgage Bankers PAC, among others.
The DCCC’s first major scandal
came not long after. Chair Ohio Rep. Wayne Hays was tasked in 1973 with leading
campaign finance reform in the House, a “whopping conflict of interest,” as
the Philadelphia Inquirer noted at the time. Hays was known to
“donate” funds from the DCCC and elsewhere to Democratic friends, even when
they faced no GOP challenger. As head of the House Administration Committee, he
dragged his feet on campaign finance reform and fought off attempts to unseat
him by, among other things, reminding freshmen Democrats about the campaign
funds he controlled. Hays ultimately resigned in 1976 after a clerk alleged she
had been hired to provide him sexual services on the taxpayers’ dime.
The chair of the DCCC from
1981 to 1989 was Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Calif.), a fiscal conservative who
endorsed the balanced budget constitutional amendment. Coelho raised mountains
of cash by opening up the DCCC’s fundraising to defense contractors, oil
producers, venture capitalists and other businesspeople that, as he put it,
“the party kicked away in the 1970s.” Coelho resigned under an ethical cloud,
but later served as an unpaid advisor to the Clinton administration, where he
refused to publicly reveal his clients at his day job as an investment banker.
Under Coelho, hundreds of
lobbyists and lawyers started attending the DCCC’s annual fundraising dinners.
A brochure for Coelho’s “Speaker’s Club” promised members that, by donating
thousands of dollars, they would be “assured courteous and direct access to”
and “relaxed intimacy” with Democratic leaders and members of Congress. One
anonymous liberal congressman complained to the Wall Street Journal, “Our
butts are being peddled around town, a dollar at a time.”
In 1981, as representatives of
the commodities industry embarked on a massive lobbying effort to prevent a
clampdown on a tax avoidance scheme, Coelho told Democrats on the Ways and
Means Committee that two of the industry reps were “friends of the Democratic
Party, so don’t be too rough on them.”
Coelho eventually departed
Congress, but the intertwining of Democratic politics and money interests never
did. In 1991, Steven Soren, an Iowa Democrat, wrote in the Washington
Post of his “appalling” experience as a congressional candidate, which,
for him, embodied a worrying and “dramatic shift from participatory democracy
to a highly centralized and manipulative system.”
At DCCC workshops in 1990, he
explained, wide-eyed candidates-to-be were imparted advice like: “Money drives
this town” (DCCC staff member Marty Stone), “You have to sell yourself in
Washington first” (consultant Tom King) and “Raising campaign money from
Washington PACs is much easier than from individuals because it’s a business
relationship” (Nebraska Rep. Peter Hoagland). At one of the workshops, Rep.
Beryl Anthony (D-Ark.), a former head of the DCCC, told corporate PAC
representatives that they would be able to pick winners in the room that would
“make your board of directors proud.”
BIG MONEY
Twenty-eight years later,
little has changed. While the DCCC has seen a “Trump bump” in the form of a
record surge of small-dollar donations for the 2018 election cycle, its model
is still stuck in big-donor mode. As The Intercept reported, the DCCC
routinely requires its candidates to be able to raise at least $250,000 from
the contacts in their phones, thereby leaning toward well-connected, wealthier
candidates who tend to sit on the party’s right.
The DCCC’s funding structure
incentivizes candidates who can cough up—or pull in—big sums. Much of the
DCCC’s purse is filled by the dues Democratic House members pay every election
cycle. A spreadsheet leaked to Buzzfeed in 2014 detailed some of
these dues: $450,000 to $800,000 for House leadership and $200,000 to $500,000
for committee members and chief deputy whips. As a 2017 report from Issue One,
an ethics watchdog group, put it, these dues act as “committee taxes,” forcing
lawmakers to fundraise if they want to sit on or chair powerful committees, and
making fundraising skills—not experience or knowledge—the most important
qualification.
“Because of this pressure for
fundraising, members have to spend a whole lot of time dialing for dollars
rather than legislating,” says Eric Heberlig, professor of political science at
the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
These dues, which the DCCC’s
Senate counterpart doesn’t levy, were at first limited to top brass. Heberlig
says this changed with the GOP’s first-in-40-years takeover of the House in
1994. “The party realized that if it got its incumbent members to chip in, they
could take money from donors who had business before Congress and shift it to
competitive districts.”
After legal limits were placed
on “soft money” in 2002, the DCCC ratcheted dues up substantially. When
Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson fell behind on his dues in 2004, Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats warned him that he would be passed over for a
ranking position on the House Agriculture Committee. He began raising
increasing amounts from business PACs and large donors.
There’s also the influence of
lobbyists. In 2017, the DCCC’s top five lobbying bundlers alone brought in more
than $1.3 million. One was Nancy Zirkin of the Leadership Conference on Civil
and Human Rights, a progressive group. The other four—Steven Elmendorf, Vincent
Roberti, David Thomas and Tony Podesta—count or have counted among their
clients a dizzying line-up of corporate giants, including just about every
major pharmaceutical company you can think of: Pfizer, Amgen, Sigma, Novartis.
Three of these
lobbyists—Podesta, Thomas and Elmendorf—have previously represented the
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry lobbying
group that fiercely fights attempts to lower drug prices.
Such fundraising comes with
access. A document leaked by one of the suspected Russian hackers in 2016
showed lobbyists for Goldman Sachs and the Securities Industry and Financial
Markets Association—whose PACs had donated to the DCCC—complaining to DCCC
chair Ben Ray Luján about “messaging demonizing Wall Street” and the influence
of Elizabeth Warren. Luján reassured them that Warren didn’t speak for the
party.
Perhaps the influence of Big
Pharma donors helps explain why a DCCC-commissioned report leaked in February
discouraged House members from campaigning on Medicare for All—the policy that
most distinguishes progressive challengers from the DCCC’s centrist picks.
MONEY OVER POWER
Sanders has expressed disgust
at the DCCC’s recent efforts to stomp out progressive challengers. He
told The Hill in March, “That just continues the process of debasing
the democratic system in this country and is why so many people are disgusted
with politics.” He called the organization’s attacks on Moser in Texas
“appalling” and “unacceptable.”
At a critical time for the
Democratic Party to start winning, the establishment appears content to follow
the same blueprint that left the party in electoral shambles. Then again,
challenging the status quo and advancing a progressive agenda have never been
the business of the DCCC, so long as the money keeps flowing.
BRANKO MARCETIC is an
editorial assistant at Jacobin magazine and a regular contributor
to In These Times. He hails from Auckland, New Zealand.
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