Mueller Testimony Deepens Democratic Divide on Impeachment

"WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III’s long-awaited testimony has inflamed divisions among Democrats over impeachment, with some senior lawmakers pushing on Thursday to begin formal impeachment hearings soon, and vulnerable moderates pleading that the party needed to rest its case against President Trump.

Liberal House members who have been agitating for impeachment were buoyed by Mr. Mueller’s nearly seven hours of testimony, asserting, despite modest viewership numbers and no dramatic revelations, that the former special counsel’s words confirmed their case that Mr. Trump had tried to obstruct justice. They showed signs of momentum.

Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has gradually become convinced that his panel should proceed with impeachment hearings and do so as expeditiously as possible, though he has not stated so publicly, according to lawmakers and aides familiar with his thinking. In a closed room of lawmakers on Wednesday evening after the hearing, he broached the idea that House committees could soon begin contemplating articles of impeachment, though Speaker Nancy Pelosi has pushed back on the idea of quick action.

On Thursday, four more House Democrats came out for beginning impeachment proceedings, including the highest ranking one yet: Representative Katherine M. Clark of Massachusetts, the vice chairwoman of the House Democratic Caucus. That pushed the total above 90.

“The case for impeachment based on the Mueller investigation has been now publicly crystallized and articulated,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a leading impeachment advocate on the Judiciary Committee. “The evidence is overwhelming: 10 different episodes of presidential obstruction of justice and the Trump campaign’s enthusiastic embrace of the Russian attack on our elections.”

The majority of the Democratic caucus remains skeptical about what it sees as a politically perilous push that would lead to an almost certain acquittal in the Senate and further drain attention from its legislative work. Some moderate Democrats who helped deliver the House majority to the party in 2018 by flipping Republican seats sounded increasingly exasperated.

“While there may be certain parts of it that are distasteful or disturbing, I don’t see the high crimes or misdemeanors,” said Representative Jeff Van Drew, who flipped a seat in southern New Jersey, discussing Mr. Mueller’s findings. “If we just let this overshadow all these other issues for a longer period of time, too long a period of time, we are really endangering the election for the Democrats.”

Democrats had never expected Mr. Mueller to cinch their case against the president, but they did hold out hope that testimony from the man who pursued Russian election interference and possible presidential obstruction of justice for 22 months would clarify their path forward. Those hopes faded by the time the House gaveled in on Thursday, and with lawmakers leaving Washington for a six-week recess, they now appear likely to fester into the fall.

Ms. Pelosi, an impeachment skeptic and a fierce guardian of members like Mr. Van Drew, did her best to keep the House investigations open. She touted the importance of Mr. Mueller’s testimony and urged lawmakers to “do your own thing” when it comes to impeachment. But behind closed doors, she took issue with those arguing that Democrats opposed to opening an impeachment inquiry are failing their responsibilities under the Constitution.

“I do kind of not feel too comfortable when people say, ‘If you care about the Constitution, you would be for impeachment. If you are not for impeachment, you don’t care about the Constitution,’” she said, according to an aide in the room. “Thank you very much, we all do.”

Amid the soul-searching and private discussions, Democrats were preparing concrete steps to continue to build their case that united all corners of the party.

Mr. Nadler’s committee is expected to formally petition a federal judge on Friday to unseal grand jury secrets compiled over the course of Mr. Mueller’s investigation. The material, committee members say, is necessary to understand exactly what Mr. Mueller learned and to allow lawmakers to evaluate the weight of the evidence for themselves.

Perhaps more important to their efforts is securing the testimony of Donald F. McGahn II, the former White House counsel whose testimony sits at the center of Mr. Mueller’s report on Mr. Trump’s attempts to impede investigators.

If it cannot reach a last-minute accommodation with the White House, the House plans to sue Mr. McGahn in the coming days to force his public testimony before Congress and invite a judge to rule on the validity of a claim by the Trump administration that he and other witnesses have “absolute immunity” from congressional requests. If Democrats are successful, a ruling could free up other potential witnesses and kick-start their investigations — impeachment or otherwise.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reiterated in recent days that Democrats should each “do your own thing” when it comes to impeachment.

The lingering divide over impeachment has led proponents to advocate alternatives. Mr. Nadler and other impeachment supporters are exploring how they could lodge charges against the president without officially opening an inquiry. One possibility, according to people familiar with the plan who insisted on anonymity to discuss it, would be for the judiciary panel to move unilaterally to open its own proceeding, without a vote of the full House.

Doing so, they think, would strengthen their hand in the courts and potentially persuade judges to move more quickly on cases like the potential one against Mr. McGahn, while building on any momentum generated by Mr. Mueller.

Representative Pramila Jayapal, a pro-impeachment Democrat from Washington State and a member of the judiciary panel, said the hearings cleared a major obstacle to educating the public about what Mr. Mueller had found.

“What became clear today was that this is a groundbreaking moment,” Ms. Jayapal said. “This now has allowed us to break open what was stuck in the Mueller report.”

She added, “I think you’ll see the next steps in the next many days.”

The Democrats to join their ranks on Thursday, in addition to Ms. Clark, were Representatives Peter A. DeFazio of Oregon, the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee; Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware; and André Carson of Indiana.

“We can’t allow Republican inaction to prop the door open for thieves to steal an election,” Ms. Clark said in a statement. “We must be relentless in exposing the truth, act to protect our national security, and ensure that every eligible American can vote without foreign interference.”

But there were differences even among those who support an impeachment inquiry over the effect of Wednesday’s hearings — which featured as many awkward, halting moments from Mr. Mueller as flashes of clarity. Privately, several such lawmakers said they felt that the hearings had not cleared the bar to persuade the public and that opportunities for doing so were slipping out of reach.

Also influencing some Democrats’ views of impeachment: Republican support for Mr. Trump in the House survived Wednesday’s hearings without any sign of a crack.

“Why would you ever even bring up impeachment after yesterday’s hearing?” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, asked reporters. “That should be put to bed. We’ve watched it, we’ve heard it, we’ve read it. What more can they make up?”

For Democrats skeptical of or outright opposed to impeachment, the extended August recess could prove a fulcrum. Heading home with much of the legislative year behind them, several front-line Democrats said they feared the House’s pursuit of the president, even if justified, had forced them into hard-to-defend votes and had distracted them from the kinds of policy issues, like health care costs and wage growth, they ran on.

Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat of Georgia and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said he was under intense pressure from voters in his suburban Atlanta district to begin impeachment. But he said he was concerned that moving forward with impeachment proceedings would jeopardize the re-election of swing-district Democrats — the so-called majority makers. He cited Representative Lucy McBath, a freshman who occupies a neighboring district in Georgia.

“Her margin of victory was 1 percent; 60 percent of the people in her district are not in favor of impeachment,” Mr. Johnson said, adding, “You don’t proceed with impeachment without the support of the American people.”

Others in safer seats said they needed to hear what their voters made of Mr. Mueller and the unfolding narrative.

Representative Debbie Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, sounded pained as she discussed the choice lawmakers cannot shake. She has withheld support for impeachment because she believes her Detroit-area constituents are far more interested in pocketbook policy changes than an attempt to take down Mr. Trump.

“I think there are pragmatic people that know it is not going to take us anywhere,” she said. But she added, “You can’t let somebody do what he is doing.”

“I am trying to be very measured about this,” she said. “I want to hear what people back home are saying."

Mueller Testimony Deepens Democratic Divide on Impeachment

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Opinion | Robert Mueller Said All He Needed to Say

"As devastating as Robert Mueller’s report was for the president, his testimony on Wednesday — coming after months of the president’s efforts to deny the report’s realities and shut down all attempts at oversight or accountability — is worse.



From the outset, Mr. Mueller, the former special counsel, was predictably cautious and restrained, and he said very little that went beyond what was in his report. But his plain-spoken answers illuminated for Congress — and millions of Americans watching at home — the case against the president.



Several episodes stand out, all of which Democrats highlighted in their questions to Mr. Mueller at the morning hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.



First, there was President Trump’s June 2017 direction to the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to fire the special counsel in the wake of news reports that he was investigating the president for obstruction of justice — and Mr. Trump’s later insistence that Mr. McGahn create a false internal memorandum that would contradict reporting about this order.



Then there was President Trump’s instructions, in summer 2017, to his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was then a private citizen, to direct Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mr. Mueller’s investigation with the intent to, as stated in the report, “prevent further investigative scrutiny of the president and his campaign’s conduct.”



More from Opinion on the Mueller Testimony



Democrats also noted Mr. Trump’s repeated instructions that Mr. Sessions “unrecuse” himself from running the investigation, which Mr. Mueller said in the report lead to a “reasonable inference” that the president wanted his attorney general to act as a shield from the investigation.



And finally, Mr. Mueller described how Mr. Trump sought, in part through his private attorneys, to influence the cooperation and testimony of several possible witnesses, including his former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his former lawyer Michael Cohen, by making public and private threats, and by floating the possibility of pardons.



These facts, starkly affirmed on Wednesday by Mr. Mueller after months of mischaracterization of his report by the president and others, are catastrophic.



Despite Mr. Mueller’s unwillingness to speculate on hypotheticals, and his adherence to the Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president, these facts, which he also outlined in depth in his report, make clear that were Mr. Trump an ordinary person, he would have been indicted on multiple counts of obstruction of justice, as more than a thousand former federal prosecutors, free of those limitations, have observed.



Republicans did their best, during their own questions, to muddy these facts by attacking Mr. Mueller’s credibility. And of course from the beginning, Mr. Mueller was limited by a finding by the Office of Legal Counsel that a sitting president could not be indicted. And yet there is no doubt, after Wednesday, that Mr. Mueller found substantial evidence of serious and repeated criminal activity by the president. Inaction is not an option. So what next?



Wednesday’s hearings are significant because they mark the point where Congress will take up where Mr. Mueller left off; they were, effectively, the beginning of an inquiry into whether these and other abuses of power are the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the Constitution says would merit President Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. Congress needs to continue that effort and make it official.



To call for a formal impeachment inquiry to begin is not to prejudge its outcome. It is to acknowledge that the preconditions for Congress for initiating that process have undoubtedly been met. It is also an acknowledgment that as a nation we have exhausted other avenues for accountability.



Since his inauguration, Mr. Trump has made clear that he will not abide by the normal standards of ethical and responsible government. Since Democrats took control of Congress in January, he and his administration have asserted baseless privileges and immunities to undermine ordinary forms of legislative oversight of the executive branch, attacked all attempts at review or accountability, and ignored recommendations to discipline top officials for repeatedly violating the law.



President Trump has threatened to dismantle the proposition that no person is above the law. But given what we have all now heard from Mr. Mueller, it is clear that Congress must assert itself as a constitutional protector of the rule of law.



In opening an impeachment inquiry, Congress must confront other questions that Mr. Mueller was not asked to answer — the most important of which is whether President Trump has engaged in other constitutionally repugnant abuses of power. In addition to obstruction of justice, there are at least two more, independent bases for impeachment that Congress should assess.



Just last week, newly released documents reinforced just how personally involved Mr. Trump was in an apparent criminal scheme to defraud enforcement of federal campaign finance laws related to hush money payments to women who claimed that they had affairs with him.



And from the start of his presidency, Mr. Trump has accepted profits, gains and advantages from foreign and domestic governments at properties he still owns, conduct so worrisome to the founders that they prohibited it in the Constitution’s two emoluments clauses. Their fear — that domestic and foreign governments might try to curry favor with the executive — has been realized.



The American people deserve a process that will facilitate a thorough assessment of the evidence presented and the gravity of the president’s misconduct. Far from being a distraction from Congress’s other responsibilities, checking abuses of executive powers is one of its core functions.



Mr. Trump has spent his entire presidency trying to foreclose the possibility of accountability for his misdeeds. Mr. Mueller, in his testimony on Wednesday, made clear that such a path is unacceptable. Congress must take it from here.



Noah Bookbinder (@NoahBookbinder) is the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington."



Opinion | Robert Mueller Said All He Needed to Say

Highlights From Robert Mueller’s Congressional Testimony

Highlights From Robert Mueller’s Congressional Testimony

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Fireworks, Maybe, but Will Mueller Hearing Be a Turning Point? - The New York Times. Don not expect much from his testimony. If you read his report you will know what he will say.

Fireworks, Maybe, but Will Mueller Hearing Be a Turning Point? - The New York Times

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Behind the Scenes of the House Democrats’ Twitter War

"Behind the Scenes of the House Democrats’ Twitter War



In an exclusive interview, Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal explains how she helped broker a truce among the warring factions of the party.



By Joan WalshTwitter



Donald Trump’s racist attacks on four left-leaning, first-term congresswoman over the last week had one salutary side-effect: They seemed to bring feuding House Democratic Caucus members together behind their besieged sisters and in renewed opposition to the repellent president.



But even though Trump’s attacks on the young Democratic leaders—telling them to “go back” to where they came from, though three of the four brown-skinned women were born here, and the fourth became a citizen as a child—appeared to end open warfare among Democrats, the ideological rifts revealed by the clash remain, as does confusion about how a truce was reached. The fragile peace seems to have many fathers and mothers—but the individuals who negotiated the calming of tensions say some folks are taking bows they haven’t earned. I reached out to Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal, who’s credited with doing some of the heavy lifting to unite the House Democratic Caucus. She wanted to set the record straight about what set off the infighting—and what put a stop to it, at least for now.



Although the brightest flashpoints came on Twitter, the original clash, between Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, and moderate Democratic leaders, came into the open after the four voted against a supplemental border-funding bill earlier this month. It was a bill Jayapal and her Progressive Caucus co-chair Mark Pocan worked hard to improve, adding language to require contractors to provide detainees with basic standards of care (food, water, hygiene supplies and medical care), to strip contracts from vendors that didn’t meet those standards, and to keep the government from detaining children for more than 90 days. The four first-term women, all members of the Progressive Caucus, had campaigned promising not to give added money to ICE, so they voted against it. The bill still passed easily, with only their four “nay” votes.



The Senate then rejected it and passed its own bill, with the unexpected support of 33 of 45 Senate Democrats, expanding funding for ICE and border security and leaving out the protective language of the House bill. When it came back to the House, a bloc of 23 conservative Democrats denied Rules Committee chairman Jim McGovern a maneuver that would have added back some of the protections before it went to the floor for a final vote. “It’s really unheard of for Democrats to do that,” Jayapal said, still seething. So the House adopted the Senate bill, but the majority of yeses came from Republicans; only 129 Democrats backed the final bill. Jaypal and Pocan voted with the four women of the so-called “squad” against the Senate bill.



“It passed with 176 Republican votes and only 129 Democratic votes, which simply should not happen when we have the majority, and certainly not without a full caucus discussion about what to do,” Jayapal said, still troubled three weeks later.



That’s the backdrop to this long, hot summer of Democratic infighting (which is technically less than half over). The so-called “squad” went its own way, even though Pelosi worked with progressives to add restrictions to the funding. (That didn’t bother Jayapal; “I knew they were never gonna vote for it; they said so. But we delivered everyone besides them.”) Pelosi was less sanguine, irritated that she’d worked with progressives to improve the bill, only to have the four women with wide progressive reach walk away.



That led to the dis heard ’round the world: when she told poison-penned New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd “they’re four people and that’s how many votes they got,” seeming to downplay their enormous popularity in the broad progressive movement. Ocasio-Cortez shot back, saying Pelosi’s comments “got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful.… the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.” She seemed to suggest race was playing a role, although she immediately denied that was her intent.



Then staffers to the feuding parties took the beef to Twitter, which (take it from me) is never a good idea.



In a series of tweets, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti compared moderate Democrats who voted for the border bill to Southern segregationists, and suggested that Representative Sharice Davids (D-KS), one of the first two Native American women ever elected to Congress, just last year, had voted to “enable a racist system” by supporting the bill. Chakrabarti and Ocasio-Cortez came under fire for the personal attacks.



By several accounts, Chakrabarti was in the process of deleting the offensive tweets when the official Twitter account of the House Democratic Caucus, technically controlled by Caucus chair Hakeem Jeffries, went after him. “Who is this guy and why is he explicitly singling out a Native American woman of color? … She is a phenomenal new member who flipped a red seat blue,” the tweet said. “Keep Her Name Out Of Your Mouth.” Jeffries refused to condemn the escalation, telling reporters=, “The tweet speaks for itself.”



Behind the scenes, tensions were rapidly escalating over the Twitter war, and Jayapal was trying to play peacemaker. “I was very frustrated with the House caucus tweet about Saikat,” she said, since she knew Ocasio-Cortez was already working with her staffer to take the offensive material down—in fact, Chakrabarti had deleted the main offending tweet comparing conservative Democrats to last century’s segregationists, but had not deleted the thread that included the tweet about Davids. “I think it’s important for the House Democratic Caucus twitter account to be about lifting up members, not getting engaged in personality wars, and certainly not pulling out a tweet that was two weeks old,” Jayapal told me. “I was particularly concerned because I was also hearing discomfort from my colleagues—that account is supposed to represent all of us in the caucus, and seemed to just be fueling the fire.”



For the record, Jayapal says she was troubled by Chakrabarti’s tweets too and raised her concerns directly with Ocasio-Cortez. “Those tweets were not helpful, at all, and should not have happened. It’s just not his role, he’s not elected, he’s chief of staff, he represents Alex.” Jayapal had texted Ocasio-Cortez the day before the Trump tweet that ultimately helped unify Democrats, “to say, ‘Can we talk about everything that is happening?’ I wanted to strategize with her about how to move beyond where we were.” When they did meet, last Sunday evening, she discovered that only Representative Karen Bass had actually reached out to the first-term congresswoman directly. Jayapal promised Ocasio-Cortez she would work with others to get the House caucus tweet slamming Chakrabarti taken down.



Jeffries had, multiple times, told reporters he stood by the tweet, when questioned about it. Jayapal and Pocan had a previously scheduled meeting with Jeffries to discuss Progressive Caucus issues, and Jayapal raised the controversial tweet with him. Others had already done so. Jeffries listened, seemed to understand the concerns, and was open to finding a way forward. They discussed a plan that involved deleting both the House Caucus tweet and Chakrabarti’s tweets. Jayapal spoke with Ocasio-Cortez, who immediately agreed, and Chakrabarti’s tweets were deleted. Eventually, the House Caucus tweet came down as well, and peace was restored.



Then Jeffries suggested to Jayapal and Pocan that the leaders of the various Democratic caucuses use the opportunity to come together and release a statement, declaring a unified front. Although the other caucus leaders hadn’t directly been a part of these negotiations, Jayapal and Pocan respected his desire to use this as an opportunity to reset the table. On behalf of the Progressive Caucus, she and Pocan joined Jeffries and New Democrats chair Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA) and Blue Dog chair Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) to release a statement calling Democrats a “diverse, robust and passionate family…dedicated to making life better for everyday Americans.”



“At times, there may be different perspectives on the way forward. That is a hallmark of the legislative process,” the statement read. “We will remain clear-eyed with respect to our unity of purpose. Every single voice within the House Democratic Caucus is an important one. We have a shared mission. Onward and upward.”



All’s well that ends well, right?



Well, mostly.



Though Jeffries told the signees they should let the statement speak for itself, immediately some of the parties began to spin. In a Politico article about the settlement, a photo of Jeffries was captioned: “House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries initiated the olive branch among his colleagues.” But the article itself contradicts that, as does other reporting; Jeffries at first refused to take the House caucus tweet down or to condemn it, though he was repeatedly asked to, and Politico credits Jayapal “as ‘instrumental’ to securing the détente.”



What most irked Jayapal was that an earlier inflammatory tweet by Pocan was depicted as part of the deal; in fact, Pocan had on his own decided to remove the tweet, which he posted after conservative Democrats blocked the House vote to add restrictions to the Senate border-funding bill. (It asked sarcastically, “Since when did the Problem Solvers Caucus become the Child Abuse Caucus?”) “Mark’s tweet never came up in the meetings! It was like I threw Mark under the bus.” For his part, Pocan knows she did not.



It was also surprising, to me, to see conservative Problem Solvers caucus chair Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey take a victory lap at the end of the Politico piece. Described as “a moderate who has also been part of efforts to unify the caucus”—narrator’s voice here; I have never heard anything like that—Gottheimer was quoted saying, “I think there’s a real recognition that even when we have differences, there’s a constructive way to have those conversations.”



Given that Gottheimer took the lead in squashing the attempt to at least amend the Senate bill with some progressive-backed restrictions on funding, enraging some constituents sufficiently that they began talking—even to Politico, by the way—about a primary challenge to the monied moderate, that seemed a stretch. Jayapal confirmed that Gottheimer had nothing to do with the Democrats’ truce.



Still, some good came out of all the infighting. After Jayapal trained her fire on Senate Democrats for passing the border bill without protections for detainees, she got a phone call from minority leader Chuck Schumer. “We need to have more consultation with the Senate Dems and the CPC,” she told him. “We actually used to have a big group of Senate Dems who met with us—but they’re all running for president!” she jokes, and indeed that week many of them were away at the first debates. “Jeff Merkley was there and of course he pushed back, but we didn’t have Elizabeth, Bernie, Kamala, Cory! That was very difficult.” (That’s Warren, Sanders, Harris, and Booker, for those who aren’t on a first-name basis with some top-tier Democrats.) But last Wednesday, Schumer met personally with the House Progressive Caucus “and promised a closer connection between the CPC and the Senate.”



That’s good, because issues of border funding will return to Congress this fall, and Jayapal told me Democrats “need to seize the narrative” and say this has never been about money. “They have the money for toothpaste. They have the money for food.” To Jayapal it’s about “a badly managed agency, and a complete lack of accountability from the administration.” Two data points—you might call them atrocities—stand out to her. One is the Border Patrol Facebook group riddled with racism that has 10,000 members, roughly half the force. And the fact that former Homeland Security secretary John Kelly now sits on the board a for-profit company running child-detention centers, including one in Homestead, Florida, which bills $750 a night but can’t guarantee its young charges adequate food, water, or hygiene. “You can stay at the Ritz for that,” she notes. And you would definitely get toothpaste.



That’s why Jayapal says border issues aren’t mainly about money. It’s clear the Democrats will be battling over these issues again come fall. But let’s hope they debate openly, and fight cleanly, and leave Twitter insults to others. “I hope that we take what happened as important lessons learned, and move on with the recognition that people need to talk to one another more directly when there are problems,” she says. “Which there certainly will be, because we are a caucus that values diversity!”



Behind the Scenes of the House Democrats’ Twitter War

Behind the Scenes of the House Democrats’ Twitter War

"Behind the Scenes of the House Democrats’ Twitter War



In an exclusive interview, Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal explains how she helped broker a truce among the warring factions of the party.



By Joan WalshTwitter



Donald Trump’s racist attacks on four left-leaning, first-term congresswoman over the last week had one salutary side-effect: They seemed to bring feuding House Democratic Caucus members together behind their besieged sisters and in renewed opposition to the repellent president.



But even though Trump’s attacks on the young Democratic leaders—telling them to “go back” to where they came from, though three of the four brown-skinned women were born here, and the fourth became a citizen as a child—appeared to end open warfare among Democrats, the ideological rifts revealed by the clash remain, as does confusion about how a truce was reached. The fragile peace seems to have many fathers and mothers—but the individuals who negotiated the calming of tensions say some folks are taking bows they haven’t earned. I reached out to Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal, who’s credited with doing some of the heavy lifting to unite the House Democratic Caucus. She wanted to set the record straight about what set off the infighting—and what put a stop to it, at least for now.



Although the brightest flashpoints came on Twitter, the original clash, between Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, and moderate Democratic leaders, came into the open after the four voted against a supplemental border-funding bill earlier this month. It was a bill Jayapal and her Progressive Caucus co-chair Mark Pocan worked hard to improve, adding language to require contractors to provide detainees with basic standards of care (food, water, hygiene supplies and medical care), to strip contracts from vendors that didn’t meet those standards, and to keep the government from detaining children for more than 90 days. The four first-term women, all members of the Progressive Caucus, had campaigned promising not to give added money to ICE, so they voted against it. The bill still passed easily, with only their four “nay” votes.



The Senate then rejected it and passed its own bill, with the unexpected support of 33 of 45 Senate Democrats, expanding funding for ICE and border security and leaving out the protective language of the House bill. When it came back to the House, a bloc of 23 conservative Democrats denied Rules Committee chairman Jim McGovern a maneuver that would have added back some of the protections before it went to the floor for a final vote. “It’s really unheard of for Democrats to do that,” Jayapal said, still seething. So the House adopted the Senate bill, but the majority of yeses came from Republicans; only 129 Democrats backed the final bill. Jaypal and Pocan voted with the four women of the so-called “squad” against the Senate bill.



“It passed with 176 Republican votes and only 129 Democratic votes, which simply should not happen when we have the majority, and certainly not without a full caucus discussion about what to do,” Jayapal said, still troubled three weeks later.



That’s the backdrop to this long, hot summer of Democratic infighting (which is technically less than half over). The so-called “squad” went its own way, even though Pelosi worked with progressives to add restrictions to the funding. (That didn’t bother Jayapal; “I knew they were never gonna vote for it; they said so. But we delivered everyone besides them.”) Pelosi was less sanguine, irritated that she’d worked with progressives to improve the bill, only to have the four women with wide progressive reach walk away.



That led to the dis heard ’round the world: when she told poison-penned New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd “they’re four people and that’s how many votes they got,” seeming to downplay their enormous popularity in the broad progressive movement. Ocasio-Cortez shot back, saying Pelosi’s comments “got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful.… the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.” She seemed to suggest race was playing a role, although she immediately denied that was her intent.



Then staffers to the feuding parties took the beef to Twitter, which (take it from me) is never a good idea.



In a series of tweets, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti compared moderate Democrats who voted for the border bill to Southern segregationists, and suggested that Representative Sharice Davids (D-KS), one of the first two Native American women ever elected to Congress, just last year, had voted to “enable a racist system” by supporting the bill. Chakrabarti and Ocasio-Cortez came under fire for the personal attacks.



By several accounts, Chakrabarti was in the process of deleting the offensive tweets when the official Twitter account of the House Democratic Caucus, technically controlled by Caucus chair Hakeem Jeffries, went after him. “Who is this guy and why is he explicitly singling out a Native American woman of color? … She is a phenomenal new member who flipped a red seat blue,” the tweet said. “Keep Her Name Out Of Your Mouth.” Jeffries refused to condemn the escalation, telling reporters=, “The tweet speaks for itself.”



Behind the scenes, tensions were rapidly escalating over the Twitter war, and Jayapal was trying to play peacemaker. “I was very frustrated with the House caucus tweet about Saikat,” she said, since she knew Ocasio-Cortez was already working with her staffer to take the offensive material down—in fact, Chakrabarti had deleted the main offending tweet comparing conservative Democrats to last century’s segregationists, but had not deleted the thread that included the tweet about Davids. “I think it’s important for the House Democratic Caucus twitter account to be about lifting up members, not getting engaged in personality wars, and certainly not pulling out a tweet that was two weeks old,” Jayapal told me. “I was particularly concerned because I was also hearing discomfort from my colleagues—that account is supposed to represent all of us in the caucus, and seemed to just be fueling the fire.”



For the record, Jayapal says she was troubled by Chakrabarti’s tweets too and raised her concerns directly with Ocasio-Cortez. “Those tweets were not helpful, at all, and should not have happened. It’s just not his role, he’s not elected, he’s chief of staff, he represents Alex.” Jayapal had texted Ocasio-Cortez the day before the Trump tweet that ultimately helped unify Democrats, “to say, ‘Can we talk about everything that is happening?’ I wanted to strategize with her about how to move beyond where we were.” When they did meet, last Sunday evening, she discovered that only Representative Karen Bass had actually reached out to the first-term congresswoman directly. Jayapal promised Ocasio-Cortez she would work with others to get the House caucus tweet slamming Chakrabarti taken down.



Jeffries had, multiple times, told reporters he stood by the tweet, when questioned about it. Jayapal and Pocan had a previously scheduled meeting with Jeffries to discuss Progressive Caucus issues, and Jayapal raised the controversial tweet with him. Others had already done so. Jeffries listened, seemed to understand the concerns, and was open to finding a way forward. They discussed a plan that involved deleting both the House Caucus tweet and Chakrabarti’s tweets. Jayapal spoke with Ocasio-Cortez, who immediately agreed, and Chakrabarti’s tweets were deleted. Eventually, the House Caucus tweet came down as well, and peace was restored.



Then Jeffries suggested to Jayapal and Pocan that the leaders of the various Democratic caucuses use the opportunity to come together and release a statement, declaring a unified front. Although the other caucus leaders hadn’t directly been a part of these negotiations, Jayapal and Pocan respected his desire to use this as an opportunity to reset the table. On behalf of the Progressive Caucus, she and Pocan joined Jeffries and New Democrats chair Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA) and Blue Dog chair Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) to release a statement calling Democrats a “diverse, robust and passionate family…dedicated to making life better for everyday Americans.”



“At times, there may be different perspectives on the way forward. That is a hallmark of the legislative process,” the statement read. “We will remain clear-eyed with respect to our unity of purpose. Every single voice within the House Democratic Caucus is an important one. We have a shared mission. Onward and upward.”



All’s well that ends well, right?



Well, mostly.



Though Jeffries told the signees they should let the statement speak for itself, immediately some of the parties began to spin. In a Politico article about the settlement, a photo of Jeffries was captioned: “House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries initiated the olive branch among his colleagues.” But the article itself contradicts that, as does other reporting; Jeffries at first refused to take the House caucus tweet down or to condemn it, though he was repeatedly asked to, and Politico credits Jayapal “as ‘instrumental’ to securing the détente.”



What most irked Jayapal was that an earlier inflammatory tweet by Pocan was depicted as part of the deal; in fact, Pocan had on his own decided to remove the tweet, which he posted after conservative Democrats blocked the House vote to add restrictions to the Senate border-funding bill. (It asked sarcastically, “Since when did the Problem Solvers Caucus become the Child Abuse Caucus?”) “Mark’s tweet never came up in the meetings! It was like I threw Mark under the bus.” For his part, Pocan knows she did not.



It was also surprising, to me, to see conservative Problem Solvers caucus chair Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey take a victory lap at the end of the Politico piece. Described as “a moderate who has also been part of efforts to unify the caucus”—narrator’s voice here; I have never heard anything like that—Gottheimer was quoted saying, “I think there’s a real recognition that even when we have differences, there’s a constructive way to have those conversations.”



Given that Gottheimer took the lead in squashing the attempt to at least amend the Senate bill with some progressive-backed restrictions on funding, enraging some constituents sufficiently that they began talking—even to Politico, by the way—about a primary challenge to the monied moderate, that seemed a stretch. Jayapal confirmed that Gottheimer had nothing to do with the Democrats’ truce.



Still, some good came out of all the infighting. After Jayapal trained her fire on Senate Democrats for passing the border bill without protections for detainees, she got a phone call from minority leader Chuck Schumer. “We need to have more consultation with the Senate Dems and the CPC,” she told him. “We actually used to have a big group of Senate Dems who met with us—but they’re all running for president!” she jokes, and indeed that week many of them were away at the first debates. “Jeff Merkley was there and of course he pushed back, but we didn’t have Elizabeth, Bernie, Kamala, Cory! That was very difficult.” (That’s Warren, Sanders, Harris, and Booker, for those who aren’t on a first-name basis with some top-tier Democrats.) But last Wednesday, Schumer met personally with the House Progressive Caucus “and promised a closer connection between the CPC and the Senate.”



That’s good, because issues of border funding will return to Congress this fall, and Jayapal told me Democrats “need to seize the narrative” and say this has never been about money. “They have the money for toothpaste. They have the money for food.” To Jayapal it’s about “a badly managed agency, and a complete lack of accountability from the administration.” Two data points—you might call them atrocities—stand out to her. One is the Border Patrol Facebook group riddled with racism that has 10,000 members, roughly half the force. And the fact that former Homeland Security secretary John Kelly now sits on the board a for-profit company running child-detention centers, including one in Homestead, Florida, which bills $750 a night but can’t guarantee its young charges adequate food, water, or hygiene. “You can stay at the Ritz for that,” she notes. And you would definitely get toothpaste.



That’s why Jayapal says border issues aren’t mainly about money. It’s clear the Democrats will be battling over these issues again come fall. But let’s hope they debate openly, and fight cleanly, and leave Twitter insults to others. “I hope that we take what happened as important lessons learned, and move on with the recognition that people need to talk to one another more directly when there are problems,” she says. “Which there certainly will be, because we are a caucus that values diversity!”



Behind the Scenes of the House Democrats’ Twitter War

Behind the Scenes of the House Democrats’ Twitter War

"Behind the Scenes of the House Democrats’ Twitter War



In an exclusive interview, Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal explains how she helped broker a truce among the warring factions of the party.



By Joan WalshTwitter



Donald Trump’s racist attacks on four left-leaning, first-term congresswoman over the last week had one salutary side-effect: They seemed to bring feuding House Democratic Caucus members together behind their besieged sisters and in renewed opposition to the repellent president.



But even though Trump’s attacks on the young Democratic leaders—telling them to “go back” to where they came from, though three of the four brown-skinned women were born here, and the fourth became a citizen as a child—appeared to end open warfare among Democrats, the ideological rifts revealed by the clash remain, as does confusion about how a truce was reached. The fragile peace seems to have many fathers and mothers—but the individuals who negotiated the calming of tensions say some folks are taking bows they haven’t earned. I reached out to Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal, who’s credited with doing some of the heavy lifting to unite the House Democratic Caucus. She wanted to set the record straight about what set off the infighting—and what put a stop to it, at least for now.



Although the brightest flashpoints came on Twitter, the original clash, between Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, and moderate Democratic leaders, came into the open after the four voted against a supplemental border-funding bill earlier this month. It was a bill Jayapal and her Progressive Caucus co-chair Mark Pocan worked hard to improve, adding language to require contractors to provide detainees with basic standards of care (food, water, hygiene supplies and medical care), to strip contracts from vendors that didn’t meet those standards, and to keep the government from detaining children for more than 90 days. The four first-term women, all members of the Progressive Caucus, had campaigned promising not to give added money to ICE, so they voted against it. The bill still passed easily, with only their four “nay” votes.



The Senate then rejected it and passed its own bill, with the unexpected support of 33 of 45 Senate Democrats, expanding funding for ICE and border security and leaving out the protective language of the House bill. When it came back to the House, a bloc of 23 conservative Democrats denied Rules Committee chairman Jim McGovern a maneuver that would have added back some of the protections before it went to the floor for a final vote. “It’s really unheard of for Democrats to do that,” Jayapal said, still seething. So the House adopted the Senate bill, but the majority of yeses came from Republicans; only 129 Democrats backed the final bill. Jaypal and Pocan voted with the four women of the so-called “squad” against the Senate bill.



“It passed with 176 Republican votes and only 129 Democratic votes, which simply should not happen when we have the majority, and certainly not without a full caucus discussion about what to do,” Jayapal said, still troubled three weeks later.



That’s the backdrop to this long, hot summer of Democratic infighting (which is technically less than half over). The so-called “squad” went its own way, even though Pelosi worked with progressives to add restrictions to the funding. (That didn’t bother Jayapal; “I knew they were never gonna vote for it; they said so. But we delivered everyone besides them.”) Pelosi was less sanguine, irritated that she’d worked with progressives to improve the bill, only to have the four women with wide progressive reach walk away.



That led to the dis heard ’round the world: when she told poison-penned New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd “they’re four people and that’s how many votes they got,” seeming to downplay their enormous popularity in the broad progressive movement. Ocasio-Cortez shot back, saying Pelosi’s comments “got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful.… the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.” She seemed to suggest race was playing a role, although she immediately denied that was her intent.



Then staffers to the feuding parties took the beef to Twitter, which (take it from me) is never a good idea.



In a series of tweets, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti compared moderate Democrats who voted for the border bill to Southern segregationists, and suggested that Representative Sharice Davids (D-KS), one of the first two Native American women ever elected to Congress, just last year, had voted to “enable a racist system” by supporting the bill. Chakrabarti and Ocasio-Cortez came under fire for the personal attacks.



By several accounts, Chakrabarti was in the process of deleting the offensive tweets when the official Twitter account of the House Democratic Caucus, technically controlled by Caucus chair Hakeem Jeffries, went after him. “Who is this guy and why is he explicitly singling out a Native American woman of color? … She is a phenomenal new member who flipped a red seat blue,” the tweet said. “Keep Her Name Out Of Your Mouth.” Jeffries refused to condemn the escalation, telling reporters=, “The tweet speaks for itself.”



Behind the scenes, tensions were rapidly escalating over the Twitter war, and Jayapal was trying to play peacemaker. “I was very frustrated with the House caucus tweet about Saikat,” she said, since she knew Ocasio-Cortez was already working with her staffer to take the offensive material down—in fact, Chakrabarti had deleted the main offending tweet comparing conservative Democrats to last century’s segregationists, but had not deleted the thread that included the tweet about Davids. “I think it’s important for the House Democratic Caucus twitter account to be about lifting up members, not getting engaged in personality wars, and certainly not pulling out a tweet that was two weeks old,” Jayapal told me. “I was particularly concerned because I was also hearing discomfort from my colleagues—that account is supposed to represent all of us in the caucus, and seemed to just be fueling the fire.”



For the record, Jayapal says she was troubled by Chakrabarti’s tweets too and raised her concerns directly with Ocasio-Cortez. “Those tweets were not helpful, at all, and should not have happened. It’s just not his role, he’s not elected, he’s chief of staff, he represents Alex.” Jayapal had texted Ocasio-Cortez the day before the Trump tweet that ultimately helped unify Democrats, “to say, ‘Can we talk about everything that is happening?’ I wanted to strategize with her about how to move beyond where we were.” When they did meet, last Sunday evening, she discovered that only Representative Karen Bass had actually reached out to the first-term congresswoman directly. Jayapal promised Ocasio-Cortez she would work with others to get the House caucus tweet slamming Chakrabarti taken down.



Jeffries had, multiple times, told reporters he stood by the tweet, when questioned about it. Jayapal and Pocan had a previously scheduled meeting with Jeffries to discuss Progressive Caucus issues, and Jayapal raised the controversial tweet with him. Others had already done so. Jeffries listened, seemed to understand the concerns, and was open to finding a way forward. They discussed a plan that involved deleting both the House Caucus tweet and Chakrabarti’s tweets. Jayapal spoke with Ocasio-Cortez, who immediately agreed, and Chakrabarti’s tweets were deleted. Eventually, the House Caucus tweet came down as well, and peace was restored.



Then Jeffries suggested to Jayapal and Pocan that the leaders of the various Democratic caucuses use the opportunity to come together and release a statement, declaring a unified front. Although the other caucus leaders hadn’t directly been a part of these negotiations, Jayapal and Pocan respected his desire to use this as an opportunity to reset the table. On behalf of the Progressive Caucus, she and Pocan joined Jeffries and New Democrats chair Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA) and Blue Dog chair Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) to release a statement calling Democrats a “diverse, robust and passionate family…dedicated to making life better for everyday Americans.”



“At times, there may be different perspectives on the way forward. That is a hallmark of the legislative process,” the statement read. “We will remain clear-eyed with respect to our unity of purpose. Every single voice within the House Democratic Caucus is an important one. We have a shared mission. Onward and upward.”



All’s well that ends well, right?



Well, mostly.



Though Jeffries told the signees they should let the statement speak for itself, immediately some of the parties began to spin. In a Politico article about the settlement, a photo of Jeffries was captioned: “House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries initiated the olive branch among his colleagues.” But the article itself contradicts that, as does other reporting; Jeffries at first refused to take the House caucus tweet down or to condemn it, though he was repeatedly asked to, and Politico credits Jayapal “as ‘instrumental’ to securing the détente.”



What most irked Jayapal was that an earlier inflammatory tweet by Pocan was depicted as part of the deal; in fact, Pocan had on his own decided to remove the tweet, which he posted after conservative Democrats blocked the House vote to add restrictions to the Senate border-funding bill. (It asked sarcastically, “Since when did the Problem Solvers Caucus become the Child Abuse Caucus?”) “Mark’s tweet never came up in the meetings! It was like I threw Mark under the bus.” For his part, Pocan knows she did not.



It was also surprising, to me, to see conservative Problem Solvers caucus chair Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey take a victory lap at the end of the Politico piece. Described as “a moderate who has also been part of efforts to unify the caucus”—narrator’s voice here; I have never heard anything like that—Gottheimer was quoted saying, “I think there’s a real recognition that even when we have differences, there’s a constructive way to have those conversations.”



Given that Gottheimer took the lead in squashing the attempt to at least amend the Senate bill with some progressive-backed restrictions on funding, enraging some constituents sufficiently that they began talking—even to Politico, by the way—about a primary challenge to the monied moderate, that seemed a stretch. Jayapal confirmed that Gottheimer had nothing to do with the Democrats’ truce.



Still, some good came out of all the infighting. After Jayapal trained her fire on Senate Democrats for passing the border bill without protections for detainees, she got a phone call from minority leader Chuck Schumer. “We need to have more consultation with the Senate Dems and the CPC,” she told him. “We actually used to have a big group of Senate Dems who met with us—but they’re all running for president!” she jokes, and indeed that week many of them were away at the first debates. “Jeff Merkley was there and of course he pushed back, but we didn’t have Elizabeth, Bernie, Kamala, Cory! That was very difficult.” (That’s Warren, Sanders, Harris, and Booker, for those who aren’t on a first-name basis with some top-tier Democrats.) But last Wednesday, Schumer met personally with the House Progressive Caucus “and promised a closer connection between the CPC and the Senate.”



That’s good, because issues of border funding will return to Congress this fall, and Jayapal told me Democrats “need to seize the narrative” and say this has never been about money. “They have the money for toothpaste. They have the money for food.” To Jayapal it’s about “a badly managed agency, and a complete lack of accountability from the administration.” Two data points—you might call them atrocities—stand out to her. One is the Border Patrol Facebook group riddled with racism that has 10,000 members, roughly half the force. And the fact that former Homeland Security secretary John Kelly now sits on the board a for-profit company running child-detention centers, including one in Homestead, Florida, which bills $750 a night but can’t guarantee its young charges adequate food, water, or hygiene. “You can stay at the Ritz for that,” she notes. And you would definitely get toothpaste.



That’s why Jayapal says border issues aren’t mainly about money. It’s clear the Democrats will be battling over these issues again come fall. But let’s hope they debate openly, and fight cleanly, and leave Twitter insults to others. “I hope that we take what happened as important lessons learned, and move on with the recognition that people need to talk to one another more directly when there are problems,” she says. “Which there certainly will be, because we are a caucus that values diversity!”



Behind the Scenes of the House Democrats’ Twitter War

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