AIPAC Bought Cori Bush’s Seat
Cori Bush delivering her concession speech on August 6, 2024, in St Louis, Missouri. (Michael B. Thomas / Getty Images)
Wealthy pro-Israel donors drove Congresswoman Cori Bush out of office because she thinks Palestinians’ lives matter.
By Ben Burgis
On October 27, just twenty days into the war in Gaza, Congresswoman Cori Bush introduced a resolution calling for a cease-fire. In the months since, many have smeared her as an antisemite or a supporter of Hamas, but a quick glance at the remarks she delivered in the House that day — which were subsequently reprinted in Jacobin — shows that these allegations are pure nonsense. She repeatedly talked about the plight of the Israeli hostages, reasoning that it’s essential to de-escalate the conflict so they can be brought home to their families. She said, “We strongly condemn Hamas for its appalling attack against Israelis.” Over and over again, she referenced the humanity of “Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims” and used phrases like “my Jewish and Palestinian siblings.”
Her crime, in the eyes of the Democratic establishment, wealthy pro-Israel donors, and much of the media, is that she takes the humanity of all of these groups equally seriously. For Bush, condemnation of Hamas, while correct, can’t be used as an excuse to support the American-backed “mass murder of Palestinians.” That would violate her “strong belief that all human life is equally precious.”
This is the belief that so infuriated the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which Jacobin’s Liza Featherstone aptly calls a “pro-genocide money machine.” To punish Bush, AIPAC dangled massive amounts of money before anyone who would primary her. A challenger rose to the occasion, and with AIPAC’s endless resources at his disposal, he won.
Whatever you think about any other aspect of Bush’s politics or record, this much is crystal clear: as millions of Palestinians have been driven from their homes in a blatant campaign of ethnic cleansing, and more children have been killed in Gaza than had been killed in all the war zones in the world in the previous four years, Cori Bush took a stand for basic human decency — and for that crime, she was drummed out of Congress.
“You Can’t Buy an Election”
Bush’s successful primary challenger, Wesley Bell, originally planned to challenge far-right Republican Josh Hawley for his Senate seat. If he’d won that race, Bell would have been an improvement over Hawley. While Hawley makes a show of pretending to be a new kind of “pro-worker” conservative, even a mediocre Democrat like Bell would have presumably gotten behind the PRO Act to make it easier to organize unions — which Hawley continues to oppose.
Last summer, Joe Holleman of the St Louis Post-Dispatch asked in his column whether Bell’s actual plan was to raise his profile in the state with a fake run against Hawley and then switch to a run for Bush’s House seat. Bell was apparently so aghast that anyone would suggest this that he called Bush to reassure her that he had no such intention. You can listen to a recording of that call here.
At the time, he might have even been telling the truth. As Drop Site News’s Ryan Grim puts it, though, after Bush took the lead in the movement for a cease-fire after October 7, AIPAC “let it be publicly known that a challenger to Bush would have effectively bottomless fundraising support.” We have every indication that this was decisive in nudging Bell to get into the race against Bush. As of last month, fully 62 percent of Bell’s campaign funds came from AIPAC-linked donations.
It’s evident to the naked eye that AIPAC bought Bush’s seat. But opponents of the Left are twisting themselves in knots to claim otherwise, insisting that actually the people had spoken about Bush’s inattention to their needs. Writing in Compact, Alexander Nazaryan opines that:
The reality is that you can influence an American election, but you can’t buy one. And Bush left herself vulnerable to such influence by catering to her brand more than to her constituents.
Nazaryan, who seems to have little to no idea what local issues were in play in the race, only gives us one example of Bush allegedly neglecting her constituents on domestic issues. She voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill. That’s it.
Why did she cast that vote? He doesn’t say, but it’s easy enough to look up. The original Build Back Better package was supposed to include all sorts of measures that would materially help Bush’s low-income constituents, like universal pre-K, free community college, and universal paid family and medical leave. These are all popular and desperately needed measures. They were sacrificed at the altar of “bipartisanship” even though there were enough Democratic votes to pass the whole thing through the reconciliation process.
At the time, Democratic leadership claimed that they were pursuing a “two-track” strategy. The Chamber of Commerce–friendly infrastructure stuff would get passed through Congress, and all the controversial stuff that would help the working class at the expense of billionaires would be passed “later” through reconciliation. Anyone who wouldn’t be routinely fooled by the “wallet inspector” in the Simpsons could see through it, and Bush did. If more Democrats had voted the way she did, the fight for paid family and medical leave and the rest might have lived to fight another day. That’s neglecting her constituents?
Devin Thomas O’Shea, who has a better grasp on local politics in Missouri than Nazaryan, sharply captured the difference in the two candidates’ messaging. Bell claimed to be just as “progressive” as Bush but “also — at the same time and without conflict — friendlier to corporations and big business.” Initially, Bell’s message didn’t seem to be landing, with Bush beating him by at least seventeen points in the beginning. A staggering eight million dollars from AIPAC, and a surprising — or maybe not so surprising — number of donations from Republicans who’d also given to Bell’s original opponent Josh Hawley, made Bell a contender.
No election outcome is monocausal. There are always decisions that could have been made differently. For example, it was probably a mistake for Bush to refuse to debate Bell. She said she wouldn’t “platform” a candidate swimming in Republican money. The problem with that is that the money already gave Bell a massive platform, and Bush could have only benefited from calling out his support of the business elite and of Palestinian genocide.
All the same, the claim that “you can influence an American election, but you can’t buy one” is vacuous wordplay. If you can buy influence, and that influence is decisive in tilting the election, that’s what everyone everywhere means by “buying an election.” And there’s no gainsaying that this is exactly what happened in Bush’s race. AIPAC money is what tempted Bell to run, and without it he wouldn’t have won.
Cori Bush Sacrificed Her Career to Oppose Genocide
The usual pro-genocide ghouls will claim that telling the truth about AIPAC buying the seat is antisemitism because it promotes a narrative about “Jewish money.” That’s nonsense, and not just because Jewish peace groups worked hard to reelect Bush or because plenty of pro-Israeli donors are Christians. The deeper issue is that parsing the accurate observation about AIPAC as a claim about “Jews,” thereby equating AIPAC with the entire Jewish people — as if entire ethnicities were hive minds that held collective political opinions and collectively acted in the political process — is itself deeply antisemitic.