Rage Against the Machine

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García represents a deep-blue district in Illinois. Late last month he filed the paperwork to run for a fifth term in Congress but was hit soon after with bad news when his doctor advised him to quit for the sake of his health. His wife’s multiple sclerosis has also taken a turn for the worse, and the couple just adopted one of their young grandchildren, who was orphaned after García’s daughter passed away a few years ago.

After thinking about it, he changed his mind and announced on November 4 that he’ll retire after serving out the rest of this term. All well and good—except for the timing. The deadline for candidates to enter the race had expired just the day before and, as it turns out, that was no coincidence. Per CNN, “One day before his announcement, García’s chief of staff, Patty Garcia, who has no relation to the congressman, filed petitions with the Illinois State Board of Elections to run for the seat ahead of the 5 p.m. filing deadline that day.”

That’s the electoral equivalent of insider trading. García and his chief of staff were privy to inside information about his retirement; instead of announcing it immediately and giving hopefuls in his district a chance to throw their hats into the ring, they kept it quiet so that his chief of staff would be the only Democrat to beat the deadline. Essentially, the two “rigged” the coming House election by gaming the timing so that she would end up running unopposed in a primary.

García’s organization even quietly helped her collect signatures to qualify for the ballot.

It was classic scummy machine politics—and not the first example in which he’s been involved. He, too, “inherited” his House seat when the previous occupant blindsided the district by announcing his retirement and endorsing García on the same day. Yet, with one exception, none of García’s Democratic colleagues had an issue with what he and his chief of staff did.

The exception was Gluesenkamp Perez, who was so offended by it that she filed a privileged resolution condemning Garcia’s actions as “beneath the dignity of his office and incompatible with the United States Constitution.” In a floor speech on Monday, she made her case succinctly: “If you’re not going to run, you don’t get to choose your successor, no matter how noble the work you have done beforehand.”

She’s right, and a few members of her party said so. Yet when the House voted yesterday on whether to kill her resolution, the only Democrat to join her in opposition was centrist Jared Golden, who will also retire after this term. The rest of her colleagues were furious at her—her, not García—and let her hear it, with one going as far as trying to block her from speaking on the floor because she was wearing jeans.

Jeffries announced Tuesday morning that Democratic leaders would oppose Gluesenkamp Perez’s resolution when it returned to the floor for a vote on final passage, but his statement only proved her point. Instead of explaining why it’s supposedly fine for a House member to connive in handing his seat to an anointed successor, Jeffries resorted to argle-bargle about what a fine progressive and swell guy García is. At no point did he try to defend what the congressman did because what García did is indefensible, as everyone understands.

Hakeem Jeffries fights … his own members, when they dare to call foul on naked corruption within their party. My political PTSD from covering 10 years of the filthy Trumpified GOP is suddenly flaring.

Is there any good reason for Democrats to be Team García here instead of Team Gluesenkamp Perez?

I don’t know about good reasons, but there are reasons.

Given Democrats’ obsession with “messaging” and “distractions,” I’m sure there’s a camp inside Jeffries’ caucus that stupidly believes the infighting risks “distracting” from Epstein Week in the House. It doesn’t. The average Barstool Sports reader has a good idea of what’s going on with the Epstein files, I suspect, but ask them about García versus Perez and they’re apt to think you’re talking about an upcoming welterweight fight.

Such is the public interest in Epstein that war with Venezuela might not succeed in distracting from it. Stay tuned.

The left being the left, there may also be some apprehension about singling out a Hispanic member for disapproval at a moment when Latino voters are peeling away in droves from the GOP and reconsidering their political options. But that’s also stupid, and not just because Gluesenkamp Perez is Hispanic herself. Latino disaffection with Trump is being driven by powerful political forces, from the high cost of living to ICE’s renegade immigration tactics. Compared to that, an inside-baseball process dispute among House Democrats won’t register with anyone who doesn’t already subscribe to Roll Call.

The closest thing to a “good” reason for siding with García is that Democrats are a bit … sensitive at the moment to disunity in their own ranks.

Progressives want Chuck Schumer’s head on a pike after the Great Shutdown Betrayal of 2025, never mind that Schumer voted against ending the standoff and reportedly convinced his members to keep it going longer than they wanted to. The base is enraged that Senate Democrats couldn’t hold together to maximize their negotiating leverage, particularly when faced with an opponent as ruthless as the president. To stand a chance against the partisan enemy, the left must prioritize unity—even if, as in García’s case, that means overlooking contemptible behavior by its own side. Annnnnnd here comes my PTSD again.

Gluesenkamp Perez is firing inside the tent at a moment when Democrats are desperate to have everyone firing outside of it. And by bringing her objections to the House floor rather than resolving them privately, she’s setting a precedent that might encourage future Democrats to call out each other’s unethical behavior with formal legislative action (ahem), creating a string of embarrassments for the party.

An effective political faction does need to maintain a degree of unity to be effective, of course. But it beggars belief to watch the opposition, led by Hakeem Jeffries, choose unity over self-policing at a moment when the ruling party’s experiment with that choice has produced the most freakishly, almost proudly corrupt administration in American history. Having watched Republicans overdose on partisan heroin daily for a full decade, Democrats are reaching for the needle.

So the first thing to say in Gluesenkamp Perez’s defense is this: If you’re worried about which precedents are being set in Congress, consider that naming and shaming election-riggers like Chuy García might set a virtuous one by deterring future Democrats from emulating his tactics. Everyone hates corrupt machine politics (except the politicians who benefit from it), right? Well, machine corruption is slightly riskier today than it was a few days ago now that someone on the Democratic side is calling it out.

Gluesenkamp Perez’s gambit has another benefit. It’s a signal that Democratic officials are taking voters’ disgust at the party’s leadership seriously.

Democrats’ favorability sank to 34 percent in July, the lowest Gallup has ever recorded for the party. Partly that’s due to progressive disaffection (“they don’t fight”) but it also reflects the problems that drove last year’s election catastrophe. Too woke in cultural matters, too remote from cost-of-living challenges, and waaaaay too old and fragile: The case that the Democratic establishment was hopelessly “out of touch” was broad and deep. They needed a rebrand, desperately.

Their latest round of candidates has gotten to work on addressing that, but the fact that the party continues to be led mostly by too-old, too-familiar faces like Schumer’s makes a true rebrand difficult. And when the current despised Democratic establishment gets to choose its own successors, as happened with Chuy García and his chief of staff, a rebrand seems all but impossible. As left-wing data-cruncher David Shor noted, it’s probably not a coincidence that some of García’s most ardent defenders in this dispute were also dead-enders about Joe Biden’s supposed continued viability as a presidential candidate.

Enter Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, insisting that if Democrats simply must be saddled with an unpopular machine atop the party, that machine should at least not be self-perpetuating. If Jeffries is worried that a competitive election in a district as blue as García’s might have produced another officeholder in the fringy Zohran Mamdani mold, I don’t blame him—but I also won’t be surprised (well, a little surprised) if Mamdani proves as popular as, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is. The first step to solving a political image problem is actually giving voters a chance to elevate Democrats whom voters find likable, right?

“The left needs fresh blood” can’t mean “the left needs Chuy García to choose his replacement.”

There’s one more thing this episode does for Democrats, although maybe it doesn’t matter much in 2025. Gluesenkamp Perez’s stand is a small gesture at taking democracy seriously.

Americans don’t take democracy very seriously. If they did, we wouldn’t have the president that we do. Kamala Harris and her party worked hard last year to identify as defenders of democracy and the constitutional order, even dragging Liz Cheney out on the trail to make the civic case against Trump. That produced a Republican trifecta in charge of the federal government, with concerns about authoritarianism washed away by concerns about grocery prices like tears in the rain.

But Americans do have certain strong-ish opinions about democracy—specifically, they hate partisan redistricting. Our two parties are engaged in an arms race on that front at the moment, of course, forced by a prisoner’s dilemma to redistrict ruthlessly for the sake of maximizing their chances at winning the House. Voters hate the idea in principle, though, as it amounts to letting a state’s majority party pick its own voters by drawing the lines of House districts to give itself a heavy advantage.

Trump’s mid-decade redistricting ploy and the Democrats’ reprisals are destined to further shrink the ever-shrinking number of truly competitive House districts. According to the Cook Political Report, just 16 seats next fall will be true toss-ups, while another 18 “lean” toward one party or the other. That’s less than 8 percent of the House that’s fully in play. That’s what’ll decide whether the president gets to govern autocratically in his final two years or not.

It’s ridiculous, Americans know it’s ridiculous, and it’ll seem that much more absurdly ridiculous as unseating the dominant party in any given House district becomes almost impossible. Throwing a spotlight on García’s chicanery is Gluesenkamp Perez’s way of getting ahead of that backlash. Politicians shouldn’t pick the winners in elections—not via redistricting and not by gaming the filing deadline with a handpicked successor to orchestrate an outcome almost by default.

And so I don’t understand why Hakeem Jeffries felt obliged to take a position on Gluesenkamp Perez’s resolution, which ended up passing this afternoon with 23 Democrats in favor.

If he needed to appease García’s friends in the caucus by issuing a statement vouching for his good character, fine, I guess. But for Jeffries to oppose a rebuke that’s plainly warranted is necessarily to ally himself with corruption against accountability in the name of partisanship. It’s probably the single Trumpiest thing he’s done as minority leader. 

And it sure doesn’t bode well for Never Trumpers’ fantasies about a return to good government if Democrats regain power in 2028, replete with aggressive legislative reforms to curb the runaway powers of an imperial presidency. It’s nice to imagine the out-party resolving to “Trump-proof” the executive branch once it gets the chance to do so, but it already had the chance to do so in 2021 and 2022 and achieved … not quite nothing, but close to nothing.

Speaker Hakeem Jeffries is almost certainly not going to ride herd on President Gavin Newsom if he’s not willing to remain at least neutral about wrist-slapping a retiring congressman who got caught practicing “election denial of another kind,” as David Axelrod put it. If we’re lucky, he’ll be replaced before he gets a chance to take the gavel. But America is seldom lucky anymore in politics.