He has been called “the fastest member of Congress” for his running exploits. Now, U.S. Representative Greg Casar, Democrat of Texas, is racing into upper party echelons as the new chair of the ninety-seven-member Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Casar is the first Progressive caucus chair from a red state, and is also the first Latinx politician to represent the Austin area. In a memo released in December, caucus leaders including Casar and Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington and the former caucus chair, urged the Democratic Party to “create an authentic Democratic brand that offers a clear alternative and inclusive vision for how we will make life better for the 90 percent who are struggling in this economy, [and] take on the biggest corporations and wealthiest individuals who have rigged the system.”
Casar, just starting his second term in Congress at age thirty-five, recently spoke with The Progressive about his vision for changing the party’s priorities and direction.
Q: I want to start by asking, how do you win as a progressive in Texas?
Greg Casar: There’s a long progressive history in Texas of organizing across rural and urban areas, of organizing across race. There’s an old progressive populist movement in Texas [made up] of Black, Mexican American, and white farmers that dates back to the beginning days of the state. And there’s a recent history of Texans pushing a Texas-born President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was previously skeptical of civil rights, to pass not just the Civil Rights Act, but also the Voting Rights Act; to create not only Medicaid, but also Head Start, all in one term.
In each of those cases, progressives brought working people together across their differences, even across ideology, to help with the basic goal of taking on the powerful and making life a little easier for everyday people. I have that experience as a labor organizer. I organized immigrants and native-born construction workers on construction sites where you had fifth-generation Texans in white majority unions working directly alongside undocumented workers. And instead of ignoring the differences among those different workers, we brought people together around one common goal, which was a safer workplace and winning a raise.
I think the Democratic Party could learn a lot from that. Instead of splitting our constituencies, we should bring a broader part of the American public together around beating back corruption and winning everybody a raise.
Q: How can immigration and the border become issues that progressives can use to build bridges instead of divides?
Casar: Corporate interests want immigrant workers who are scared they could be deported if they speak up. They want immigrant workers to be [afraid to] claim their overtime pay. That brings down pay for everyone. So when I organize on construction sites, we talk about how we want union contracts for everybody, and that helps long-standing union workers, just like it helps exploited immigrant workers.
Our fight for immigration reform and equal rights for immigrants isn’t just an act of charity for immigrant workers; it’s actually a cause that helps everybody on a job site. I found that worked for everybody, regardless of how comfortable they felt culturally with each other.
If the Democratic Party just tries to act Republican-lite on the issue, then we don’t present any real vision or alternative to the Republican vision. And then the Republicans will drag us further and further to the right, to the point where Democrats are being asked to vote for things that are completely outside of our value set. When you’re completely outside of your value set, people know that you’re being inauthentic, and there’s nothing worse for a political party than to be seen as inauthentic.
I expect, unfortunately, that Donald Trump will be so cruel and so horrific on immigration issues that there will be backlash to his cruelty. We saw that in the first term, but the backlash to Trumpism isn’t enough. We need to establish a long-standing principle that will withstand the back-and-forths of Fox News politics, and ground our immigration politics in something that is good for everybody, even if you’re not the kid of an immigrant like me or so many others.
Q: Do you feel the Democrats opened the door to today’s immigration issues?
Casar: Well, we contributed significantly by continuing our devastating economy-wide sanctions on countries like Cuba and Venezuela. The U.S. policies established by Trump [in his first term] but then continued in many ways by the Biden Administration didn’t serve to create free and fair elections in places like Venezuela. But they did contribute to the poverty and desperation there, pushing people out of their home countries.
Democrats going along with Republican foreign policy and sanctions policy has made the issue worse, [leading to] a Western Hemisphere migration surge. When Republicans don’t want to help address the logistics of that surge and want to politically exploit it, and then Democrats have helped contribute to the creation of that surge, you’ve got to start asking yourself, why do we do that?
Q: What is a progressive vision or policy on immigration? Where would you like to see the Democratic Party go on this issue?
Casar: I think the party should say clearly that immigrant workers and native-born workers deserve the same rights, and that will raise wages and improve benefits for everybody. Republicans want there to be two tiers of people and that hurts everybody. Second, immigration can be legal, lawful, humane, and orderly, and that’s good for everyone. And that Republicans are trying to make the immigration system more disorderly and more broken. That’s what actually creates danger for people.
Nothing enriches the cartels more than for immigration to be extremely difficult and dangerous and for the legal system to be almost impossible to access. That’s what the Republican and Trump platform is. Nothing helps the cartels more than for states like Texas to hand out guns, oftentimes without a background check, and for guns and weapons of war that are impossible to access in Mexico to be easily accessible on the Texan side of the border. Republican policies on immigration are bad for our economy. They’re good for the cartels. They get weapons in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.
Q: Let’s talk about economic populism. What is a populist economic agenda for the Democratic Party?
Casar: The Democratic Party used to primarily be associated with fighting for the working class. We started losing that over the last thirty years, ever since NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. But it’s been in more rapid decline in the past ten years. I believe deeply in fighting for vulnerable people and for reproductive rights and climate action. But we won’t have the numbers in office to protect the vulnerable and health care and the climate if we don’t fix the fundamental problem of the Democrats’ loss of trust among a lot of working class people, because that’s our base.
Many working class people perceive us as either technocratic or out of touch. I think the way to get working people back to the party is for working people to not just see our policy positions, but to know that we’re willing to fight for them against the people that are screwing working people over.
That economic populist and progressive vision has been at the core of what the Progressive Caucus has been all about. There are populist economic issues: capping credit card interest rates, cracking down on junk fees, breaking up corporations that are jacking up prices at the grocery store. For those issues, we have the vast majority of the American people with us, and we need a Democratic Party to catch up to where progressives have been on that for a long time.
I think the Democratic Party needs to put taking on corporations and raising people’s wages and lowering people’s housing costs first. I know the consequences of abortion bans. We have one in Texas. Women are dying, and it’s serious. I know the consequences of the January 6ths of the world. Those are serious issues that we should talk about. But first on the list, it should always be people’s pocketbook issues.
The Republicans have said that it’s immigrants that are raising your rent and driving housing shortages, or that it’s trans people that are ruining our health care system, and that Democrats are enabling that. Democrats have to be able to say it’s not an asylum seeker raising your rent. It’s a Wall Street CEO, just like the ones that Trump is appointing to his Cabinet.
Q: Why do you think the Democratic Party has not been doing clear messaging around corporate power and economic wealth?
Casar: I trace part of this back to the Clinton era. I was six years old at the time. I think there were well-meaning people in that era who believed that the expansion of U.S. corporations around the world would lower consumer prices and that the working class would tie itself more deeply to the Democratic Party in response, right? That would create global stability and lower consumer prices.
Most Democrats in the House voted against NAFTA, but I know there are well-meaning Democrats who thought that lowering those prices would resonate with the working class. What they underestimated was how important solid wages, stability, and good jobs, and standing up for everyday people’s daily lives is. Voters don’t function on a spreadsheet, right? You can’t say, “Well, these hundred people are going to lose their jobs, but these thousand people are going to be able to get a cheaper toaster, so we’re going to go up a net 900 votes.”
We have to care for the daily lives and experiences of those hundred working-class constituents. I think that technocratic, corporate-influenced mentality is failing us, and we’re trying to figure out how to take the Democratic Party in a new direction.
Q: A memo just came out in which you, Representative Jayapal, and others talked about corporate PACs and really changing the structure of the Democratic Party and donors. Do you see any progress on that front?
Casar: Yes, we’re going to be asking the chair candidates of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] about getting rid of massive corporate influence inside the Democratic Party. We need to be able to name names and call out corporate bad actors and not be tied up with them. We have a real opportunity to decouple the Democratic Party from many of those corporate influences here in the DNC chair race. And the Progressive Caucus is going to be asking all of the candidates where they stand on those principles.
Q: How do you see the Progressive Caucus building more power and leverage vis-à-vis the Democratic Party?
Casar: This is an area where [former] Chair Jayapal did great work. We have updated our bylaws to require a lot more caucus unity. We’re going to be trying to reclaim a majority on this populist economic agenda. I think we’re going to really leverage Progressive Caucus votes to make sure that those votes come to the floor.
We’re nearly half the Democratic Caucus now and we’re already trying to use our numbers to get more progressives onto key committees that oftentimes have excluded progressives. That’s something that I’ve made a real priority at the beginning of my time as chair. That’s what makes differences in our financial system. That’s what makes differences in our tax system.
Republicans right now often need two-thirds of the House to pass a bill because they can’t get things out of their own disorganized rules committee. So they may sometimes need Progressive Caucus members’ votes to put things into law. The Progressive Caucus has a huge opportunity with ninety-plus members to actually kill some of Trump’s priorities.
