More loyal than oppositional: What’s so progressive about the Progressive Caucus?

As the opening day of the Republican-majority House of Representatives approached, what mainstream Washington reporters weren’t covering the scandal of Rep.-elect George Santos were focused on Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s desperate attempt to corral enough votes from Republicans to make himself Speaker of the House.

So far, McCarthy’s groveling for votes has led him to make one concession after another to the small faction of far-right Republicans who McCarthy needs to win the speakership. Most of these involve the usual grubby horse-trading—committee chairs, focusing on made-for-Fox News investigations, and swearing to take a hard line on Biden Administration priorities. At the end of December, he even conceded his opponents and skeptical supporters an easier path to removing him as speaker if they so choose in the future.

For readers of this Website, the details of McCarthy’s capitulations aren’t as significant as the fact that he feels forced to make them. In part, that’s because the narrowness of the GOP wins last November have left him with little room for maneuver. So, any group of a handful of Republican House members could refuse to vote for him, and to torpedo his speakership-in-waiting. But a more salient point is this. McCarthy feels he must cater to far-right factions because they have made clear that they will withhold their support from him if he doesn’t.

Contrast this with the similar period in 2020 when the Democrats were readying their second term in charge of the House of Representatives with the identical number of members that the Republicans have now. Liberal media personalities like Briahna Joy, Krystal Ball and radio host Jimmy Dore called for “the Squad” the self-identified group of “democratic socialists” and progressives on whom significant sections of the left have placed their faith, to withhold their vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker unless she conceded a vote on “Medicare for All” on the House floor. But Pelosi said no, and the Squad voted to make her speaker. Yet the Squad also didn’t seriously consider “Forcing the Vote,” and much of the social democratic left produced long, tortured justifications for dismissing it as “political theater,” “symbolic” and “political voluntarism.”In theory, the Squad could have pushed Pelosi to make concessions the way the far right are forcing McCarthy today.

One response to the “Force the Vote” campaign that came from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(D-NY) had a strategic sound to it. Whereas “Medicare for All” remained a minority position among House Democrats, progressives should spend their political capital on popular, “winnable” goals like raising the minimum wage to $15. But when the Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonoughruled in 2021 that the minimum wage provision couldn’t be included in the legislation that ultimately became the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the Squad and its supporters took what one might characterize as “symbolic” actions against the decision. They issued statements, tweeted, and introduced resolutions calling for the parliamentarian to be overruled. But with the Biden Administration signaling that such options were off the table, the Squad and the Progressive Caucus folded.

If the tussles around “Force the Vote” and the minimum wage had enough parliamentary tomfoolery involved in them to make them seem ambiguous and subject to debate, November’s Congressional vote forcing a settlement on12 railroad unions was a straight-up “which side are you on?” moment. And the only member of the Squad to vote against the bill was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Others, including DSA membersOcasio-Cortez, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), settled on a strategy of voting to impose the settlement and then voting on separate CongressionalProgressive Caucus (CPC)-sponsored legislation mandating railroads to provide seven days of sick leave to workers. They did so knowing that the Senate would vote to impose the settlement but would oppose the separate sick-leave legislation. Thus, they could get credit (from the Biden administration and the House leadership) for supporting what Biden and Commerce Secretary Pete Buttigieg said was a top priority (i.e., preventing a rail strike), while seeming to side with a key labor demand. At the end of the day, they voted to impose a settlement that most rail workers had already voted to reject. So much for championing the working class in the halls of Congress!

The vote to crush the strike passed 290-137 in the House. So, the Squad members who voted for it couldn’t even claim that they had to vote for it to prevent something even worse from passing—a standard argument in the “lesser evilest” catalog of justifications. Instead, they allowed dozens of right-wing Republicans who voted against it to pose as friends of unions and the working class.

Squad members who voted to impose the settlement issued statements trying to square the circle of their alleged commitment to the working class with their vote to suppress working-class activity. AOC, for example, claimed that she voted for it because she heard from other (non-rail) unions in her district who worried about how a rail strike might affect their members. Bowman detailed the parliamentary horse-trading involved in the two votes (although it still wasn’t clear why he had to vote for the strike-ending vote while voting for the sick-days provision). In other words, both acted like traditional congress members representing their districts and protecting their institutional standing with their colleagues—rather than acting as socialist tribunes behind “enemy lines.”

Around the same time as the rail vote debacle, a similar encounter between progressives and the Biden administration was brewing on the foreign policy front. Sen. Bernie Sanders had gathered enough support (he thought) to introduce a War Powers Act resolution to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia in its war against Yemen. Sanders had mounted a similar (and successful) campaign in 2019 when the Congress passed a similar resolution that then-President Trump vetoed. At the time, leading figures in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, (like Jake Sullivan, Biden’s current national security adviser) signed on to statements supporting the resolution.

Three years later, with the Democratic administration in office and with many of these same officials now occupying key positions in the U.S. government, Biden & Co. had changed their tune. Now, they were “whipping” congressional votes against the War Powers resolution, advancing a number of questionable arguments for their position that Ryan Grim summarized here.

That Democrats would flip a position they held while Trump was in office to hold the opposite one when their own party was running the government is no surprise. It happens all the time, especially on questions of foreign policy. But Sanders’ reaction was instructive. He agreed to withdraw his resolution: “I look forward to working with the administration who is opposed to this resolution and see if we can come up with something that is strong and effective. If we do not, I will be back.”

Yet again, when the administration made known its position, the progressives folded. Keely Mullen, writing for Socialist Alternative, hit the nail on the head: “Bernie has commented from the sidelines about all sorts of inadequacies of the Biden administration, but he’s ultimately caved on every key question. By doing so, he allows Biden to pose as a progressive, to try to hide his status as a bought-and-paid-for corporate politician.” One could say the same for the rest of the Democratic socialists and leaders of the CPC.

For months, the CPC refused Biden’s and Pelosi’s urging that they divide the larger Build Back Better bill into two: one focusing on physical infrastructure that business, mainstream Democrats, and some Republicans supported; and another focusing on the “care” infrastructure of health, education and childcare that most Democrats and progressives supported. CPC leaders correctly noted that if they voted for the first on the promise that they would get a chance to vote on the second, they were giving up any leverage to win reforms that they supported. But in the end, they caved, allowed the two votes, and didn’t get the second. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was something of a consolation prize, but it dropped most of the “care” provisions in favor of tax credits and industry subsidies repositioned as the “largest investment in the climate crisis ever.” The IRA passed with all Democrats in the House voting for it.

“I’m incredibly proud of the role our Progressive Caucus played in getting us here. From the very beginning, progressives have fought tooth and nail to advance the full scope of the President’s economic agenda,” said CPC Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal in a statement. “We would not be passing this bill today had the CPC not insisted we move that agenda from a promise to legislative text that passed the House. Together with movements, activists, and volunteers from across the country, we insisted this Democratic majority deliver. In its major provisions, the Inflation Reduction Act draws on the House-passed Build Back Better Act. Essentially, it also achieves our shared goals in a progressive way: lowering costs of necessities, creating good jobs, and attacking climate change, while raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations.”

The progressives, with the Squad in tow, followed a well-worn path: set out a “progressive” position; pledge to hold fast to it; compromise with their mainstream opponents; vote for the mainstream “compromise” which drops the progressive position; then, after it passes with their votes, claim that’s what they wanted all along. Perhaps it’s only a coincidence that Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar (R-Minn.) is the chief CPC whip—the person in charge of lining up votes for the CPC positions.

In any event, this is the logical outcome of a politics that remains trapped inside of one of the two main capitalist parties in the U.S. These congress members pose as promoters of an alternative—even social democratic—vision. Yet, when the pressure is on, they act as the most loyal Democrats. As Neal Meyer asked following a 2022 New York DSA convention vote reaffirming the organization’s commitment to running campaigns as Democrats: “Is the strategy now to present ourselves as the ‘real Democrats’ against the ‘fake Democrats’ and ‘Joe Manchins of New York’ (as one DSA state legislative campaign in NYC labeled its opponent)?”

AOC made news in 2020 when she claimed that in any other country, she and Joe Biden wouldn’t be in the same party. That’s certainly true. But given that isn’t the case in the U.S., AOC and the rest of the self-identified social democrat representatives have chosen instead to help the Biden party “govern.” Is this really an example of what it means to“build power” for socialism?

In early 2023, the Republicans will sort out who will lead them in the House and the Democrats will be in a minority. This situation will give the Squad—expected to double in size following results of the 2022 election—more freedom to take oppositional stances. One might even hear more from them about Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. But we shouldn’t forget that if the Democrats regain the majority, they—the “loyal opposition”—will become more “loyal” than oppositional.