As election results in the Queens district attorney race began coming in this evening, it was looking quite good for Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president who has the backing of the famous Queens machine, as well as every local member of Congress (save one), including the most famous ex-member, the one-time King of Queens, Joe Crowley.
Crowly lost his seat in a stunner a year ago tomorrow, and a shock was in store tonight for Katz. As the votes continued to be tallied, Tiffany Cabán, running on a radical decarceration platform, surged into the lead. She held it through the night, and declared victory with 99 percent of the precincts reporting, holding on to a lead of 1,090 votes. The outstanding precincts were all in Jackson Heights, a Cabán stronghold, and there don’t appear to be enough absentee ballots outstanding to swing the election. Katz has not conceded.
Nausicaa Renner was at both watch parties for The Intercept, and her dispatch, with Akela Lacy, is here. I did an explainer on the race for TYT, which you can watch here.
It was a tense day on Capitol Hill, too. Democrats have been negotiating an emergency spending bill for the border crisis. Democrats, of course, want no part in Trump’s immigration policy, particularly the element that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others have accurately dubbed his concentration camps. But at the same time, children are suffering, and the money, with conditions attached, could improve the situation for desperate people.
Over the past few days, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has been debating internally how to approach the spending bill. On Sunday, they held a conference call that three dozen members of Congress joined to debate whether to push for a tougher bill or support whatever party leadership came up with. They met on Tuesday and the conversation got heated, with Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman arguing that Democrats should vote for whatever comes up and CPC co-chair Pramila Jayapal pushing back, making the case that by standing together, they could at least demand concessions before going about the ugly act of voting to fund Trump’s border policy, however reformed by the conditions. Enough CPC members stuck together that they were able to win some concessions, particularly a condition that any private contractor not meeting safety and sanitation criteria within six months will lose their contract and be unable to bid for the next one. “It’s ridiculous but that’s the first time we’ve been able to get that in,” Jayapal told me.
Earlier on Tuesday, activists from the Sunrise Movement attempted to occupy the DNC’s headquarters, protesting the party committee’s refusal to host a climate change debate. Aída Chávez and I were there. Here’s her report.
If any of these insurgent victory are coming as a surprise to you, that must be because you haven’t read my book yet. You can fix that by getting it here. And the good news is it’s now available at Barnes and Noble for $12.40, which is a steal, and I hope it means I still get some royalties, but who knows.