How the Squad ‘Thumbed’ Their Noses at the Status Quo

The following is an adapted excerpt from The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution by Ryan Grim, published December 5th, 2023 by Henry Holt and Company.

The day after the New York State primaries, Ocasio-Cortez was asked a question by the Washington Post she hadn’t given much thought to: Would she be supporting Pelosi for Speaker? She told the paper it was indeed time for “new leadership,” but she wasn’t sure who was even in the mix to replace Pelosi. “I mean, is Barbara Lee running? Call me when she does!”

Lee, by this time in her career, had become something of a matron saint of the progressive movement. A congresswoman from Oakland, California, she had volunteered with the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children program and had worked on Shirley Chisholm’s groundbreaking 1972 presidential campaign. A year later, she’d worked on Black Panther cofounder Bobby Seale’s bid for Oakland mayor. She had worked on the staff of Ron Dellums, the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America to serve in Congress, and had played a leading role in both of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns, in 1984 and 1988. She was elected to Congress herself in 1998 and would soon cast the vote that would define her career. In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, she was the lone vote against going to war in response, delivering a searing and prophetic speech.

Since then, Lee had become a close ally of Pelosi’s, and the notion that she would directly challenge her was a fantasy. Her radical roots were real, but she had always been interested in being an inside player—you don’t work as a staffer for a member of Congress or a mayoral candidate if you don’t have some faith that working inside the system can deliver results.

After the Democratic takeover, it quickly became clear that nobody was going to mount a challenge from Pelosi’s left. Her right, however, was a different story. Waiting to ambush her was New Jersey representative Josh Gottheimer, cochair of a group called the Problem Solvers Caucus. Gottheimer had founded the caucus in 2017, his freshman year, under the guidance of the group No Labels. (It had initially been formed by No Labels in 2013, but after Gottheimer’s election, he helped make it an official caucus recognized by the House of Representatives.)

Problem Solvers, made up of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, held the title for receiving the most bipartisan mockery, but over the years it had become a funnel for a growing amount of super PAC spending, which required it to be taken seriously. (The super PACs, which themselves went by names like Forward Not Back and United Together, operated under the umbrella of No Labels.) Ostensibly, it claimed it would solve problems by bringing together moderate Democrats and reasonable Republicans to find commonsense solutions. In practice, it was simply a vehicle for blocking any type of tax increases on the private equity moguls and hedge fund executives who funded the dark-money groups No Labels sponsored.

No Labels, for its part, was founded after the Tea Party wave of 2010 and publicly sought to “cool the temperature,” striving to bring bipartisan groups of centrists together to fend off the extreme elements of both parties. To fund the endeavor, founder Nancy Jacobson and her husband, Mark Penn, the notorious operative who rose to prominence as the whispering devil on President Bill Clinton’s shoulder, turned to a who’s who of hedge fund barons, private equity executives, and other moguls. Many of the donors Jacobson and Penn recruited to fund No Labels also maxed out donations to Gottheimer. It was a role Gottheimer had been preparing for his entire career.

His first job out of college was as an intern in Bill Clinton’s White House, where he rose to a speechwriting position under Penn. The pollster-slash-operative Penn took the up-and-comer under his wing, training Gottheimer in the dark arts of palace intrigue. Gottheimer, quite short, both in size and temper, with a rabid dedication to weight lifting, quickly took on the nickname “Pocket Hercules” among his Clinton administration colleagues.

Penn and Gottheimer stayed close, and when Penn worked to nudge Hillary Clinton into the 2004 presidential campaign, he brought Gottheimer with him to work on the effort as a consultant. He wound up as a speechwriter for John Kerry, where he picked up his second nickname, “The Thumb,” a nod to the squat stature and high forehead that made him look like one. Following the campaign, Gottheimer became director of strategic communications for Ford Motor Company, where Penn was a consultant.

Penn had become CEO of the consulting firm Burson-Marsteller in 2006, long one of the PR outfits working closest with Saudi Arabia, and that year, he hired Gottheimer as an executive vice president. (“He was a terror there,” said one of Gottheimer’s employees.)

Burson-Marsteller, as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow laid out while Penn was running it, had long been a reliable voice for the worst of the worst. “When Blackwater killed those seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, they called Burson-Marsteller,” Maddow said. “When there was a nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island, Babcock and Wilcox, who built that plant, called Burson-Marsteller. Bhopal chemical disaster that killed thousands of people in India—Union Carbide called Burson-Marsteller. Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu—Burson-Marsteller. The government of Saudi Arabia, three days after 9/11—Burson-Marsteller.”

She continued: “When evil needs public relations, evil has Burson-Marsteller on speed dial. That’s why it was creepy that Hillary Clinton’s pollster and chief strategist in her presidential campaign was Mark Penn, CEO of Burson-Marsteller.” (Penn, at the time still serving as CEO, disputed the characterization.)

Penn’s most notorious strategic advice was that Hillary should paint Barack Obama as un-American, the true birth of birtherism. He was explicit about the strategy, penning a 2007 memo with a section titled “Lack of American Roots.” Arguing that Obama’s “roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited,” he urged Clinton to draw a contrast by noting in every speech that she was “born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century.”

“Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t,” Penn wrote. Publicly, he advised, they had to pull this off “without turning negative.” Privately, the Clinton camp circulated images of Obama in African garb and of his minister, Jeremiah Wright, intoning “God damn America!” in a sermon. The Clinton team whispered to reporters of an audio recording of Michelle Obama bashing “whitey.” The rumors of the recording would turn into a scream on the right, where black-bag operatives and conspiracy nuts would spend years looking for the nonexistent “whitey tapes.” Among right-wing radio and TV audiences, it simply became an article of faith that the tapes existed. (There’s zero evidence that they do.)

As for Gottheimer, he was known during the Obama-Clinton primary to be one of the more vicious knife fighters in Hillary’s camp—a hatchet man’s hatchet man. Every foul thing that emanated from the campaign was presumed by the Obama team to be the handiwork of Penn as executed by Gottheimer, and the latter earned the universal enmity of Obama’s staff. Yet, in 2010, Gottheimer copublished a book called Power in Words: The Stories Behind Barack Obama’s Speeches, from the State House to the White House. The gall was breathtaking, and simply mentioning that book today to Obama alumni is enough to trigger a range of emotional reactions. (For all that, the book sold fewer than a thousand copies across all formats, according to Book- Scan.)

In the summer of 2010, Gottheimer became senior counselor at the Federal Communications Commission, just as Penn was joining Microsoft, which was engaged in a major battle with the FCC. Gottheimer’s reputation as a brutal boss to work for carried over to the FCC. “Josh Gottheimer is the biggest douche I have ever worked for ever,” said one former FCC employee, calling him a “poor man’s Rahm,” a reference to former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. While there, Gottheimer helped ease through the controversial NBC-Comcast merger. “He wrote slimy press releases touting Comcast’s broadband for poor people that was basically dial-up for ten dollars,” the employee recalled. Gottheimer served for two years before Penn pulled him back through the revolving door to join him at Microsoft.

In 2015, Gottheimer became a consultant with the Stagwell Group, a Penn-owned private equity firm, according to a 2017 financial disclosure. Between 2015 and 2017, while Gottheimer was consulting for Stagwell, Saudi Arabia paid Targeted Victory, a digital company owned by Stagwell, more than a million dollars to spread pro-Saudi disinformation on Twitter. (“The congressman has never done any work for Saudi Arabia,” a Gottheimer spokesperson told me.)

In 2016, Pocket Hercules ran for Congress in a Republican-held swing district in his home area of northern New Jersey. In the campaign, he played up his close ties to the pro-Israel lobby, noting that he was active with both the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and NorPAC, an organization even less hospitable toward Palestinian rights than AIPAC. Donors connected to NorPAC made up his largest source of campaign cash, and he’s been a regular speaker at AIPAC’s annual conference.

These ties, paradoxically, were aided by Penn’s longtime work on behalf of Saudi Arabia. For the prior several years, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had built an alliance with the Israeli lobbying operation in Washington, DC. Israel won Arab cred from the two autocracies even as its settlements in occupied Palestinian territory were rapidly expanding. And the autocracies were helped by association with one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies, while at the same time beginning to form cyber warfare and military technology connections that would later blossom into the Abraham Accords under President Trump.

“Israel and the Arabs standing together is the ultimate ace in the hole,” a high-level official at the Israeli embassy told me in 2015. “Because it takes it out of the politics and the ideology. When Israel and the Arab states are standing together, it’s powerful.” The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were spending tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars per year to influence Washington, but because of the limited number of Saudi or Emirate immigrants with U.S. citizenship, and with very limited sway over the American Muslim community, they had little ability to contribute directly during elections. Israel had no such handicap.

Israel’s highest priority that year was blocking the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal. It was in the Iran deal fight that Mark Mellman, later to found Democratic Majority for Israel, sharpened his intra-Democratic knife-fighting skills. Though he and Gottheimer would lose the first round of that fight, with the Iran deal approved and Congress unable to stop it, they would win later when Trump ripped the deal up. Gottheimer became the most reliable ally of the Saudi-Emirati-Israeli nexus in Washington, with Mark Penn and Mark Mellman as his patrons. One of Gottheimer’s earliest fund-raisers in 2015 was hosted by Don Baer, an ex-Clinton aide who replaced Penn as CEO of Burson-Marsteller.

In Washington, a handful of law and lobbying outfits are registered as agents on behalf of Saudi Arabia. In his first reelection cycle, Gottheimer was among the top recipients of cash from those firms’ lobbyists and lawyers, according to Ben Freeman, an analyst at the Center for International Policy’s Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative. This made Gottheimer one of the top twenty biggest recipients of Saudi agent cash in either party, but that number is deceptive, as the rest of the list includes party leaders and veterans. Nobody as junior as Gottheimer came anywhere close to that level of donation. The alliance between him, the two Gulf states, and Israel would become a major force in Washington, taking direct aim at the Sanders-AOC wing of the party.

Gottheimer quickly began building on his Pocket Hercules reputation. In January 2017, he got an invitation to the eightieth birthday party for a senior member of his state’s delegation. The area that Rep. Bill Pascrell represented abutted Gottheimer’s district in New Jersey, but it couldn’t have been more socioeconomically different, anchored by the working-class city of Paterson. Pascrell was hosting the party-slash-fund-raiser at a favorite hometown bar, Duffy’s, something of a dive on the outskirts of town.

Paterson wasn’t the type of place where Gottheimer spent much time, but it wasn’t an actively dangerous spot. Not only was the bar a regular haunt of the local congressional representative, but it was owned by Terry Duffy, a town freeholder, the state’s version of a county council member. Gottheimer agreed to brave the journey to Paterson to celebrate his colleague, but when he arrived, it was clear that he’d taken a confounding set of precautions: he was accompanied by an off-duty police officer and showed an unusual amount of bulk under his shirt.

“Are you wearing a bulletproof vest?” Pascrell asked his first-term colleague. Gottheimer acknowledged that he was, but he went on to say, by way of explanation, that he had been doing a ride-along earlier with the officer and had worn the vest for that. The explanation, even if it was true, failed to explain why he was still wearing the vest at the party. A round of heckling and wisecracking ensued, drawing the attention of Terry Duffy.

The freeholder was not amused and ordered Gottheimer out of his bar. “Duffy told him to get the hell out, ‘You’re mocking us,’” Pascrell confirmed to me. “I said, ‘He’s not intelligent enough to mock you.’ So, he says to me, ‘Should I leave him in?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, you’re not going to get anything by throwing him the hell out.’”

This kind of approach to his colleagues led to an unusual level of hazing for Gottheimer, and the ribbing at the weekly New Jersey delegation meetings began immediately. Members of the delegation simply couldn’t bring themselves to stop giving Pocket Hercules a hard time, whether it was Rep. Albio Sires turning on his phone’s stopwatch whenever Gottheimer arrived, to time how long it took him to leave— the “Gottheimer Timer” never ran very long—or Pascrell and Don Norcross mocking him for barely being a Democrat.

Gottheimer’s voracious fund-raising was inextricably linked with his legislating. At a Financial Services Committee hearing early in his tenure, he objected to a small reform put forward by Rep. Steven Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat close to Big Labor. The top-ranking Democrat, Rep. Maxine Waters, called for a private huddle of Democrats to sort the mess out. In that side room, Gottheimer’s colleagues were first introduced to his legendary temper. He excoriated Lynch and Waters, an extraordinary display for a freshman, and warned that the legislation would kill him back home among his financial industry backers. He pulled out his phone and dialed Pelosi, certain she’d have his back. Explaining his predicament, he asked her to intervene on his behalf. “Josh, it sounds like a reasonable amendment. I think you should support it,” Pelosi told him before hanging up. The awkward meeting broke up and, that afternoon, his personal office would feel the brunt of his fury.

Gottheimer also began picking up a reputation for telling little lies. Once, he reached out to Pascrell’s office to pitch a joint event in his district with the American Postal Workers Union. It wasn’t his idea, he said; the union wanted to do it. So Pascrell’s team called the union rep, who told them Gottheimer, in fact, had pitched the idea and then had asked him to lean on Pascrell to make it happen. It was the whitest of lies—who cares whose idea a banal union event was? But it seemed to define Gottheimer for his colleagues.

His treatment of staff and fear of his own constituents quickly became legend within the Democratic caucus. In the wake of Trump’s election, spontaneous demands sprang up around the country that members of Congress hold town hall meetings so they could hear the frustrations of those they represented. It was the last thing Gottheimer wanted to do, but after extensive negotiations, he eventually agreed to hold one, in Teaneck, at the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, on the condition that no press be allowed and that all questions be written down.

The Teaneck Democratic Municipal Committee meeting on May 8, 2017, is now seared into the memories of those who witnessed it. The event was going well until Gottheimer’s staff noticed an elderly Teaneck resident in the audience taking notes. The man, Jim Norman, had been thinking of starting a community newspaper, a weekly that he planned to call the Teaneck Independent. As it was, he occasionally posted his community dispatches online. Gottheimer’s aides tried to get the representative’s attention, to warn him that a potential member of the fourth estate was in the audience. They also told Norman that no press was allowed at the event, but he told them that it was a public event and that the press couldn’t be barred.

Norman said that Ron Schwartz, the committee vice chair, stood up for Norman’s right to be there as a member of the press, saying that the committee would not bar press from a public event. “A little disagreement was developing around me,” Norman said. “I declined to leave.”

When the event ended, Gottheimer’s aides let him know that it had gone terrifically, but they flagged the fact that the would-be community reporter had been taking longhand notes. A switch flipped, and Gottheimer moved into war mode. Get me those notes, he demanded, growing increasingly agitated as his aides advised against this. As he grew louder, sprinkling in profanity, his staffers nudged him into a corner, where they hoped his outburst would be less of a scene for the audience members who’d lingered and were now seeing an encore. It didn’t work, so an aide went to find state senator Loretta Weinberg.

Gottheimer’s aides briefed her on the situation, and Weinberg, who was the state senate’s majority leader, tried to intervene. Weinberg had known Norman for years, and she assured Gottheimer that if he wrote anything at all, it would be a straightforward, community newspaper–style write-up of the event. Weinberg, when asked about being brought in by Gottheimer’s staff to try to calm him down at the Teaneck gathering, said, “I really don’t have anything to add.”

Gottheimer wasn’t reassured by Weinberg, and he stormed outside, where, now in the middle of the street, he could go on an even louder diatribe. His aides continued to gather around him, working to calm him down, as the Teaneck Democrats filed out and rubbernecked the perplexing scene.

Pocket Hercules ordered two aides to confront Norman and demand his notes. Norman, who had recently been part of a mass layoff at the Bergen County Record, told me that he stood firm under pressure from the staff. He said he was aware that Gottheimer was angry at his presence, though the representative never spoke to him directly. (Norman confirmed that he has indeed known Weinberg for years and that the two had worked on a number of local issues together, including a fight to protect one of Teaneck’s largest trees.)

Gottheimer’s aides, Norman said, told him that they would need to review anything he wrote before it was published, a condition Norman rejected. Furious, Gottheimer spotted the car of the staffer who had driven him to the event and channeled all his rage on it, raining blow after blow down upon its roof.

He then developed a new battle plan. He wanted his remarks transcribed that night, so his team would be prepared to rebut whatever the old man might post. Gottheimer’s staff did transcribe his remarks, but they were never needed. Jim Norman posted an 817-word dispatch on his now-defunct website, TeaneckIndependent.com, and, indeed, it reads like a straight community newspaper write-up of a town hall meeting, summarizing Gottheimer’s talk and including positive quotes from attendees.

The crowd, according to Norman, generally approved of Gottheimer’s positions. “I think he’s a good middle-of-the-road Democrat, even if he does not understand why we should be pushing for single-payer health care,” said Mark Fisher, a member of the sponsoring organization.

“I think he’s a good, centrist, reach-across-the-aisle congressman who knows a lot of his constituents are Republicans,” said committee vice chair Ron Schwartz.

For Gottheimer’s staffers, the episode was one of the most extended, public expressions of the madness they’d come to know in private. Gottheimer’s more extreme outbursts were often followed by quasi-apologies. One in particular, during his first year in Congress in 2017, stood out. After multiple staffers quit or threatened to quit, Gottheimer agreed to do a conference call with his staff to apologize for his general behavior—except, on the call, he never quite apologized, instead telling his aides that they should be proud of the work the office was doing. That was fine enough, but it was the specific work he identified that had staffers shaking their heads. Take deep pride, he told them, in how much money we’re raising. But nobody in his congressional office had gotten into politics to break fund-raising records—as Gottheimer does routinely. The staffers simply stared at one another in disbelief. Raising money, several aides said, appeared to be the only thing Gottheimer genuinely cared about. To talk about it with staff in a congressional office crossed the ethical boundaries most members had set—and was also likely a violation of the law separating fund-raising and official congressional work.

Gottheimer cycled through staff at a startling speed. Of the 535 members of the House and Senate, he had the tenth highest turnover rate in 2018, according to LegiStorm’s ranking of “worst bosses.” He was the only freshman member of Congress to burn through enough staffers that quickly to make the top ten. But the ranking is somewhat generous, as four of those ranked as worse than Gottheimer retired that year, which better explains the exodus of staff from their offices. Aside from the campaign cash Gottheimer raked in from the pro- Israel and pro-Saudi lobbies, he cultivated Wall Street openly. This tendency was on unusually obsequious display at an April Financial Services Committee hearing, where the CEOs of America’s major banks testified, including JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan, Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon, Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman, and Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat.

At the hearing, titled “Holding Megabanks Accountable,” Waters, the committee chair, showed a rotating series of slides highlighting antisocial banking practices. When it was Gottheimer’s turn to question the bankers, he borderline apologized to them, flattering them and telling them how much he appreciated their work. “Mr. Dimon, can you describe some of the work that your firm has done in the small business lending arena and how those loans are helping to facilitate small business growth?” he fawned.

Rashida Tlaib, sitting in front of Gottheimer at the hearing, was startled. “I had to pause, because he was on our side of the aisle,” she told me. “I was taken aback by his strong stance for megabanks. There’s a way to do it that doesn’t undermine the leadership of the committee.”

Throughout 2018, it became increasingly apparent that Democrats would take over the House of Representatives, setting up Pelosi to become Speaker again. That cycle, Nancy Jacobson of No Labels vowed to raise and spend fifty million dollars to defend centrists in both parties, though the group ended up spending roughly twice as much on Republicans as Democrats. And some of what they spent on Democrats was in defense of the party’s most retrograde remaining member. Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois had been gifted his seat by his father, a “Chicago machine” boss, and governed so far to the right that in the 2010 redistricting, he successfully fought to make his district more conservative. His politics—outspokenly anti-LGBT, opposed to a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, and against abortion rights—had skated by in the oblivious years before Trump, but once Democratic voters were awakened in 2017, Lipinski’s days were numbered.

Marie Newman, a small business owner who’d become an anti-bullying activist to defend her trans child, challenged Lipinski, and she had not just the support of Justice Democrats but, eventually, and belatedly, also the broader progressive infrastructure, including NARAL Pro-Choice America, which put together a coalition to take on Lipinski. Yet Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List, uncomfortable challenging an incumbent Democrat, were both slow to join the race, getting in only a few weeks before the election.

As her run picked up steam, Newman got a call from the top federal affairs official for AIPAC in Washington, who happened to be a friend of her nephew. She told him he was wasting his time, that she didn’t agree with AIPAC’s posture on the Israeli occupation or its support for endless military aid with no conditions attached. “Well, you’re really gonna lose a lot of fund-raising,” she recalled him telling her. “And I said, ‘Okay. Are you trying to scare me? Because that’s not working.’”

Newman probably should have been scared. Founded in Illinois, AIPAC, as we know it today, was born thanks in large part to the work of Chicago businessman Robert Asher, who pushed in the 1970s to transform the committee into a political powerhouse, becoming one of the so-called Gang of Four board members who helped set strategy and organize a national network of donors. They first tested their theory of the case on Republican representative Paul Findley, whom they viewed as too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

In the 1980 election, Asher sent scores of letters to AIPAC donors around the country and chipped in his own money, targeting Findley in both the GOP primary and the general election. A young Rahm Emanuel took time off from college to volunteer for his first campaign that year, becoming chief fund-raiser for the Democrat challenging Findley, raising some three quarters of a million dollars. It was the first attempt to unseat a member of Congress by fund-raising on the issue of support for Israel, and Findley survived, but the model was in place.

In 1982, Asher and his AIPAC allies recruited Dick Durbin to challenge Findley and helped make the race the costliest ever in Illinois. “If I hadn’t been a persistent critic of Menachem Begin, I wouldn’t have had a real contest this year,” Findley told the Washington Post then. This time, he lost by less than 1 percent, and the message was sent that showing sympathy for the Palestinians or wavering in one’s full support of Israel could be politically costly, even in districts like Findley’s, with a significant Arab population. (Bridgeview, Illinois, is known as “Little Palestine.”)

The next cycle, AIPAC recruited Democrat Paul Simon to take on Sen. Charles Percy, whom the group also deemed too sympathetic to Palestinians. Simon won. Thomas Dine, AIPAC’s executive director, called it a warning. “Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy,” Dine said at the time. “And American politicians— those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire—got the message.”

Asher, thirty-eight years later, was still sending letters, but now in the form of emails. The Times of Israel reported that he went into overdrive on behalf of Dan Lipinski, telling allied donors that Marie Newman was “catering to the anti-Israel population in the district,” a reference to Bridgeview’s Palestinian Americans. “They are well aware of where there are strong Arab and Muslim American communities, they are intensely aware of it,” said Newman.

Gottheimer’s ally Nancy Jacobson worked closely with AIPAC, she told Washington Jewish Week magazine, and she and Gottheimer’s mentor, her husband, Mark Penn, were able to raise and spend a million dollars through various super PACs linked to No Labels, saving Lipinski by just a few thousand votes.

It was a significant win, but it came at a cost beyond just the money: defending an incumbent who was opposed to reproductive freedom and hostile to marriage equality angered some in the No Labels community, one of whom fired off an angry email to Jacobson. She responded by saying that despite Lipinski’s views, it was worth defending him in order to push back against the Sanders wing of the party. “I see a whole new crop of Democratic challengers—like Marie Newman—who see Bernie—WHO IS NOT EVEN A DEMOCRAT—as a model worthy of emulation,” Jacobson wrote (using all caps in the original), apparently oblivious to the irony that she was attacking a politician for eschewing a label—No Labels’ implicit goal. “But I don’t think we need more people in Congress on either side who rile up their bases and then actually achieve nothing.”

During the campaign, according to emails I obtained, No Labels deliberated making Pelosi a “boogeyman” in its communications strategy, but ultimately decided against doing so. No Labels chief strategist Ryan Clancy argued that the time wasn’t right. The group “is probably going to go to war with Pelosi. And it probably should,” Clancy wrote in an email. “I don’t know that now is the time to do it, especially when we have a perfectly good villain to use in Bernie.”

The time to do it would come. In June 2018, No Labels launched the “Speaker Project,” aimed at expanding the power of a small group of centrists if Democrats took power in the House of Representatives. The project pushed for a rules change that would give a clear path to a floor vote for any legislation that met a certain threshold of bipartisanship. It was easy for K Street to round up small bipartisan groups, meaning the reform, if passed, would effectively hand control of the floor to corporate interests. “There’s a problem-solvers group that is looking to have some influence, if the result is close, in terms of changing the rules and naming the Speaker,” Penn said in September 2018 on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, declining to mention his central role in that group.

The demands were absurd in the extreme, and the group knew they’d be rejected by Pelosi, which would then give them a public rationale to oppose her. Gottheimer attempted to execute the Speaker Project in the run-up to the new Congress, organizing the Problem Solvers Caucus to withhold support from Pelosi. He worked in tandem with Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who had been raising money furiously and backing veterans running for Congress in the hope of building a bloc of power he could use to oust Pelosi.

But in the Trump era, in the shadow of the Women’s March, with women forming the backbone of the party’s support, it was absurd to think the two men could oust Pelosi and replace her with another man. They needed a woman, and they didn’t have one. At a minimum, they needed a viable candidate, and they didn’t have that, either. “You can’t beat somebody with nobody,” Pelosi’s allies noted repeatedly during the contest, deploying what was an accurate, if not exactly inspiring, campaign slogan. Had Joe Crowley been reelected, the week after Thanksgiving in 2018 could very well have been the day the Democratic Party nominated him to be House Speaker. Crowley had long been viewed as the Democrat most likely to take Pelosi’s spot when she retired or was pushed aside. Throughout 2018, his operation seeded stories in the political press about his ambitions, while he publicly insisted he wouldn’t challenge Pelosi directly if she ran again for the gavel.

But Crowley had been ousted by Ocasio-Cortez, so the Pelosi opponents publicly attempted to recruit Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio. But Pelosi was able to offer her a subcommittee chairmanship, and that threat was neutralized. As it became clear that she had the votes, and Moulton and Gottheimer didn’t, Pelosi began taunting them publicly. She offered some modest concessions, and Gottheimer folded.

The threat from the left, such as it was, was massaged by Pelosi, and Barbara Lee ran for caucus chair instead, spying an opening in the loss by Crowley, who had held the position. She would be running against Crowley’s protégé, a Brooklyn machine politician named Hakeem Jeffries.

Jeffries had his own radical past, but it came through his father. Marland Jeffries was a New York state substance abuse counselor and, in his free time, an active Black nationalist in a period when there was intense energy behind the Black Power movement. Leonard Jeffries Jr., Marland’s brother, became the subject of a national controversy and debate over free speech and academic freedom when the City University of New York tried to remove him as chair of the Black Studies Department for claims he’d made about the Jewish role in the African slave trade (incidentally, the same outlandish and genuinely anti-Semitic claims that tore apart the leadership of the 2017 Women’s March).

Out of this cauldron, Hakeem Jeffries emerged with a visceral hostility toward the radical left. During an interview in the fall of 2021, Jeffries said that one of his sons came to him and said he wanted to participate in some upcoming protests. “Are they marching on me?” Jeffries said he asked him. He was joking—sort of.

Elections for caucus leaders began on the morning of Wednesday, November 28, 2018, and in a twist of narrative fate, Joe Crowley, still chair of the Democratic caucus until the new Congress was sworn in, oversaw the proceedings. Staff was barred from the private session, resulting in something of an intimate atmosphere inside the main auditorium at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. After ten long years, Democrats would finally retake control of the House.

The longest-serving member from each state introduced each new freshman. Eliot Engel, who represented parts of the Bronx and West- chester County, took the stage to introduce the new members of Congress from New York. “Haha they had the region deans announce all the new members and give everyone a rousing, long intro,” AOC texted. “Engel had to introduce me and I got golf claps.”

After the caucus acquainted itself with its new members, Crowley moved to the election for his own soon-to-be-vacant leadership position, chair of the caucus.

Congress is like high school in many ways—one being that it is saturated with rumors. Shortly after Jeffries entered the race, the talk among Democrats turned toward the role of Pelosi in his decision to run. Some of Pelosi’s opponents in the caucus had been hoping Jef- fries would make a bid for Speaker. Jeffries was a natural Plan B. A number of members of Congress who supported Lee, as well as some who backed Jeffries, were convinced that Pelosi had recruited Jeffries to run against Lee—not necessarily to undermine her Bay Area ally, but to prevent Jeffries from running for Speaker.

In either event, Jeffries’s bid was a boon to the trio of septuagenarians in the top three leadership positions, as it offered a release valve for the pressure in finding younger faces among the brass. Concern that Pelosi was behind Jeffries mounted as the race tightened. With her vaunted whip operation, it was assumed that if she wanted Lee to win, she had the tools to make it happen, but she didn’t lift a finger to help Lee.

Brian Higgins, a New York representative who backed Jeffries, suggested that Crowley had a hand in nudging Jeffries into the race against Lee. “To what extent, I don’t know, but I do know that he’s a mentor, and I think he helped him develop a strategy to succeed,” Higgins told me. “Joe Crowley is the most popular guy on campus, with Democrats and Republicans.”

Lee, meanwhile, made her own miscalculation. Convinced by responses from her colleagues that she had enough votes to win, she demanded that the city’s progressive groups—including MoveOn, NARAL, Color of Change, and Democracy for America—stay out of the race rather than call in favors.

Headed into the auditorium that morning, both Lee and Jeffries believed they had the commitments they needed to win. What Lee didn’t know was that Crowley had been doing more than emceeing the proceedings. In the run-up to the vote, he told a number of House Democrats that Lee had cut a check to Ocasio-Cortez, painting Lee as part of the insurgency that those in the room considered a viable threat. Supporting a primary challenge against the beloved Crowley was a treasonous act.

Lee’s campaign did indeed cut a thousand-dollar check to the campaign of Ocasio-Cortez, but it did so on July 10, two weeks after AOC beat Crowley. Since then, Steny Hoyer, Raúl Grijalva, and Maxine Waters, as well as the PAC for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, had all given money to Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign committee. It’s not unusual—a way to welcome an incoming colleague—but Crowley’s framing linked Lee to the growing insurgent movement, despite her decades of experience in Congress. But even if Crowley had been strictly honest about the timing of the donation, the fact of it at all would have been disturbing to many Democrats. The “golf claps” rep- resented the profound distrust Ocasio-Cortez’s new colleagues felt toward her, and it was true that the group coming to be known as the Squad was supporting Lee. So Lee had to be beaten.

Lee took the stage with some thirty members of Congress, and a half dozen gave speeches on her behalf. Her mistake, members of Congress argued to me afterward, was that her message was flat. Her campaign, and the speeches that day, made two points: that Black women powered the Democratic Party and should be in leadership and that Lee had cast that lone courageous vote against going to war in 2001.

There was universal acclaim for both points, but Lee didn’t bother to make a case beyond that. And the fact that her opponent was also Black, albeit a man, diluted the potency of her pitch. Jeffries, meanwhile, made his case based on “generational change” and cited his ability to go toe-to-toe with Trump on cable TV. Implicit in his generational argument was that elevating him to caucus chair would put him in line for Speaker. And nobody in the room thought there was any chance he’d support primaries against incumbents (except, perhaps, against Ocasio-Cortez or others in the Squad).

The votes were cast by secret ballot, and as the counting began, Crowley returned to the stage to say goodbye. On the night of his primary loss, Crowley queued up a song at his watch party, “Born to Run,” that he’d been playing for years at events and had planned to play at his victory party. Instead, he dedicated it to the insurgent who’d beaten him, mispronouncing her name. As the votes to replace him in leadership were being counted, he again broke out in song. This time it was what multiple members said sounded like an Irish funeral dirge.

As Crowley sang his mournful tune, one member of Congress leaned over and captured the mood of the room, saying quietly, “It’s such a shame. This isn’t right.” The congressman looked up and realized—or, perhaps, pretended to realize—that he was talking to Ocasio-Cortez. She texted me about the exchange, adding a laughing-crying emoji and “Belly of the beast baby!”

It took more than an hour, but when the votes were tallied, Jeffries prevailed 123–113. I found Lee in the hallway later that day and asked her about Crowley’s spreading the rumor about her check to Ocasio-Cortez. “Those rumors took place, and that was very unfair,” Lee said. “I didn’t even know [Crowley] had a primary.”

Crowley, following Jeffries’s victory, congratulated him. “I’ve been honored to work alongside Hakeem as we both fought for the working- and middle-class families of New York,” he said in a statement. “As chair, I know he’ll continue that fight and serve as a champion for all Americans by protecting their health care, their voting rights, and their livelihoods. I am incredibly proud that a fellow New Yorker and my friend will help lead the Democratic caucus. New York, and the country, are in good hands with Hakeem.”

Roughly half of Jeffries’s campaign money had come from political action committees—including from the spheres of real estate, finance, law firms, entertainment, and the pharmaceutical industry—and he was one of the most outspoken defenders of the most aggressive Israeli policies inside the Democratic caucus. Jeffries had broken with Democrats to back Wall Street on key votes, including one high-profile measure written by Citigroup lobbyists in 2013. He had also been one of the most vocal supporters in Congress of charter schools and a close ally of not just Crowley, but also New York governor Andrew Cuomo. A prominent supporter of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, he savaged Sanders in particularly aggressive terms, dubbing him a “gun-loving socialist” who provided “aid and comfort” to Donald Trump.

After the vote, I asked Jeffries what specific ideas he and Lee disagreed on during the contest of ideas. “Well, the question for many was ‘How do we get the right mix of experience and generational change,’” he said, deploying a phrase he would return to over and over. “I focused a lot on the work that I’ve done in the past with Blue Dogs, New Dems, and progressives; and with Republicans, at least as it relates to the criminal justice bill, and in a divided government context, [I] made the case that I was reasonably well positioned to get things done, working with Republicans in the House and in the Senate and with a Republican administration in the White House.”

Orientation was just getting started. In a tradition that stretched back generations, veteran members of Congress used the period after the November elections and the start of the new session in January as an opportunity to school incoming freshmen on the ways of the institution. The break also offered an opportunity for powerful interests to shape impressionable new congressional minds.

The House has been continuously in operation more or less since its first session in March 1789, and the chamber has evolved the type of complex and overlapping ecosystems you’d expect in a still- functioning two-hundred-plus-year-old institution. In order to orient members of Congress in the proper direction, they must first be disoriented. Finding one’s place in that teeming mass of 435 bodies is a challenge, but luckily for new members, they can turn to the former ones for guidance—former members still hanging around but now serving as lobbyists.

For candidates who oust a member of their own party, there’s no sharing of institutional knowledge. Crowley’s staff was as surly as possible with AOC’s, and Michael Capuano, who had lost to Pressley, dragged his feet as long as possible in sharing anything helpful.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee used the orientation process to hammer home to its members the importance of immediately beginning to fund-raise for the next election. The DCCC had put together a PowerPoint presentation for freshmen, and a version that had been used in previous cycles was leaked to me. The daily schedule they recommend contemplates a nine- or ten-hour day while members are in Washington. Of that, four hours are to be spent in “call time,” and another hour is blocked off for “strategic outreach,” which includes fund-raisers and press work. An hour is walled off to “recharge,” and three to four hours are designated for the actual work of being a member of Congress—hearings, votes, and meetings with constituents. If the constituents are donors, all the better. The presentation assured members that their fund-raising would be closely monitored; the Federal Election Commission requires members to file quarterly reports.

The schedule back in the home district allowed for a more leisurely fund-raising pace. Members were expected to put in a workday of only eight hours, three of which were to be spent on call time, three to four on community events, and one on strategic outreach.

“What’s my experience with [call time fund-raising]? You might as well be putting bamboo shoots under my fingernails,” Rep. John Larson of Connecticut told me. “It’s the most painful thing, and they’re no sooner elected and they’re down there making phone calls for the [next] election.”

Tom Perriello, who as a populist Democrat represented a right- leaning Virginia district in the consequential Congress of 2009/10, spoke with Ocasio-Cortez after her primary victory, as she was looking for young progressives who could give her some insight into the chamber and its occupants. For Perriello, the fund-raising demands had warped the institution. He told me that the four hours indicated in the presentation may even be “lowballing the figure so as not to scare the new members too much.”

Perriello also said that the drive for fund-raising winds up containing “an enormous anti-populist element, particularly for Dems, who are most likely to be hearing from people who can write at least a five-hundred-dollar check. They may be liberal, quite liberal in fact, but [they] are also more likely to consider the deficit a bigger crisis than the lack of jobs.” The time spent fund-raising, he added, also “helps to explain why many from very safe Dem districts who might otherwise be pushing the conversation to the left, or at least willing to be the first to take tough votes, do not—because they get their leadership positions by raising from the same donors noted above.”

Congressional hearings and fund-raising duties often conflict, and members of Congress have little difficulty deciding between the two—occasionally even raising money from the industry covered by the hearings they skip. It is considered poor form in Congress—borderline self-indulgent—for a freshman to sit at length in congressional hearings when the time could instead be spent raising money. The purpose of being on a good committee—a “money committee,” as they’re known—is to be able to fund-raise from the industry the panel oversees. Over the course of the House’s history, power had gradually been concentrated into the hands of the leadership and, specifically, of the Speaker. Once upon a time, individual chairs of committees held sway over their own fiefdoms, and those competing fiefdoms allowed entrepreneurial backbench members of Congress to have at least the tiniest amount of leverage. Much of that is thanks to Rep. Phil Burton, who served in Pelosi’s seat from 1964 until his death in 1983. Burton was instrumental to Pelosi’s rise, though Pelosi resists the descriptor of mentor, seeing it as a suggestion that she needed a man to get where she is. In truth, she also needed a woman: Burton’s wife, Sala, took his seat after his passing. As she herself lay dying in 1987, she delivered a deathbed endorsement of Pelosi that eased her into the seat.

Phil Burton, known as “the fighting liberal” and one of the most consequential members of the House in the twentieth century, successfully went to war with the southern Old Bulls who had a lock on the House committee structure. He invented a new power structure—no longer would seniority reign; money would—and pioneered the practice of raising money and then sharing it with colleagues to build personal power and rise through the ranks, the system that persists to this day.

Pelosi now had a lock on most sources of big money, and she oversaw a super-committee that operated in secret, which controlled who got on what congressional committee. The money-est of all money committees is Ways and Means, which has jurisdiction over tax and revenue policy, but also over tax credits, which have increasingly become the way the government spends money. The panel has always reserved at least one seat for a member from New York City, and that seat had been Crowley’s. It was now up for grabs, with only two eligible candidates: Ocasio-Cortez and Tom Suozzi, a Long Island Democrat whose few blocks of Queens technically made him eligible. The seats almost never went to freshmen, but AOC decided to try for it. “Well, fuck,” Suozzi told me when I called to tell him Ocasio-Cortez was making a bid for the seat.

The jockeying went on all throughout orientation and was particularly heated as the freshman class traveled to Boston for one of the bipartisan capstone events. The newly elected members attended the gathering hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics not because it was required, but because it was the thing everybody else was doing. Looking back later, Ocasio-Cortez recalled the ordeal as surreal. “That retreat is so weird,” she told me. “It’s not ‘official,’ but it’s so engrained in everything that it seems like it is, but it actually isn’t. So, everyone goes because you just got elected and have no idea what’s going on and don’t want to miss anything important, and then it’s like an MLM for the ruling class,” she said, referring to multi-level marketing. But, she added, “it is really weird, though, because it’s not totally unofficial either—House admin is involved.”

She was in Cambridge that week for a bizarre series of panels organized in part by the House of Representatives, but underwritten by corporate-backed think tanks. The Cambridge event was cohosted by the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Congressional Institute. AEI is a corporate-funded, right-wing think tank; CSIS is a foreign policy think tank funded by corporations, foundations, and foreign governments, many with horrific human rights records, like the United Arab Emirates; and the Congressional Institute is a largely Republican-run, corporate-funded operation that throws retreats for members of Congress, allowing lobbyists access while skirting ethics rules that bar them from funding such activities directly.

The trip to Boston was also a chance for Ocasio-Cortez to return to her college stamping grounds a conquering hero—she had graduated from Boston University just a few years earlier—and to see Ayanna Pressley in her Boston element.

The first week of December, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Omar, and Tlaib filed into seats to listen to panel after panel of business leaders and lobbyists telling them how Washington works. One panel, called White House Congressional Relations: How to Advocate for Your Prior- ities, was led by lobbyists Dan Meyer and Anne Wall of the Duberstein Group; the top lobbyist for CVS Health, Amy Rosenbaum, a former aide to both Obama and Pelosi; and Josh Pitcock, Oracle’s top lobby- ist, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence. Another panel included Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs, who had been an economic adviser to Trump.

Ocasio-Cortez couldn’t hold back anymore. “This Harvard ‘orientation’ is a corporate indoctrination camp and it’s infuriating,” she texted me. About an hour later, she shared a similar sentiment online: “Right now Freshman members of Congress are at a ‘Bipartisan’ orientation w/ briefings on issues. Invited panelists offer insights to inform new Congressmembers’ views as they prepare to legislate,” she tweeted.

# of Corporate CEOs we’ve listened to here: 4

# of Labor leaders: 0

Aside from Cohn, the incoming members had heard from General Motors CEO Mary Barra, Johnson and Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky, and Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg.

“Our ‘bipartisan’ Congressional orientation is cohosted by a corporate lobbyist group. Other members have quietly expressed to me their concern that this wasn’t told to us in advance,” she tweeted. “Lobbyists are here. Goldman Sachs is here. Where’s labor? Activists? Frontline community leaders?”

Members of Congress had been writing memoirs for two hundred years, but none had ever exposed the banal corruption at the heart of the enterprise with such a brutal flick of the thumb in real time. AOC’s words were retweeted more than 25,000 times and liked more than 100,000. Like nothing House Democrats had ever seen, her tweet was a moment of radical opportunity, as if the public had sneaked somebody inside Troy and they were now opening the gates. “Even if it is off record, I didn’t say what they said. Just who wasn’t there,” Ocasio- Cortez recalled later. “I never got a rebuke for that, surprisingly. I think because it was so blatantly embarrassing and indefensible[,] they didn’t have a straw to grasp at.”

Once it became clear what the event’s agenda truly was, the four—Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Omar, and Tlaib—began skipping out on events. Some dropped in on a fossil fuel divestment protest at Harvard. AOC went to watch Pressley participate in her final city council hearing.

When transportation secretary Elaine Chao—the wife of Mitch McConnell and heiress to a Chinese shipping fortune—spoke at the orientation session, Pressley led Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib outside for a rally and press conference, a rebuke of the bipartisan comity being urged on them. “We need to shake this nation awake,” Ocasio-Cortez told the assembled reporters, flanked also by Rep. Andy Levin, a Michigan Democrat who would go on to be a leading voice of labor in the House.

“I did attend a lot of the panels[;] don’t get me wrong!” Ocasio-Cortez added later, ever the diligent student. “But after a while it was repetitive[,] and I got the gist. ‘Bipartisan’ = neoliberalism conference.” One evening, she walked the short distance from her hotel to a nearby bar to meet friends from college. While she may have been returning to town as a conquering hero, she was not yet a universally recognized one.

“ID,” said the server.

Ocasio-Cortez fumbled around, realizing she’d left her license back in her room. At twenty-eight, she was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and in person she looked it. The server was skeptical, and Massachusetts has rules. It took Ocasio-Cortez all her powers of persuasion to talk her way out of an ejection.

She would have less luck with the Ways and Means Committee. The seat ultimately went to Suozzi.