Photo: Mandel Ngan/Pool/Getty Images Pramila Jayapal has been arrested three times. First in 2010, and again in 2013, during her years as a community organizer in Seattle. But between arrests number two and three, which took place in 2018, a few things changed. For one, Jayapal had been elected to Congress.
“My deep fear,” she adds, “is that we get Trump out of office, but don’t do enough to address the root causes. And we leave open that giant wound to fester, so that people can again use it to their advantage to divide us, and to get another Trump.” For all its progress, Seattle isn’t a liberal paradise, either. The city has its own complications and contradictions. Gentrification and a booming tech sector have driven up housing prices, and the mayor, Durkan, recently alienated progressives for her failure to control the city’s brutal police force. Activism runs into institutionalism, even in Seattle. That friction created an apt proving ground for Jayapal, who now co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
In the wake of the attacks, President George W. Bush cast the war on terror in apocalyptic terms, an existential struggle between us and a broad category of other. People listened, and some, Jayapal notes, targeted Muslims and Sikhs — often mistaken for Muslims — for acts of vigilante violence. Jayapal then a distraught new citizen, began to organize, starting with a push to declare Seattle a “Hate Free Zone.” She later started a group by the same name; it has since evolved into OneAmerica.
Now an insider, a rising Democratic star with a national profile, Jayapal can find herself on the receiving end of criticism from activists. Despite its name, the CPC is ideologically diverse, and its rank-and-file members aren’t all as liberal as Jayapal. On issues like national security and immigration, they can in fact be significantly to her right — and as a caucus co-chair, it’s her task to figure out where exactly to draw the line. “For me, it has to be a principled compromise,” she says.
Take Medicare for All, which Jayapal strongly supports. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will probably never back Jayapal’s Medicare for All bill, but despite this, Jayapal, her CPC co-chair Mark Pocan from Wisconsin, and their allies were able to negotiate the first House hearings on the policy in 2019. The progressives pushed, too, for the inclusion of a patient voice on the witness list: Ady Barkan, who lives with ALS and is a prominent supporter of Medicare for All.
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