House Democratic leaders have spent the past few weeks waging a bitter campaign against their own left flank over a leftwing streamer. On Tuesday, it was the party’s center-right who blindsided them. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, announced late on Tuesday that he had asked the Democratic caucus’s committee on caucus rules to consider punishing the retiring Jared Golden of Maine and Blue Dog Coalition leader Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington after the pair sided with Republicans on a procedural vote that had appeared doomed.
For much of the past few weeks, he and other senior Democrats have trained their fire on the party’s left, repeatedly condemning Hasan Piker, a leftwing streamer, over remarks about antisemitism and the 11 September attacks that he says were taken out of context. That campaign has drawn accusations from progressives that leadership is picking an unwinnable fight with a Twitch personality while ignoring bigger political threats. On Tuesday, the bigger threat to comity turned out to come from the party’s center-right instead.
The vote in question was a routine procedural measure known as a “rule”, which the House majority must pass before it can bring legislation to the floor. Five Republican hardliners had planned to vote it down, in a dispute unrelated to its substance, which would have handed the speaker, Mike Johnson, an embarrassing defeat and potentially disrupted the House’s legislative calendar for the rest of the month. Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez supplied the votes that let the rule pass, 210 to 208.
Under House rules, a tied vote is treated as a defeat, meaning their support was decisive. It is highly unusual for members of the minority party to back the majority’s procedural rules, which typically pass on party-line votes and are treated by leadership as a basic marker of caucus discipline. Neither Golden nor Gluesenkamp Perez gave Democratic leaders advance notice, according to House Democratic leadership.
Clark told reporters shortly after the vote that the move “came as a surprise”. Jeffries later told reporters that the two Democrats “blindsided the entire caucus and created a significant breach of trust”. The rule cleared the way for a package of Republican-favored bills to reach the floor, including a GOP resolution condemning socialism and the Democratic Socialists of America, a measure Republicans are expected to use against Democrats in midterm campaign messaging.
That resolution also included a poison pill in the form of a statement of support for Donald Trump’s restrictive voting legislation, Save Act. The stunt was designed to force House Democrats to choose between voting against the resolution in what Republicans would portray as tacit support for socialism, or vote in favor of it and lend a (non-binding) blessing to legislation that experts say could stop millions of Americans from voting. The rule also advanced a bipartisan bill, co-authored by Golden, to shield Maine’s lobster industry from federal whale-protection regulations the fishing industry says could put smaller operators out of business.
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