Just a quick note to start: Over the last eight days, we have together raised over $1.3 million in bail funds and grassroots community groups working to dismantle systemic racism. It’s a jaw-dropping number and I’m grateful to play any role in the mass movement to right our country’s greatest wrong.
We’ve learned a lot these past two weeks about Americans, their elected leaders, and the massive gulf in courage between the two. Yes, Republican leaders have acted as cruelly as expected, from Donald Trump’s disturbing, televised threats to send in the military on peaceful protestors to Tom Cotton’s outrageous NY Times op-ed. But we’ve also seen so many elected Democrats utterly fail this test, over and over again, indicative of problems deeper than just pure partisanship.
Congressional leadership has been just about silent, too busy on vacation to take a real stand. Worse, Democrats that run the states and cities where many of these protests and police beatings are happening have encouraged and privileged the carnage. Here in NYC, Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo spent the week deploying vicious cops to clobber innocent people who dare violate a draconian 8 pm curfew, then applauded those officers’ “restraint.”
We are in desperate need of change, and it’s now clear that to make it happen, we need a new generation of leaders who actually experience the stakes in their own lives. And like Alex Morse a few weeks ago, New York congressional candidate Mondaire Jones certainly fits the bill.
Jones is running in the Democratic Primary for Congress in New York’s 17th district, just north of NYC, and has been endorsed by Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others. He’s one of five Democrats seeking the seat that the retiring Nita Lowey has held since 1989, when Jones was just two years old, underscoring the need for change. The welfare of the 17th district is personal to him, as Jones grew up in Lowey’s district, and understands what it’s like to have the odds stacked up against you — he is an openly gay black man who grew up poor in a starkly divided community he likens to a Tale of Two Cities.
His resume at 32 years old is impeccable: Jones attended Harvard Law and worked in Barack Obama’s Department of Justice. He’s also long been an activist; Jones became a national NAACP leader in high school and organized against racist police while an undergrad at Stanford. After a short stint in corporate law, he returned home to work for the Westchester County Attorney’s office, where he’s served ever since.
During our conversation last week, he not only expressed support for progressive policies — including Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and a massive investment in public housing — but also displayed the fighting spirit that it’s going to require to actually get any of those things passed. And in a district that is guaranteed to elect a Democrat, having a progressive with a backbone in office is essential. That he’s running against a state senator who was a member of the turncoat IDC, which gave Republicans virtual control of New York for nearly a decade, makes this race even more urgent.
“I'm not someone who is still traumatized by Democratic losses in the ‘80s,” Jones said, winning me over in just one sentence. “We need to recognize that public opinion has shifted dramatically. Progressive policies are overwhelmingly supported by the American people. And now we need champions who can message it and who can fight for us without being afraid of their own shadow.”
That also distinguishes him from so many of the terrified Democrats kowtowing to barbaric police right now, ordering and enabling the brutality ricocheting around Twitter and cable news. Jones rattles off a host of important reforms that are urgently required: A repeal of the 1994 crime bill that enabled mass incarceration, demilitarizing law enforcement by ending the transfer of military-grade weapons to local police departments, and ending the qualified immunity that so often lets cops off the hook for their crimes, among other items.
Jones also insisted that Congress needed to pass a ban on chokeholds and require police officers to both identify themselves to pedestrians and practice de-escalation, which many departments don’t even teach their officers. And with his Department of Justice pedigree, Jones not only has the will and moral urgency but also the expertise to structure these laws to ensure that they survive challenges and dramatically change our broken system of law enforcement.
“At a minimum, we can use financial incentives and disincentives in the way that the [‘94] crime bill did,” he said. “We should also be making the killing of unarmed civilians by law enforcement a federal crime. And the mechanism for doing that is if local law enforcement has received federal funding, then it’s in your jurisdiction.”
His expertise is obvious: We spoke last Wednesday, and many of the solutions he proposed will likely be part of a Congressional police reform bill first reported today by the Times.
The Department of Justice experience also taught Jones a lesson that it took many rank and file Democrats much longer to discover, a lag that continues to haunt us today: Expecting any kind of bipartisanship from the Republican Party is just plain foolish, like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football and get it shoved down his throat instead.
At the DOJ, in addition to working on criminal justice reform policy, Jones vetted and prepped federal judges for Senate confirmation and grew immensely frustrated by the GOP’s refusal to allow them fair hearings. It took years of obstruction for Sen. Harry Reid to invoke the nuclear option and end the filibuster for those nominees, breaking a logjam but never fully undoing the damage. Now Republicans have made confirming judges their central focus, ensuring years of conservative domination of the courts.
“We should never have trusted the Republican Party, with Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan as the House Speaker,” he says. “From the onset, they said that their primary purpose was to oppose anything President Obama did. I think that we could have been using our majorities in the Senate more effectively, to really serve the best interests of the American people. That was a huge learning experience.”
That all being said, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Lowey hadn’t yet announced that she would be retiring when Jones declared his candidacy last summer. At the time, he was planning to run as a primary challenger, motivated by Lowey’s seeming unwillingness to support impeachment and her record as Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, which included giving even more funding to ICE in 2019.
He also points to Lowey’s failure to repeal the SALT cap for homeowners, a major issue in his district, as it jacks up the cost of living in what is already one of the most expensive places to live in the country. One of his key issues is a massive expansion of mixed-income housing so that opportunity can be spread more equally, as well as green energy in the district that is home to the infamous Indian Point nuclear plant.
These are all lofty goals, but again, this is a deep blue seat that should be occupied by a progressive — especially given the alternatives this year. Jones is running in the primary against the IDC alum as well as a multi-millionaire pharmaceutical heir trying to buy the election while refusing to divest his pharmaceutical stock, making Jones that much more of a clear choice. It’s a neck-and-neck race ahead of the June 23rd primary, so any and all help will go a long way right now.
“If you can't get a progressive victory in a seat like this, then you're going to be out of luck,” he says. Because this is where the action is in a gerrymandered society. In blue states like this, we can afford to challenge ourselves to do better even as we challenge Republicans.”
Some other news:
The biggest news stories in the country right now are pretty self-evident, but here are a few things you may have missed:
Florida, which has bungled the coronavirus response every step of the way, is seeing a surge in new cases.
Speaking of why it’s dangerous to live in Florida, the GOP-dominated State Supreme Court kicked a ban on automatic weapons off the ballot. Adding insult to injury, the ballot initiative was being organized by family members of kids who were murdered at Parkland.
The fight over redistricting takes an interesting turn in Oregon — we should be in favor of independent redistricting everywhere, I think, because Democrats may not always be in such control in certain places.
If you need a mental break here and there, the NBA and British Premier League are coming back!
A note about our crowdfunding campaign: Progressives Everywhere will always be a free newsletter. Together we've raised over $1 million for progressives candidates and causes and over $1.3 million for bail funds and grassroots community groups! We’ve grown so much that it costs $100 just to send this email, and there are other costs as well.
We’re now sending out premium mid-week editions of the newsletter, filled with important news, undercovered stories, electoral analysis, and everything else you need to stay ahead of the curve in this intense time. It costs just $5 a month.
To help support the cause, you can also make donations at GoFundMe (you’ll be thanked in future public editions of the newsletter).
With over 14,000 active subscribers and a high open-rate, we’re also opening the newsletter up to sponsorships. Get in touch if you’re interested!