Science ftw

You had the Centrist Dem Senators and House members in the Problem Solvers Caucus who killed Build Back Better, which was Biden’s admirable attempt at a real transformative policy with input and collaboration from across the party. (An ExxonMobil lobbyist was caught on camera bragging how he bought them off). Centrist Dems signed off on the For the People Act when it had no chance of passing, which were policy reforms meant to protect Democracy, and then blocked it when we had power, including various watered down versions of necessary voting reforms. Centrists killed the Public Option when we passed the ACA. The Problem Solvers Caucus Dems famously withheld their vote for Pelosi when Dems retook the House until they were able to get a rule that allowed Republicans to bring bills to the floor in the minority. Those same Problem Solvers Caucus Dems, that same session, tried to swap out the text of a humanitarian aid bill meant for the border with Mitch McConnell’s version of the same bill, turning it effectively into another giveaway to military contractors and an expansion of detention centers, while bringing down the humanitarian aid to less than 3% of the bill. Then there’s the rolling back of Dodd Frank, Sinema infamously giving the thumbs down to a minimum wage increase, this year’s funding and offering gratitude towards ICE and voting for the Laken Riley Act and crypto bills. And those are just the ones off the top of my head where the rotating villain strategy magically always gives Republicans enough Dem votes. I ran in a primary against a centrist Dem, who is still funded by Trump donors, who during his break from Congress worked for a lobbying firm that represented anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice groups, and gets his DC housing subsidized by a right-wing religious extremist group. Not every candidate is going to be great. Most are going to be somehow flawed. And some should never have been allowed to run in the first place. We should be able to have objective conversations about these things. But frankly, it won’t happen on click-incentivized platforms like this where pundits and lobbyists with monetized agendas have more clout, and over half the accounts are bots.