On Tuesday night, the voters in Missouri’s overwhelmingly Democratic first congressional district threw Congresswoman Cori Bush out on her ear. She joins outgoing Representative Jamaal Bowman in ignominy as the second member of the so-called Squad to be ousted by their Democratic constituents. Bowman amply earned the reproach his own voters meted out in June, but Bush managed to somehow outdo him.
Even before they assumed office after their first elections in 2020, Bush and Bowman both made spectacles of themselves. In one of their first acts, they declared their intention as representatives-elect to protest against their own party outside Democratic National Committee headquarters, seeking to compel it to adopt a more revolutionary platform. “When we don’t act, people who look like me die,” Bush insisted.
This cry-bully performance soon became a feature of Bush’s activism. “It’s simple,” she wrote. “We want to cancel student and medical debt.” In addition, Bush insisted, “cash bail is ransom” and must be done away with — but only after we “abolish private prisons” and “decarcerate” their general populations. “Defund the police,” Bush would later declare. “It’s not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive.” And if the Democratic Party failed to act on her demands, she threatened that a withering campaign of emotional blackmail would follow.
That describes the approach Bush took in her effort to compel Joe Biden to abrogate the rights of America’s property owners in 2021. Bush camped out on the steps of the Capitol building to popularize her campaign for a permanent eviction moratorium — even in defiance of the courts. You see, Bush had been herself evicted — more than once, in fact. If Congress failed to act on her demands, she implied (through tears) that the progressive activists she represented would soon come for their careers.
This was hardly the only headache Bush created for her fellow Democrats. She made what NBC News called a noble “attempt at legislating” when she sought to introduce an amendment to a post–George Floyd police-reform bill that would have extended the right to vote to federal inmates — something that “rankled” her fellow Congressional Black Caucus members, whom she had not warned in advance of the maneuver. For the most part, Bush’s legislative record consists of voting against her own party — behavior that is consistent with her fellow Squad members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.
In addition, Bush advertised herself as a friend of enemies of the United States and its allies. “As someone who has been brutalized by police,” Bush’s familiar preamble began, “I continue to stand in strong solidarity with Palestinians rising up against military, police, and state violence.” These remarks and her desire to see the U.S. cut off support for the Israeli military was occasioned by a rocket attack on Israel by Hamas in 2021 as Israeli courts adjudicated a decades-old property dispute in East Jerusalem. Bush had become a consistent opponent of funding not just for the U.S. military but most of the core security functions of the state, so her hostility toward U.S. backing for Israel was consistent. But it was soon obvious that her advocacy had less to do with the U.S. than it did with Israel.
Bush was one of two Democrats to vote against a bill that denied immigration benefits to alien residents who were implicated in the October 7 massacre. She fêted and encouraged anti-Israel protesters who engaged in trespassing and vandalism in and around the Capitol in the weeks following that attack. She blamed Israeli “military occupation and apartheid” for the rape and slaughter of Jews, and she called the defensive war imposed on Israel in the Gaza Strip an “ethnic cleansing campaign.”
Like many activists of her ilk, Bush made the mistake of applying the heuristic of racial politics in America to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, likely as a means of simplifying a subject she didn’t otherwise understand. “The fight for black lives and the fight for Palestinian liberation are interconnected,” Bush explained. “We oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation, and systems of violent oppression and trauma.” The combination of aggression couched in the language of therapy perfectly encapsulates the outlook that has led progressives to divorce themselves from the reality experienced by their voters. All this and more catalyzed the primary challenge that ended up convincing enough of her constituents to give her the boot.
What Bush lacked in prudence, she made up for in hypocrisy. It was conspicuous enough that one of the Democratic Party’s most vocal critics of additional funding for local police forces spent nearly $130,000 in 2023 on a private security detail — a member of which she ended up marrying. It’s fitting that Bush’s effort to preserve her own safety at the expense of your own prompted the Justice Department to investigate Bush for allegedly misusing campaign funds for her own personal gain (and that of her new husband).
Establishmentarian Democrats aren’t shedding any tears for Bush. But there will be an effort to insist that Bush was undone by the malign influence of Jewish money. Democrats should muster the courage to explain to their voters that Bush lost of her own accord. She surely won’t be the last progressive insurgent to rise up to shame her own party, but it’s good to see her joining Jamaal Bowman in forced retirement.