The Squad Has Been Decimated by the Democratic Primaries
slate.com
Both BLM activists were pushed out. And the Squad isn’t done being primaried.

Despite broad popular support for legislation to curtail police violence, Congress got nothing done. Democrats, despite controlling both the House and Senate in 2021 and 2022, slow-walked the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, insisting on bipartisan support that never materialized. Ending qualified immunity, the legal standard that prevents police officers from being sued for wrongdoing even when they knowingly break the law, was deemed not urgent by Jim Clyburn, then the highest-ranking Black member of the Democratic House majority, despite that being a core demand of the protest movement. Once that slipped away, it opened the door to even smaller reforms floating out of reach.

In the end, despite the embarrassing photo op in which Democratic leaders donned matching kente-cloth stoles and knelt on the floor of the Capitol building, no reforms were passed into law. After much hand-wringing over activists’ use of the slogan “Defund the Police,” no major efforts to defund large police departments were ever implemented. Police killings continued to increase: Officers killed at least 1,232 people in 2023, the deadliest year in a decade.

Now not even a single representative who swept into Congress on the heels of the popular mandate of police reform remains.

It’s a stark outcome. Consider, for example, Georgia Rep. John Lewis, an activist during the Civil Rights Movement and the leader of the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama. Lewis continued his activist work for years afterward, arriving in Congress only in the 1980s, but he served 17 terms as a celebrated member of the Democratic House caucus until his death in 2020.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240814115829/https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/omar-tlaib-bush-bowman-primaries-squad-democrats-aipac-israel.html

Worth noting, this opinion piece came out before Ilhan Omar’s primary took place, which she ended up winning

e; wrong archive link

  • jpreston2005@lemmy.world
    88·
    3 months ago

    Now, just over four years later, both Bowman and Bush have been routed out of Congress, thanks to a historic deluge of big-money spending against them. They battled challengers in the most and third-most-expensive congressional primaries in American history, respectively, and each was outspent roughly 4–1. In both races, the overwhelming majority of that money came from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the conservative, pro-Netanyahu lobbying group that has fast become one of the biggest outside spenders in elections, funded in large part by Republican megadonors. The cryptocurrency industry, also increasingly Republican-aligned, chipped in at least $1.5 million to knock out Bush and over $2 million to knock out Bowman too.

    Thanks Citizens United! I love having an unlimited amount of dark, untraceable money from foreign powers influencing our elections!

    • HasturInYellow@lemmy.world
      8·
      3 months ago

      There need to be massive protests/riots about this shit. I’m talking about showing up on senators’ lawns with 10,000 or more people with guns (to keep police at a distance) or some shit. These people need to fucking FEAR US, the fucking voters or they will continue to rape our society out of existence.

      • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.worldOP
        6·
        3 months ago

        I like the energy, but if you try to organize anything like that undercover cops will infiltrate your group, push you to go beyond self defense to planning pre-emptive violence, and then get a nice commendation in their file when you’re all arrested and charged with terrorism