No newly elected member of congress has garnered more TV airtime than Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York. Whether she’s protesting in the office of Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, demanding a select committee on climate change or complaining about the cost of housing in Washington, D.C., Ocasio-Cortez has spent more time on cable television in the last month than reruns of “Home Alone.”
Most recently, Ocasio-Cortez generated headlines supporting a group called Justice Democrats, which reportedly will launch a national campaign mounting primary challenges against incumbent Democrats deemed to be ideologically and demographically out of step with their districts.
The soon-to-be congresswoman’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, a co-founder of Justice Democrats, recently declared, ”We need new leaders, period … We gotta primary folks.”
Rather than bluntly saying it’s time to purge white guys, the group claims it wants Democratic members of Congress to be “representative of their diverse communities” and support left-wing policy positions like “Medicare for all,” abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and rejecting corporate PAC donations.
The Justice Democrat’ haven’t announced which members of Congress they will target in 2020, but says they’re taking nominations and will prioritize women and diversity in their recruitment.
But if they actually follow their goal to make sure members of congress are “representative of their diverse communities,” it leads to some truly bizarre places.
Take Congresswoman Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, for example.
Congresswoman Waters has represented California’s 43rd Congressional District, which includes parts of Los Angeles and Torrance and all of Hawthorne, Lawndale, Gardena, Inglewood and Lomita, since 1991, but the statistics show she has little in common with her constituents.
According to the most recent census data, the median household income in the district is $56,655, well below the statewide median of $71,805, with 16.6 percent of residents living below the poverty line.
Additionally, the median value of owner-occupied housing is $562,300.
Congresswoman Waters, in comparison, lives in a 6,000-square foot, $4.3 million mansion outside of the district, in the Windsor Square neighborhood of Los Angeles near Hancock Park — one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Southern California.
Not bad for government work.
The African-American population in Waters’ neighborhood of Windsor Square is just 6 percent, well below her congressional district, which is 23 percent black.
According to stats from the Los Angeles Times, the black population in Los Angeles County dropped by 122,032 people from 1980 to 2014, at the same time that the county gained around 2.5 million residents overall.
Where did Congresswoman Waters’ African-American former constituents go? They fled her district for Riverside and San Bernardino counties, which gained a combined 260,494 black residents from 1980 to 2014.
And if you really want to talk about being “demographically out of step” with the voters, the 43rd CD is a plurality Latino district, at 47 percent, and 31 percent of residents are foreign-born. In fact, over 54 percent of district residents speak a language other than English at home.
If, as they claim, the Justice Democrats are looking to better match representatives with their constituents, they should primary Maxine Waters, and replace her with a much less wealthy, Spanish-speaking Latino candidate.
Now, I want to make sure to point out that it’s silly for anyone to say you have to be the same race as your constituents to represent them, but that is exactly what Congresswoman-elect Ocasio-Cortez and the Justice Democrats are implying.
Time will tell whether they actually believe it, or whether this is a merely a thinly veiled ethnic purge of their own party.
John Phillips can be heard weekdays at 3 p.m. on “The Drive Home with Jillian Barberie and John Phillips” on KABC/AM 790.
