Chances are that unless you lived in Seattle or were a political junkie, you hadn’t heard of Pramila Jayapal before last year. Nor should you have. Elected in 2016 to represent Washington’s 7th District, she was like most congressmen are after two terms: an anonymous backbencher.
Two things changed that in 2021. First, Joe Biden became president. Second, Jayapal was chosen by her colleagues to lead the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Previously the co-chair, she would now run the group comprised of Congress’ most liberal Democrats alone. With a Democratic trifecta (control of both houses of Congress and the presidency) in Washington, the continuing leftward drift of the party, and a 95-member CPC constituting a record share of the House Democratic caucus due to Democrats’ surprise loss of a baker’s dozen of seats in the 2020 election, progressives looked poised to exert greater influence over the Democratic agenda than ever before. And the now-third term congresswoman from the Pacific Northwest would be the person to wield it.
For a time last summer and fall, Jayapal was arguably wielding it more effectively than anyone in Washington. For two months, she held up the House vote on the bipartisan infrastructure deal Biden had negotiated with Senate Republicans while she attempted to force Congress to pass the hodgepodge of long-standing Democratic priorities known as the “Build Back Better” plan. Republicans and centrist Democrats would get what they wanted, but only when progressives got what they wanted. Which, it so happened, was just what Biden wanted: Build Back Better was the centerpiece of his legislative program. Here at last was the power progressives had craved for so long. The Democratic agenda was in their hands.
It would not stay there long. Pressure to pass the infrastructure bill became too great, and eventually, Jayapal had to relent. That bill went through, while Build Back Better remains trapped in limbo. While Biden sounded the appropriate noises during his State of the Union address about the need to pass “my plan” and touted some of its more popular provisions, such as lowering the cost of prescription drugs, paid parental leave, and subsidizing childcare, the name “Build Back Better” was conspicuously absent from it. And with no negotiations about a revamped version taking place, and the administration engrossed with a Supreme Court confirmation and the Ukraine crisis (not to mention the ever-present shadow of COVID), Build Back Better is no closer to passage today than it was a year ago.
Where progressives go from here is anyone’s guess. The first person who will have to venture one is Jayapal. As head of their caucus, advancing progressives’ priorities is her job. For a moment, she pushed them nearer to the finish line than ever. That still wasn’t far enough. She may never come so close again.
Pramila Jayapal was an unlikely candidate to be in such a position at all. Born in the Indian city of Madras (now Chennai) in 1965, she spent most of her childhood in Indonesia and Singapore before emigrating to the United States at the age of 16 to attend Georgetown. After getting an MBA from Northwestern, she worked briefly in the private sector before settling in Seattle to pursue a career in progressive activism.
Having dipped her toes into politics as a member of Seattle’s commission tasked with adopting a $15 minimum wage, and as the chairwoman of the search committee to find a new police chief, Jayapal was elected to the Washington state Senate in 2014. Two years later, she ran to replace the retiring Jim McDermott in the House of Representatives, becoming the first Indian American woman in Congress.
Though she lacked the initial notoriety of her progressive compatriots in the so-called “Squad” who followed her into Congress two years later, Jayapal quickly became a progressive darling. Four months into her tenure, Nation writer Joan Walsh anointed her “a leader of the Democratic resistance.” No less impressed was Nancy Pelosi, who described the newcomer as “a rising star in the Democratic caucus.”
Jayapal’s star kept climbing last year when she was chosen to lead progressives’ efforts to enact their agenda as sole head of the progressive caucus after having been named its co-chair in only her second term. A fast rise for someone who wasn’t in Congress five years ago. But her tenure got off to a rocky start. The drive to include a $15 minimum wage in the latest coronavirus relief bill crashed in the Senate in February. By April, outlets such as Politico were publishing articles about how progressive ambitions were already foundering on the shoals of reality.
That did nothing to dim Jayapal’s increasing refulgence. As her prominence grew, so did the adulatory coverage from a media that no doubt sympathized with her goal of coaxing Biden to the left. But when coaxing proved insufficient, Jayapal turned to a blunter approach.
As negotiations between him and Republicans on the infrastructure bill dragged from the spring into the summer, Jayapal demanded that Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue end the talks and focus on the multitrillion-dollar Democratic wish list that they intended to pass without any GOP votes through the reconciliation process. After various fits and starts, however, a deal was clinched in late June.
Rather than deter Jayapal, this only made her more insistent that if centrists were going to get their way, progressives must get theirs, too. Progressives swore they would not allow the House to pass the infrastructure plan by Speaker Pelosi’s proposed Sept. 27 deadline unless it voted on House Democrats’ version of the reconciliation bill (i.e., Build Back Better) by then as well. “It’s very obvious that I’m not going to do” the Sept. 27 date unless BBB is included, Jayapal told reporters in late August. “They’ve got to bring all of us along.”
When it appeared they’d be left behind, progressives wouldn’t relent. “Try us,” Jayapal said a month later when reporters asked if they were bluffing. To the dismay of some and delight of others, she proved they weren’t when they forced Pelosi to delay the Oct. 1 vote she had scheduled for the infrastructure bill. The same thing happened at the end of the month. Not even Joe Biden could convince the progressives to yield. Both times, he went up to Capitol Hill to rally House Democrats, and both times, he walked away empty-handed, though in neither case did he give them an ultimatum. The second time, in fact, it was Jayapal who issued one. According to Politico, she implored Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, not to send his boss to the Capitol to cajole progressives to vote for the infrastructure bill while the reconciliation bill languished in purgatory. With the president not directly asking them to vote for the infrastructure deal, progressives had the pretext not to. For the second time in October, House Democrats were in disarray. But progressives had triumphed.
If Jayapal’s press was glowing, it now became positively incandescent. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg gushed that Jayapal “won’t let the Biden presidency fail” because, to her, passing the reconciliation bill was not just a “political imperative” but also a moral one. The ever-excitable leftist writer John Nichols lauded Jayapal for fashioning the progressive caucus into “a bulwark against the sort of centrist compromises” that undermined Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. CNN pointed out the obvious, dubbing her “one of the most powerful leaders on Capitol Hill right now.”
Jayapal’s power derived from her being a leader of both progressives and Democrats. Yet her obligations as one were always in tension with her obligations as the other. However much she protested she was fighting for the president’s agenda, her actions had the effect of blockading it. A week later, the White House did deliver an ultimatum: The president needs a victory, now. The progressives submitted; all but six voted for the infrastructure bill as it passed the House.
Progressives gave in, but not before flexing their muscles. This new, emboldened stance pleased activists, who hailed Jayapal & Co. for holding out and doing so for two months. But what did they actually gain from their new assertiveness besides plaudits? Build Back Better remained where it had been all year: in the ether. Moreover, Jayapal may have fatally sabotaged it by alienating Joe Manchin.
The centrist West Virginia Democrat coldly remarked that “I’m not really good on threats” when asked about progressives’ warnings that they’d sink the infrastructure bill unless an agreement was reached on BBB. Without his vote, it would not pass the Senate. In December, Manchin announced he could not vote for Build Back Better in its present form, pulling the plug on it once and for all. Progressives’ fears that Manchin would ultimately oppose BBB proved true. Fears that, given their barely concealed antipathy, even contempt for him, were at least partially self-fulfilling.
Undaunted, Jayapal told the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner that she and her cohort would adopt “a two-track strategy to do everything we can” to enact Build Back Better via legislation while also urging the president to implement parts of it via executive action. Neither did she rule out further negotiations with her Mountain State antagonist. Manchin seemed somewhat receptive to the president’s State of the Union entreaties about “building a better America,” but he reiterated that he would only support a much more modest bill that would fall far short of progressives’ most ardent desires for a vast increase in government social spending. As they had already downsized their ambitions at Manchin’s behest, that would be a bitter pill to swallow.
Jayapal’s sincerity should not be doubted. When she claims she wants to help as many people as possible by pursuing the policies she is — awful as they are liable to prove in practice — she means what she says. What can be doubted are her tactics and their efficacy. A recent Businessweek profile proclaimed that she “is imposing discipline on the Democratic left.” Which is true: Without the cohesion she inspired in her ranks, her gambit would not have gotten as far as it did. Yet it still failed. A failure that was inevitable.
Pramila Jayapal could not defeat Joe Manchin for the simple reason that his vote mattered more than hers — and that of every progressive in the House. Nothing she did could overcome that cold, implacable political reality. Little wonder, then, that these days, she has been reduced to hurling daily imprecations against the filibuster on Twitter, as though if she tweets “end the filibuster” enough times, her wish will become Manchin’s command.
The defeat on Build Back Better was the most dramatic, but it was just one of many progressives experienced last year. On issue after issue, from climate change to gun control to voting rights to the minimum wage to D.C. statehood to immigration, House Democrats’ left flank found itself outmaneuvered and outgunned. Even if its numbers are increased by reinforcements from safe blue districts next year, it is likely to remain so for some time.
Progressives greeted Joe Biden’s presidency with great expectations, ones they chose Pramila Jayapal to fulfill. But great expectations are made to be dashed, and theirs were, repeatedly. As a result of which, she and they became only the latest to learn one of the harshest lessons in politics: that having enough power to make a noise but not enough to make an impact is perhaps worse than having no power at all.
Varad Mehta (@varadmehta) is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area.
