Cori Bush is a uniquely bad member of Congress
You should vote against her if you can. She has no legislative accomplishments, brings nothing to the region, and other than lining her own pockets, has nothing to show for four years in Congress.
A few weeks ago, I wrote that in states like Arkansas, Indiana, and Missouri, Democrats should vote in Republican primaries, since the Republicans who come out of those elections will almost certainly win in November.
That’s a sound strategy when the highest impact you can have is voting for your statewide officials. But even that is Not Quite Right… What I meant to say, really, is that you should vote on the primary ballot where your most important elections are happening.
Usually, those are your statewide elections. But not always.
On Tuesday, August 6, those of you who live in Missouri’s First Congressional District (MO-1) will have the opportunity to vote Cori Bush out of office. You should.1
Cori Bush is a uniquely bad and ineffective member of Congress. I’ll explain why, and why those of you who have a chance to vote for Democrat Wesley Bell should do so.
For those of you who live elsewhere in Missouri (or don’t live in Missouri at all), you will see parallels with what’s going on in other parts of the country. People are tired of performative politics, an unwillingness to compromise, and prioritizing ideology over their constituents.
Cori Bush does all of that.
The most effective members of Congress understand the importance of local issues. Cori Bush ignores them
As the saying goes, all politics is local. When you look at the most effective legislators in Congress, and why candidates win in some of the country’s toughest races, it’s because they focus on local issues.2
On the other end of the spectrum are the ineffective legislators who do nothing for their communities. That’s Cori Bush.
Cori Bush was one of only six Democrats who partnered with 200 Republicans to vote against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Anyone who has driven in St. Louis lately understands how bad the roads are, and how desperately we needed that investment.
Of course, none of this has stopped Cori Bush from misleading voters by claiming credit for projects where she deserves none. She showed up to an event to take a victory lap for investments from the infrastructure bill despite having voted against it.
But that’s hardly her only anti-St. Louis vote. Boeing is the second-largest private employer in the region, employing nearly 17,000 St. Louisans. Nearby Scott Air Force Base employs another 13,000. So voting to make sure that critical defense jobs remain in greater St. Louis feels like a no brainer, right?
Nope, not for Cori Bush, who’s repeatedly voted against defense spending.
Defund the Police for thee, not for me
Violence is the biggest issue facing St. Louis, which has America’s highest violent crime rate. The homicide rate is 16x higher than the national average, and the scourge of violence is particularly acute for the Black community.
There is not an overnight fix. But St. Louis needs someone serious about taking incremental steps to address crime and violence. Cori Bush is doing none of that.
Despite the fact that Defund the Police was never effective, is wildly unpopular , and is overwhelmingly unpopular with Black voters, Cori Bush stubbornly continues to support the cause. She did in 2022, and she’s not backing away in 2024.
But here’s the kicker: Bush spends more on private security than just about any other member of Congress, having spent close to $500,000 on private security in the 2022 cycle. Just to be clear, this is highly aberrant. Combined, the rest of Missouri’s House delegation has spent a grand total of $0 on private security.
When asked about this, she gave a dismissive, rude, and tone-deaf answer:
So if I end up spending $200,000, if I spend 10, 10, 10 more dollars on it, you know what, I get to be here to do the work. So suck it up and defunding the police has to happen. We need to defund the police…
Let’s be clear: political violence is a huge issue in this country. We saw that on full display in Pennsylvania with the recent near-assassination of Donald Trump. We should be spending more on safety for our elected officials.
But to spend lavishly relative to your peers on private security, while pushing to defund the police, is an act of supreme entitlement—it means you think you deserve more safety than the people you represent.
Doing so when you represent the most dangerous city in America? That’s a moral outrage.
With a national platform, she fails to take even basic steps to help St. Louisans
After a high-profile protest in 2021, fawning press from national media gave Cori Bush an enormous platform. But rather than use that platform to help Missourians take advantage of nearly $300 million in about-to-expire rental support, or rather than lead a sprint to help housing-insecure constituents behind the scenes, Cori Bush made everything about Cori Bush.
On July 30, 2021, as Congress and the White House planned to allow a pandemic-era federal eviction moratorium to expire, Bush “took a page from her years as an activist,” as The New York Times wrote, and kicked off a Capitol sit-in. President Biden yielded a few days later.
Here’s the problem: the concession was meaningless. A month before, the Supreme Court had explicitly telegraphed that it would not allow the evictions moratorium to stand. And sure enough, less than two weeks later, the Court did exactly what they said they would, nullifying Biden’s executive order.
While Bush was grabbing headlines for herself, $295 million out of $325 million of rental assistance funds allocated for Missouri remained unspent, according to the Missouri Housing Development Commission.
Had Bush spent those critical two weeks using her megaphone to bring media attention to all of the available resources, she likely could have helped thousands of Missourians pay off up to a year of back rent, and even pay forward rent for up to three months.
But she chose to do nothing to help her constituents.
The FBI is investigating her for some old-school corruption
Of course, if all of that weren’t enough, Bush is being investigated by the Department of Justice and the Federal Elections Commission for using campaign funds to pay her now-husband—who has no qualifications to serve as a security guard—to be part of her security team.
She’s also using her campaign account to pay her personal legal bills, to the tune of about $100,000.
Four years in Congress may not have been enough time to accomplish anything, but if being a politician means some baseline level of corruption, she certainly seems to be excelling at that! Private security, a job for your partner, and campaign-funded lawyers for yourself is one hell of a grift.
Cori Bush has nothing to show for her four years in Congress
Throughout her reelection bid, Cori Bush claims over $2 billion in investments that she’s brought to St. Louis. Thanks to some terrific reporting from Mark Maxwell at KSDK, the reality is—generously—one-tenth of that.
When you remove her fictitious accomplishments, Bush’s superlatives3 are rather unimpressive:
Got bipartisan cosponsors on the fewest bills compared to House Democrats
Got their bills out of committee the least often compared to Missouri Delegation
Held the fewest committee positions compared to Missouri Delegation
To a fault, Cori Bush is uncompromisingly partisan
The vast majority of Americans still want more bipartisanship—87%, to be exact. It’s why we’re seeing more moderate candidates win in primaries.4
Nonetheless, the House is still a group of America’s 435 most uncompromising ideologues, hacks, nut-jobs, and sanctimonious pricks.5 So when you’re third-from-the-bottom on the bipartisanship index, it really says something:
And speaking of Cori Bush on the same list with some of the nuttiest Republicans…
She almost never reaches across the aisle to work with Republicans. But when she does, she likes to work with the craziest of them.
Take her “no” vote on sanctions against Russia, where she was one of only two Democrats to team up with Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz after the invasion of Ukraine.
Don’t worry, though: her crazy isn’t limited to voting with Republicans. She was one of only two people to vote against a bill that would deny immigration benefits for Hamas terrorists, for example.
I won’t linger on Bush’s stance on Israel, which has obviously attracted a lot of attention and a lot of controversy. But it is worth noting that despite roughly 60,000 Jews living in St. Louis, “Bush has largely refused to engage with the mainstream Jewish community since she first took office in 2021,” according to community leaders.
That includes refusing to sit for an interview with the St. Louis Jewish Light newspaper and having met with only one local Jewish group in four years in office, despite repeated requests from numerous organizations.
These are organizations which, in many cases, do not take positions on Israel or the conflict in the Middle East. Rather, they represent her constituents and people in her community. But her refusal to meet with them has been steadfast, and that’s alarming. And so when she votes against resolutions to condemn antisemitism, as she did at the end of last year, that’s deeply problematic.6
Why this matters
As a region, St. Louis faces enormous challenges. As a country, we face enormous challenges. And I believe strongly that we need people who are serious about governing and addressing the huge challenges we face as a country.
After four years in office, it’s clear that Cori Bush is not up to the challenge. America, Missouri, and St. Louis deserve better.
If you live in MO-1, vote for Wesley Bell on August 6. And if you don’t live in MO-1, you can help defeat someone notably bad at her job by:
Forwarding this to friends and family who live in MO-1.
This is the most political post I’ll write for a while. Next time, I’ll write about education in rural America, and how hard it is for teachers to make ends meet. Stay tuned!
Missouri’s First Congressional District leans D+27. Whoever wins the Democratic primary will win the general election.
Take, for example, Rep. Mary Peltola (D) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) in Alaska, who dedicate significant legislative efforts to support the Alaska Native community. Or across the country, there’s Rep. Jared Golden (D) and Sen. Susan Collins (R) in Maine, whose efforts support the fishing industry that are critical to Maine’s economy.
What’s notable about all of them: they are serial overperformers. Peltola and Golden represent the two most Republican districts held by Democrats; Collins represents the most Democratic state held by a Republican.
These come directly from GovTrack, which is about as fact-based as they come: “We publish the status of federal legislation, information about your representative and senators in Congress including voting records, and original research on legislation. We’re one of the oldest government transparency websites in the world.”
On the Democratic side, Rep. Jamaal Bowman lost to George Latimer in New York. In Colorado, two of the most progressive lawmakers in the state house lost their primaries. A progressive and big-time electoral underperformer lost handily to a moderate in a competitive U.S. House race in Oregon.
On the Republican side, Capitol stormer Derrick Evans lost his U.S. House primary in West Virginia. Sandy Smith, repeatedly accused of abuse, lost her House primary in North Carolina. Brandon Herrera, “the AK Guy,” lost a primary in Texas.
The point here is not to draw an equivalency between far-left and far-right elected officials. There isn’t one. It’s rather to say that Americans are craving more moderate and more sane politics, and we’re seeing voters in both parties move towards that.
It probably definitely says something about me that I tried to join them. But in seriousness: there are some really good people in the House too.
The list of Bush’s borderline (and sometimes not borderline) antisemitic comments and activities is long. She has a history of associating with profound antisemites, most recently including Kyrie Irving, for example. Even her campaign kick-off was problematic. There is much more that could be written here, but there’s a reason that local Jewish faith leaders have been so active in the campaign to beat her.