The last time a Democratic Party candidate lost the Missouri First Congressional District was in 1942. So, while it’s not officially a done deal, it’s quite safe to assume Cori Bush — the Democratic Party’s nominee for MO-1 — will take her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives this coming January. When that occurs, she’ll join a growing chorus of truly radical voices in Congress.
Recently, a stark reminder of Bush’s almost assured election to Congress came in a joint speech during the 2020 RNC made by Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who became famous for bearing firearms in defense of their home as Black Lives Matter protestors by on June 28.
“Consider this,” implored Mark McCloskey, “[a] Marxist, liberal activist leading the mob to our neighborhood, stood outside our home with a bullhorn screaming, ‘You can’t stop the revolution.’” “Just weeks later,” he lamented, “that same Marxist activist won the Democratic nomination to hold a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
Grasping the politics of the district, McCloskey conceded Bush’s primary victory amounts to winning the election in November months in advance. “That Marxist revolutionary is now going to be the congresswoman from the first district of Missouri.”
The political terms “Marxist” and “revolutionary” have become so unfortunately commonplace that it can be tempting, though incorrect, to dismiss their use as overzealous hyperbole or as a cheap way to gin up controversy. Make no mistake, however, not only do both terms fit Bush perfectly, but upon taking her seat, Bush will instantly become one of the most leftward members of the House of Representatives.
Bush will fit right in with the pre-existing “Squad” members Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), all open socialists who were first elected in 2018.
Unlike vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who poses as center-left Democrat and is hailed by the media as a “pragmatic moderate,” Bush is open about her extremism. Whether emboldened by the deep-blue political leaning of her prospective district, or by the Democratic Party’s extreme leftward lurch, Bush has made it clear where she stands.
According to her campaign website, Bush’s far-left economic policies include supporting a $15 minimum wage, “Universal Basic Income,” and nebulously vague “economic security” and “food security” as well as the storming-the-Bastille language of “recapturing wealth from Wall Street.” In the realm of immigration policy, Bush advocates abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a quick pathway to citizenship for foreign citizens who illegally entered the United States, and turning St. Louis into a full-blown sanctuary city.
Bush vows to champion the leftist push for socialized health care under the guise of “Medicare For All” while promising to vote to repeal the Hyde Amendment to allow federal tax dollars to be used to fund abortions. On the environment, Bush is in total lockstep with Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), pushing to “fight for environmental justice and the Green New Deal.”
Taking a page out of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s failed “Economic Bill of Rights,” Bush’s radical housing policies are clandestinely frightening. Wholly ignorant of the disastrous consequences of rent control, Bush wants legislation to impose rent control nationwide. “Housing is a basic human right,” Bush argues, refusing to recognize that naming something a “right” doesn’t make it appear or magically immune to the laws of supply and demand.
Bush advocates taxpayers assuming all $1.6 trillion of student debt, a costly scheme that was a prominent policy advocated by Sanders during the 2020 Democratic Party primary. To pair with this enormous expenditure, Bush calls for tuition-free public colleges, universities, and trade schools, a proposal that doesn’t seem to grasp the reality that post-secondary administrators, professors, and staff need to be paid somehow.
The enormous price tag that would accompany the schemes Bush seeks would — by necessity — result in a further explosion of the already untenable national debt, increasing inflation, or massive tax increases.
Aside from domestic policy, Bush’s views on foreign matters are equally troubling. Bush is a supporter of the antisemitic “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement, which among other beliefs, questions Israel’s right to exist. When challenged on her pro-BDS stance, her campaign doubled-down on Bush’s support for BDS, exclaiming, “Cori Bush has always been sympathetic to the BDS movement, and she stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people just as they have stood in solidarity with Black Americans fighting for their own lives.”
Bush has been endorsed by leftist political action committees such as Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats. More tellingly, she received the full endorsement of the openly socialist group Democratic Socialists of America — a move, however, that wasn’t so surprising considering Bush is a member of the radical organization.
That Bush was able to defeat Lacy Clay, who held the seat since 2000, shows the worrying trend of extreme leftists waltzing into “safe” Democratic Party seats didn’t end with Ocasio-Cortez and Omar. Bush’s victory is a blaring alarm to any remaining reasonable Democrats that they need to take the fringe of their party seriously, and a far greater effort must be made to stymie the rise of such radicals. The more Marxists like Cori Bush find districts to take advantage of, the more they’ll increasingly fill the halls of America’s most hallowed bastions of government and influence.
America benefits from a healthy debate between rational representatives from the left and the right. By their very nature, however, Marxists reject the core precepts of the American Founding. As such, with such extremists, there is little hope for productive discussion or educational exchange of ideas.
Before their radical ideology is normalized and they occupy platforms to spread their cancerous beliefs, the American people need to be shown how such policies would do horrific harm to the country. There’s no political compromise with revolutionaries like Cori Bush — the only course of action is to defeat them at the ballot box at every turn.