Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), who will be retiring after this term, roasted Democrat leadership for repeatedly defying moderates and siding with the extreme far-left fringes of the Democrat Party.
The Daily Caller reports:
Murphy, a co-chair of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, speculated that congressional leaders direct left-leaning interest groups to advocate for their specific positions and browbeat moderates. She noted her experience receiving criticism for her vote to support Kate’s Law, a bill that increased prison sentences for illegal immigrants found re-entering the country, as well as her lukewarm support for the Build Back Better social spending package.
“A lot of these outside groups that purport to represent a specific interest are just an extension of leadership. Instead of purely focusing on their issue area,” she told Politico’s Rachael Bade.
Murphy noted her experience with organized labor and environmental groups during infrastructure negotiations. Those groups remained focused on the Build Back Better package, despite the fact that the bill had not yet been written, and not the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Like Democratic Party leadership, labor and environmental groups urged members to wait to support the IIJA so that they could vote for Build Back Better.
“Labor didn’t start whipping the infrastructure bill until three months after it had passed the Senate,” Murphy explained, saying she thought that party leadership sends “smoke signals” to outside groups telling them that they should support a piece of legislation.
“We had environmental groups that were calling us before the legislation text for the Build Back Better Act had been put out, calling us saying, “If you don’t support that, we are going to delist you,’” Murphy added. “They couldn’t define it specifically because nobody had seen the text. But we had the text for the infrastructure bill and not a peep out of them advocating for that.”
Murphy noted that Democrat Party bosses spent millions of dollars to defeat moderate members of the party in primaries, while outside groups tied to socialists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have spent big to defeat moderates like Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX).
