Progressive Caucus

Student Resistance To Gaza Genocide Spurs Crisis For Democrats

May 6, 2024 Habib Badawi, Mondoweiss. Strategize! Campus Movement, Democrats, Gaza, Genocide, Israel, Progressive Caucus, Student Activism

The defiant student protests erupting across American universities over U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza represent something far beyond a cyclical wave of campus activism. These scenes symbolize a profound political crisis that has laid bare the fractures within the Democratic Party and its faltering grip on a disaffected younger generation. As the Biden administration persists in providing military aid and diplomatic imprimatur for Israel’s bombardment of the densely populated Palestinian territory, the human suffering in Gaza has become a tragic staging ground for global outrage.

Progressives Capitulate To Biden

May 7, 2021 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Democrats, Joe Biden, Progressive Caucus

No one is holding Joe Biden’s “feet to the fire” or pushing him left or taking any of the other make believe actions which were meant to silence the Democratic Party’s left wing. There is no longer any need to say that such claims are phony when proof comes straight from the horses’ mouths. The Justice Democrats, Progressive Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus all sing Biden’s praises despite the fact that he lied to them and to their constituents during the 2020 campaign. All of the policies that rank and file Democrats want to see realized are again left behind though their party has the power to enact them. Only fools believe that a Senate parliamentarian prevented inclusion of a minimum wage increase in the stimulus plan.

Squad And Company Must Unite As A Bloc To Downsize Biden’s Military Budget

May 6, 2021 Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd, Popular Resistance. Organize! Congress, Joe Biden, Pentagon Budget, Progressive Caucus

Imagine this scenario: A month before the vote on the federal budget, progressives in Congress declared, “We’ve studied President Biden’s proposed $753 billion military budget, an increase of $13 billion from Trump’s already inflated budget, and we can’t, in good conscience, support this.” Now that would be a show stopper, particularly if they added, “So we have decided to stand united, arm in arm, as a block of NO votes on any federal budget resolution that fails to reduce military spending by 10-30 percent. We stand united against a federal budget resolution that includes upwards of $30 billion for new nuclear weapons slated to ultimately cost nearly $2 trillion. We stand united in demanding the $50 billion earmarked to maintain all 800 overseas bases, including the new one under construction in Henoko, Okinawa, be reduced by a third because it’s time we scaled back on plans for global domination.”

Congressional Progressive/Pentagon Caucus

September 3, 2013 David Swanson, www.warisacrime.org Educate! Progressive Caucus, Wars and Militarism

Back in 2007, the Congressional Progressive Caucus helped organize 90 Congress members to commit to voting against war funding. Most of them turned around and voted for war funding. That was a high point for the CPC. Since then, its commitments -- such as to vote against corporate healthcare -- have hardly been taken seriously, and so it's hardly been news when most members have gone back on their commitments. The CPC has shifted in recent years away from pretending to take a stand on things, and instead toward issuing statements full of non-committal rhetoric. That, too, is now a stage in the devolution of the CPC to which we can look back with nostalgia. The CPC, on the question of a new war on Syria, is choosing to do nothing at all. In fact, one of its two co-chairs is actively promoting war.

Lesson Learned [Again]: We Cannot Trust Progressive Democrats

July 28, 2013 Cole Stangler, www.inthesetimes.com Educate! Government, NSA, Progressive Caucus

'When push comes to shove and you actually have a chance of winning one of these votes, you’ll usually see a bunch of people who purport to be progressives back with the institutionalists.' On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of legislators in the House came extraordinarily close to passing an amendment that would have prevented the National Security Agency from collecting bulk data on Americans. The Amash-Conyers amendment would have limited Section 215 of the Patriot Act to apply only to individuals subject to investigation under that law, barring mass surveillance programs like PRISM. Failing by a 217-205 vote, the amendment earned support from an unlikely coalition of Republicans and Democrats—a group that could perhaps lead future legislative rebellions against the surveillance state.

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