Rashida Tlaib Reminds Us That Kamala Harris Still Must Earn Your Vote

By Jacob Weindling | July 23, 2024 | 11:00am

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Elections 2024 Election

Rashida Tlaib Reminds Us That Kamala Harris Still Must Earn Your Vote

Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, is taking some heat for not instantly lining up behind Kamala Harris for president. Some partisan hacks have tried to portray this as disloyalty to the Democratic Party, but such is the nature of partisan brain rot. It cannot comprehend the notion of doing politics, as it is inherently subservient to power. Partisans do as they are told, while those who understand politics attempt to influence the people telling partisans what to do.

Tlaib is not opposing Harris’s candidacy, but using what little leverage she has as an elected official from a swing state to try to accomplish tangible policy goals. After Joe Biden helped usher us into a coconut-based future, Rep. Tlaib released the following statement:

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“I welcome the opportunity to engage Vice President Harris as my team and I work hard to inspire our Democratic base in the 12th Congressional District. They want to see a permanent ceasefire and an end to the funding of genocide in Gaza. They want to see immigration policies that support a fair and humane system, not one that vilifies immigrants. They want to see a clear path to ending fossil fuel subsidies that continue to poison our air and water. They want to see the end to our inhumane health care system and the attempts to dismantle our public education system. They want us to fight against corporate greed that wants to eliminate unions and keep our families in the cycle of poverty. I am eager to speak to Vice President Harris about all of these issues and more.”

If you read that passage and your first response is to get mad at a supposed betrayal of the Democratic Party, you have partisan brain worms. Everything Rep. Tlaib put in there is a concrete policy ask, and she ended her statement by asserting the need to “defeat Donald Trump and the dangerous implications of Project 2025.” This is what normal politics looks like, and it says a lot about the Democratic Party and her progressive allies that basically everyone except for Rashida Tlaib just unquestionably lined up behind Kamala Harris after they were told to without trying to use any of their power to move her left.

Kamala Harris might be better for the left than Joe Biden. Her record on climate is pretty encouraging. Reports indicate she is more amenable to a permanent ceasefire in Gaza than Biden. Harris has endorsed policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal in the past before kinda backtracking. There are reasons to believe that she could be a lefty ally, but it won’t happen without the left trying to drag her in our direction like we did with Joe Biden. If everyone just does what they’re told and never questions anything, then the donors who created this shitshow will continue to drive policy and push the Democrats further to the right. There needs to be a counterweight to them on the left.

And it needs to be more than just Rashida Tlaib. I defended Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s gambit to toss a flailing Joe Biden a lefty lifeline because I think it was all upside and no downside, but uncritically supporting Harris without any policy asks is a total waste of the power the left has amassed since 2016. Why not just take the agenda you forced on Biden and withhold your endorsement until Harris adopts it too? Rashida Tlaib is the only Democrat who is trying to use this moment to push the party to adopt serious policy solutions to major problems, and it is dismaying seeing her hung out to dry like this by her progressive caucus.

There are risks to this strategy, of course. Using this moment of Democratic unity to drive a policy wedge into the party could leave Tlaib on the outside looking in should the party win the White House, and potentially make it more difficult to achieve her policy goals. Challenging power sounds good in the abstract and in Rage Against the Machine songs, but the reality is that it always carries immense risks because the very nature of power is that it holds all the cards. The best way to counter this advantage is to use our strength in numbers, but unfortunately Tlaib’s colleagues did not provide her that benefit. That she is still venturing out on this limb alone speaks to her bravery as a politician.

Rashida Tlaib deserves better. The Palestinian people deserve better. The genocide is still ongoing, even if power’s favored stenographers were able to replace massacred Palestinian children with protesting American college students in the media’s collective consciousness. Kamala Harris is part of an administration aiding and abetting a genocide, and she shouldn’t get a pass just because there are media reports suggesting that she is not as callous towards Palestinian life as Joe Biden.

The only vote that actually matters is 104 days away, and it is not unreasonable to try to leverage its power in the meantime. Gaza and the West Bank and southern Lebanon are all under attack right now by an out-of-control pariah state led by an indicted autocratic maniac gleefully perpetuating a genocide with tangible American support. Horrific doesn’t even begin to describe this situation, and the lack of urgency within the Democratic Party to do anything to ameliorate the suffering in the region is an indictment of their bankrupt priorities.

Unfortunately for Tlaib, her principled stance is running into an impossible political situation, which can be measured by her colleagues’ capitulation. Addressing the genocide in Gaza, our inhumane immigration system and the Democrats’ lurch to the right on the issue, or the continued subsidies for unfathomably wealthy companies poisoning the planet, requires critiquing Joe Biden’s presidency, which is verboten in the Democratic Party right now.

The implicit deal being offered by Democratic Party power brokers was that a man losing a fight to Father Time would step aside for a more competent generation, and he would instantly become venerated, while stubbornly staying on the ticket would leave him reviled. Now that Biden has made good on his end of the bargain, the Democratic Party and its favored media organs are going into overdrive to write Joe Biden’s legacy in permanent ink while he still ships bombs to Benjamin Netanyahu. If anything, Rashida Tlaib is the one trying to protect his legacy by pressuring his handpicked replacement to reverse his barbarous policies.

This is what politics looks like. The fantasy booking for Vice President that consumes so much of the media narrative now is fun and all, but that’s an indulgence in the superficiality of politics. It’s a sugar high. It is one of the many shiny things that power distracts us with while they influence the levers of government in the shadows, demonstrating a far better understanding of the true nature of politics than partisans treating it like their favorite TV show ever do.

Rashida Tlaib understands power’s aims, which is why she is trying to use this historic moment to advance policies that would make millions of people’s lives immeasurably better. That the party is more concerned with preserving one man’s legacy in this moment is a stark reminder of its real priorities. We have a long, long ways to go to become the country we believe ourselves to be, and it will take a lot more Rashida Tlaibs if we are ever to get there.