Rashida Tlaib Burned Too Many Bridges
When You Are Comfortable Making Enemies, They Will Kick You When You're Down
Only days after the January 6th attack on the Capitol, I was on a Zoom meetup with several friends, including five who worked on Capitol Hill, discussing the attack, Trump’s impeachment, and the impending Biden presidency. A few worked for progressive New York Reps. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velazquez.
I asked them who the most disliked person in the Democratic caucus was. Having won a small House majority after the 2020 elections, I expected that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have issues with either the moderate Blue Dogs or the progressive Squad, or both. I wanted to know who would be a potential problem for her.
All agreed it was Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, then in her second term and a member of the “Squad,” a group of progressives that included AOC. All genuinely liked her, with one explaining she was the most disliked “for good reasons.” I suggested being unpopular with her colleagues could backfire. At the time, fellow Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was in hot water for engaging in anti-semitic tropes about Jewish lobbyists and money. Omar survived an attempt to censure her because every Democrat in the House defended her, though former Speaker Kevin McCarthy did remove her from the Foreign Relations Committee earlier this year. Omar had made attempts to soothe her colleague’s concerns and hear them out. She apologized and promised to do better. She made alliances with some moderates and Blue Dogs over issues like relations with Saudi Arabia. They were there for her when she messed up.
If Tlaib is ever in a similar position, I said that not having allies could be a problem. The friends on the call agreed but said their experience with Tlaib told them she was not the kind of person who was focused on that.
“She did not come to play,” one of them said. “She’s going to say and think what she feels and let the consequences be damned.”
That’s exactly what played out this week. The House of Representatives censured Tlaib on Tuesday for comments she made last week on the Israel-Hamas War. In a tweet, she used the phrase “from the river to the sea,” which is commonly associated with calls to destroy Israel and establish one Palestinian state on the land. She even endorsed that idea, suggesting, delusionally, that Jews and Arabs could live in peace and equality in a new Palestinian state. The November 3 tweet came after one in which she posted a video accusing President Joe Biden of endorsing a genocide in Gaza and threatening to not vote for him in 2024.
The censure got the support of 22 Democrats, even though Republicans didn’t have enough votes to pass the censure on their own. Had all Democrats opposed the censure, it would have failed.
I reached out to those friends of mine, some of whom I’ve lost touch with in three years since that call, to get their take on the censure and ask why Tlaib did not get the same circling of wagons that Omar got. I suggested that it had to do with what we had all talked about in 2021; Tlaib not being a well-liked member of the caucus. They agreed.
Tlaib has been unapologetic in her progressive views going back to her time as a state legislator in Michigan. She is not an establishment person. Tlaib has been tougher in tone against moderates of the party, in ways that would be rewarding for her if the progressive candidates won. Unfortunately, she has repeatedly ended up on the losing side of those campaigns. In 2018, she defeated the establishment favorite, Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones, narrowly. Her win was not necessarily welcomed by the Michigan establishment, who scored big wins elsewhere in the state in the same election.
After taking office in 2019, Tlaib held a rally where she endorsed the impeachment of then-President Donald Trump, famously yelling at the crowd “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker!”
The line got cheers from across the Democratic electorate, it was even spoofed on Saturday Night Live in a skit where Tlaib was played by singer Halsey. Privately though Democrats in Congress cringed and huffed at her outburst, fearing it would make it harder to sell any potential impeachment attempts as legitimate responses to criminal activity and not a preordained partisan act. Later that year Trump was impeached for trying to bribe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for campaign dirt on Joe Biden, but he was acquitted in the Senate. Polls showed that while moderate voters supported the impeachment, they believed it to be nakedly partisan. Some Democrats felt Tlaib’s outburst played a role in that perception.
In January 2020, three days before the Iowa Caucus, Tlaib was representing Bernie Sanders at a campaign event in Iowa where the crowd booed 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The moderator of the event tried to quell the boos, but Tlaib encouraged them.
“No, no, I’ll boo,” she said. “You all know I can’t be quiet. No, we’re going to boo. That’s alright. The haters will shut up on Monday when we win.”
They didn’t win.
Tlaib was forced to walk back her booing on Twitter a day later and Sanders narrowly lost the Iowa Caucus, which he was favored to win, to now-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. It was a loss that fatally damaged his presidential campaign. Some Sanders advisors privately suggested that the incident, which was featured heavily on social media in the days before the caucus, may have hurt Sanders.
Tlaib has been tougher in tone against moderates of the party, in ways that would be rewarding for her if the progressive candidates won. Unfortunately, she has repeatedly ended up on the losing side of those campaigns.
During the 2020 general election, Tlaib refused to publicly endorse Biden, the only Democratic House member not to do so, which angered a lot of Democrats who felt the party needed to be unified to win Tlaib’s home state of Michigan. Donald Trump had narrowly won the state in 2016. Biden won the state anyway by four points.
For the past month, Tlaib has been one of the loudest voices against Israel’s actions in Gaza. It has earned her the praise of progressive activists, but the scorn of some of her colleagues. A few weeks ago, Tlaib continued to suggest Israel bombed a Gaza hospital and killed hundreds of civilians even when multiple investigations into the attack proved it to be false. That led one of her colleagues, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Florida) to suggest a censure was coming. Moskowitz was one of the 22 who voted for the censure.
I asked my group of friends for comment when the censure was announced earlier this week. One friend, who worked for AOC and freshman Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, another Squad member, emailed me back:
“You have to realize. Rashida hates Israel, like really really hates Israel. She doesn’t hate Jews, she has a lot of Jewish friends and allies, but she despises the Israel. When you look at the history there, her background, and what she feels has been done to her people, her family, it’s understandable. This is a situation where she isn’t going to be as tactful as [Omar]. She’s not looking to win friends, she’s looking to express her beliefs. It obviously doesn’t serve her well in a political environment like Congress, but she doesn’t care. I think she believes if making allies requires compromising her beliefs, then it’s not worth doing. She’ll wear the censure like a badge of honor.”
The other agreed but did not want to get too deep into why.
“I think when you accuse your own party’s president of genocide, you can’t expect your entire party to stand by you,” one of them said. “I’m surprised only 22 went against her.”
There’s a scene in The Crown, when Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson, tells Queen Elizabeth II that she is not concerned about making enemies. The queen warns her that “it’s a dangerous game to make enemies left, right, and center.” Thatcher is one of the most infamous examples of a political radical who had no problem alienating anyone who didn’t agree with her. She would fire cabinet members who didn’t go along with some of the more controversial proposals and refused to compromise when there were uprisings in the streets. In the end, she made so many enemies, her own party ousted her in what was at that time an unprecedented palace coup. Had she been a man, it probably never would’ve happened.
Thatcher’s downfall is what I thought of this week watching the censure of Tlaib. Though she isn’t a powerful figure like Thatcher, Tlaib also believes compromising her political views was not worth making allies and building coalitions to protect her from the inevitable backlash when those more controversial views come to the surface. Had she been a man, and not Palestinian, the censure probably wouldn’t have happened, but she is, and in a country where polls show overwhelming support for Israel. Many of her colleagues have no loyalty to her. Censuring her was an easy win for them.
She hates Jews actually. Don’t cover for her baseline antisemitism. It’s obvious. October 7 brought out genocidal ecstasy in a lot of fat leftists. She was one of them. There’s nothing progressive about that.
Any Democrat who accuses Joe Biden of genocide is an irresponsible person, not to be taken seriously, worthy of scorn. Get a different job if you don’t understand or care what’s at stake in this presidential race.