On the menu today: National Review political reporter Audrey Fahlberg here, filling in again for Jim Geraghty while he’s on the National Review Institute cruise. Today, I’ll give you a quick update on how two-term New York representative Jamaal Bowman is faring ahead of his June 25 primary against a more moderate primary opponent critical of his stance on Israel, and a look at how movement pro-lifers are putting pressure on RNC members not to “water down” existing pro-life language in this year’s national party platform.
Things Are Looking Rough for This New York Progressive
The first Corner post I filed for National Review in early October began with a temperature check on Jeff Blehar’s favorite member of the “Squad”:
Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman is brushing off multiple House Republican-sponsored legislative efforts to punish him for pulling a fire alarm in the Cannon House Building on Saturday on his way to vote on a stopgap bill to fund the government.
Bowman’s response at the time? “I mean, they’re going to do what they’re going to do because that’s what they do, but I’m not worried about that,” he told me, about three weeks before he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in connection with the fire-alarm incident.
Here we are eight months later, and Bowman has a lot more to be worried about than the political fallout one must apparently deal with after pulling the fire alarm as a middle-aged member of the U.S. House of Representatives. This 48-year-old former middle-school principal is fighting to hold onto his seat amid a very strong primary challenge from Westchester County executive George Latimer, 70, an establishment Democrat who is well known in this Westchester and Bronx-area district and has a very strong chance of winning.
The race has attracted boatloads of outside spending and is seen as a proxy battle in the intra-party fight over Israel’s war with Hamas. Don’t take my word for it: Even Hillary Clinton is wading into the race, endorsing Latimer and putting herself at odds with Bowman-supporting Senate progressives such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. This dynamic was on display during their second debate of the primary Wednesday evening, when Spectrum News anchors asked both candidates if there are any circumstances in which they would support cutting off U.S. “weapons or aid to Israel” amid its war with Hamas:
“We should not be sending any more weapons at this time to Israel. They are engaged in collective punishment by killing mostly women, children and babies in Gaza,” Bowman said.
“I believe the path to peace starts with the release of the hostages, the cessation of hostilities, and then humanitarian aid, which is supervised by a third-party, most likely a group of folks from within the Muslim world,” Latimer said.
Tensions ran a little less high last night than during their first debate in May, when Latimer accused Bowman of belittling his Republican colleagues in viral screaming matches with them on Capitol Hill, prompting Bowman to shoot back: “The angry black man, the angry black man. . . . It’s the southern strategy in the north.”
Latimer has a lot of material to work with. Take for example, the 9/11 conspiracy theories Bowman peddled in free-verse poetry on his personal blog in 2011. Or the comments Bowman made during a rally with pro-Palestinian protesters in Westchester in November: “There was propaganda used in the beginning of the siege. There’s still no evidence of beheaded babies or raped women. But they still keep using that lie [for] propaganda.” Here’s some great reporting from the New York Times’s Nicholas Fandos earlier this week on how these political dynamics are reflected in Bowman’s evolving relationship with the DSA:
Last fall, in the days after Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York appeared ready to make a hard public break with the Democratic Socialists of America.
Mr. Bowman condemned a rally promoted by the group “in the strongest possible terms” after some attendees glorified the slaughter of 1,200 Israelis. His office also took the opportunity to publicize for the first time that he had let his own D.S.A. membership lapse amid earlier disagreements over funding for Israeli defenses.
But in a private video meeting with the group late last month, Mr. Bowman insisted he had never actually left, shifting his story as he sought to mend fences with the small but influential group amid a primary challenge that has become a symbolic test of his party’s divisions over Israel.
But wait! There’s more:
It was not the only time Mr. Bowman appeared to break with an earlier stated position related to Israel during the half-hour meeting. He told the D.S.A. members that he no longer supported funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and that he would soon come out in favor of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, bending closer to the group’s positions.
He also implored them to help him fight off a “common enemy” in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby spending nearly $3 million a week to defeat him ahead of the June 25 contest.
Public polling is always limited in House races, particularly in primary contests for seats that are not considered competitive in a general election. But a new Emerson College survey released earlier this week suggests that the race is trending in Latimer’s favor. Early voting begins this weekend.
RNC Platform Discussions Put Movement Pro-Lifers on Edge
The Republican National Committee’s platform has not been amended in eight years. Next month in Milwaukee, it’s likely that the platform committee will change the document’s language to better reflect presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign position that abortion should be left to the states. Some would-be platform-committee members are complaining that their staunch pro-life views have disqualified them from having a formal stake in the process. As Brittany Bernstein and I reported Wednesday afternoon:
State delegations are responsible for picking their committee representatives at the convention, which includes one man and one woman from each state and territory. It’s typical for the presumptive presidential nominee’s campaign to play a role in identifying platform picks who are closely aligned with their candidate. This cycle is no exception. Many RNC members tell NR that in recent weeks, the Trump campaign has sent state parties a slate of their preferred picks for the four convention committees, including the influential platform committee.
Some members who were eager to get a slot on the coveted platform committee are convinced they were sidelined by the Trump campaign because of their staunchly pro-life views.
Vermont RNC committeeman Jay Shepard, for example, “very much wanted” to serve on the platform committee but was disappointed to hear he didn’t make it onto the Trump campaign’s list of preferred picks.
“Apparently, they were not looking for someone like me who is firm in their position on the life issue,” Shepard, a Trump supporter with committed pro-life views, tells NR. As he understands it, the presumptive nominee’s campaign sent Vermont Republicans a number of Republicans “who they thought would be 100 percent loyal to the president, rather than loyal on any particular issue on the platform.”
Spots on the platform committee are of course limited, and any intra-party spats over contested policy questions always risk distracting from the presumptive nominee’s message.
In response to accusations from some RNC members that they were weeded out of the platform-committee process because of their staunchly pro-life views, the Trump campaign maintained that its job is to vet platform-committee members whose views are most consistent with those held by the presumptive nominee — including on social issues such as abortion:
“This issue is very important, but it’s not the only issue that will be discussed during the platform committee week,” a senior Trump campaign official tells National Review. “Ultimately, the goal is to have a party platform that reflects the party’s nominee, which ultimately reflects the will of Republican voters who chose President Trump as their nominee in a historic fashion.”
ADDENDUM: “House Republicans voted on Wednesday to hold U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress after the Justice Department refused to turn over the audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur,” National Review’s James Lynch reports.