Here’s something you don’t see every day: members of the president’s own political party planning on giving a rebuttal to his State of the Union speech on March 1.
Generally, the party out of power is afforded equal time to respond to the president’s hyping of his own record. But Michigan Congresswoman Rep. Rashida Tlaib, on behalf of the radical left Working Families Party, is going to skewer her own party for not kowtowing to the president’s “transformative” agenda and for refusing to enact ruinously expensive programs that would curtail liberty.
Tlaib won’t necessarily criticize Joe Biden. But we can expect that Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) will be called out by name to be shamed — just they did in Mao’s heyday.
During her talk, Tlaib is expected to criticize some Democrats by name, and that likely means Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who opposed parts of Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation. Another featured boogeyman might be Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), who led a small group of centrist Democrats who threatened to kill the budget unless the bipartisan infrastructure legislation first passed.
Biden’s “agenda is incomplete,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. “We’re going to be clear about who and why the agenda is incomplete. There are particular political actors — of course Republicans, but then a very niche, small group of obstructionist Democrats. And we’re going to name names.”
Tlaib is also expected to demand that Biden use extra-constitutional authority to cancel student loan debt — all $2 trillion of it — and change the way poverty is calculated so more people can get on the dole.
But most of all, Tlaib will use the speech to call for the election of more radical crazies just like her. It will be live-streamed, so the audience will probably only surpass CNN.
Related: ‘Squad Politics’ Has Backfired Spectacularly on Democrats
Tlaib and the radical left don’t care about the midterms as other Democrats do. They aren’t interested in maintaining a Democratic majority. All they care about is adding more wacky members to their caucus.
If that’s what the Left sees, then the Galston-Kamarck prediction of utter disaster in 2022 and 2024 elections will come true in blinding Technicolor. The progressive Left has a real opportunity to elect more progressive Democratic minorities to both chambers of Congress in this election, and then to lose even more ground in the Senate in 2024 when Democrats have to defend more seats. That is the outcome of such purity campaigns, which have had a long tradition in both parties but in which Democrats seem to engage every 20-30 years in modern times: mid-1940s over Communism, 1968 and 1988 over the New Left, and now 2022.
Looks like popcorn’s back on the menu. Let us have it!
Since I have a heart condition, I’d like mine unbuttered and unsalted, please.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member