This article appears in the August 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
It was 97 degrees outside, and Greg Casar was in a fragrance store, looking for an envelope.
He had marched on that June evening with about 30 workers from two restaurants owned by the mogul Stephen Starr. They stopped first at St. Anselm, a steakhouse in the historic Union Market District in Northeast Washington, D.C., where 85 percent of the workers signed cards seeking union representation and later won an election. But the STARR Restaurant Group argued that the election was void because the Trump administration’s National Labor Relations Board had only two of its five seats filled, one less than a quorum, and therefore could not certify the results.
Casar, a second-term congressmember from Austin, Texas, had visited St. Anselm once before, in February, and the STARR Group’s leadership promised him then that it would honor employee wishes. But St. Anselm and another restaurant, Pastis, not only broke that promise; they started reducing hours, changing work rules, and even firing union-supporting workers. “I haven’t had a raise in two years,” one baker told Casar at a meetup before the march. “I can barely afford my rent.”
St. Anselm workers had signed a petition demanding wage hikes and union recognition. But the hostess told Casar she was not authorized to accept anything related to the labor dispute. Casar had experienced these indignities from management a million times as a labor organizer. It wasn’t going to deter him.
“Sometimes one of the tactics that our restaurant uses is to make us feel small and powerless,” said Bridget, a baker at St. Anselm. “Having a member of Congress there … makes us feel as if what we’re doing is legitimate.”
Casar suggested that they could seal the petition in an envelope for the hostess to deliver to her superiors. That was deemed acceptable. Now they needed the envelope.
The fragrance store was next door. “A weird fact about me is, really strong perfume gives me a little lightheadedness, I hate it,” Casar said later. “So actually going into there, I was like, I gotta get in and out.” The mission proved unsuccessful. But someone fashioned a sheet of loose-leaf paper into an envelope, stuck the petition inside, and the hostess took it. Chants of “¡Si se puede!” broke out among the mostly Spanish-speaking workers.
Casar was 1,500 miles from his constituents. It was the hottest day of the year so far in D.C. He was on his own time. There were no TV cameras. I was the only press.
“He’s not just interested in symbolic victories,” said one of Casar’s colleagues. “He’s about what is going to deliver a victory for working people.”
A couple of days later, in his Capitol Hill office, Casar told me the march was “the most fun I had all week, man! … It’s a whole lot better than sitting in a committee hearing.” He believed his presence, as the second-highest ranking Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, could make a difference in the unionization fight. But secondarily, he considered it a way to stay grounded, outside the trappings of power and in solidarity with the kind of people who brought him to Washington. “We need more congressmen and -women,” Casar told me, “who feel more comfortable marching into a fancy D.C. restaurant with a union than mingling inside of one with lobbyists.”
In January, Casar, who is 36 and just three years removed from serving on the Austin City Council, took over as the tenth chair in the history of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It was an inauspicious moment to be a leader on the left in Washington. Donald Trump had just swept back into the presidency, winning dramatic gains in many urban precincts represented by many CPC members. Many big liberal cities were under assault from ICE raids and threats to federal funding. Notwithstanding the cautious, business-friendly Kamala Harris campaign, centrist Democrats had already decided to blame progressives for her loss and every other loss of the past half-century, forming new groups and fundraising schemes to steer the party to the right.
What bothered Casar most was waning support for Democrats from working-class voters, something he had seen firsthand on the campaign trail for Harris. He saw it as an existential crisis for the party of the New Deal and Great Society, predicated on fighting for the common man and woman. “If we become a party of upper-income people, then I think we’re toast because we become a contradiction in and of ourselves as a party,” he said.
This year, Casar has focused squarely on reviving Democrats’ populist roots, while trusting that such positioning can play across the ideological divide. While the CPC has typically tended to its own membership in policy development and political strategy, Casar has pitched frontliners and swing-district members on his anti-oligarchy message.
And the CPC is plotting to introduce what they call the “battleship bill,” a funhouse-mirror version of the Gingrich Contract with America in 1994, designed to be used for campaigning in every contested district in the 2026 midterms, and as a set of deliverables after taking power. While the specifics have not been finalized, it’s likely to include measures on fighting corruption in D.C., lowering costs at the pharmacy counter, expanding Social Security benefits, and raising taxes on the rich. “It’s a moment where we can actually lead on it but bring the entire caucus along with us,” Casar said.
It’s an audacious strategy, given the low esteem in which Democrats are held by the voting public. The belief that the many cats in the Democratic coalition can be herded toward a singular goal may be even more foolhardy. But organizers focus on what brings people together instead of what drives them apart, and prioritize winning tangible gains over winning an argument. Casar has done this from his earliest years in politics, when he was in the struggle with perhaps the most marginalized people in the entire country—and helping them prevail.
GREG CASAR WAS BORN IN HOUSTON to immigrant parents from Mexico, yet not acquainted with squalor: His father was a physician, and he studied at prep schools. But he grew up amid protests against the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and rallies for comprehensive immigration reform. He entered college at the University of Virginia thinking he wanted to be a teacher, but quickly learned the realities of American life. “So many students in the high schools where we would go in to volunteer teach are getting driven to school in the cars that they’re sleeping in at night with parents,” Casar said. He found a different passion: ensuring everyone had a fair shot.
Organizing for living wages for campus employees later took him back to Texas, as a summer intern with Workers Defense Project, a research outlet and worker center for primarily Latino and immigrant construction workers. Texas is the most dangerous state in the nation for workers—5,165 died on the job throughout the 2010s—and the only state without universal workers’ compensation. Construction work is particularly brutal and disproportionately conducted by Latinos, many of them undocumented.
“Especially in a place like Texas that is notoriously anti-union and anti-immigration, we weren’t going to have the power to individually shape policy agendas,” said Emily Timm, a co-founder of Workers Defense. So organizers developed coalitions with churches, neighborhood groups, environmentalists—whoever shared their interests. And although worker centers traditionally had standoffish relationships with unions, Workers Defense actively sought them out. “Workers Defense and Greg made a priority to engage in deep conversation and joint organizing that built a powerful force in Austin,” said Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO.
Timm hired Casar as an intern in 2010, and he jumped into a campaign to secure mandatory rest and water breaks on construction sites. After a worker died from a heart attack a mile from the Workers Defense offices in Austin, the group held a vigil, worked with labor allies, and pressed the city council, sharing stories of accidents and deaths in the Texas heat. By the end of that first summer, Austin had approved the first right-to-water breaks in the South. (In 2023, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law overturning local worker protections, but it was ruled unconstitutional and is now working through appeals courts.)
After graduating, Casar returned to Austin full-time, becoming Workers Defense’s policy director and witnessing the power of unified working people. “We were organizing sometimes workers that had started a wildcat strike on their own and then came to us to be like, ‘Hey, we all just walked off the job, what do we do next?’” he told me. At weekly Tuesday night meetings, Casar communed with workers, helping them document safety violations and recover stolen wages, with back pay often presented on the spot to raucous applause.
“He really understood how engaging people around working conditions, the most basic economic needs of their day-to-day lives, was such a powerful motivator to bring people together,” Timm said.
A major initiative involved community benefit agreements on projects receiving government subsidies and tax breaks, to ensure that the jobs created would be good jobs. One incident stood out. White Lodging was a developer building a 34-story Marriott near the Austin convention center. In exchange for $3.8 million in tax incentives and fee waivers, White Lodging promised to pay prevailing, union-scale wages to construction workers. But Workers Defense heard from members that they weren’t making these wages.
Casar then discovered that assistant city manager Rudy Garza had signed a secret agreement with White Lodging to pay some workers below prevailing wages, as long as the overall project met “anticipated targeted average wage rates.” Garza left government shortly thereafter and, according to Casar, founded an engineering company that benefited from the hotel project. Workers Defense demanded a meeting with Austin’s mayor over the secret agreement. “They’re like, ‘Well, we keep our promises that we signed off on this piece of paper,’” Casar said. “We keep our promises to the developer, not we keep our promises to the workers or to the law.”
The outcry led to a city council hearing, where a group of housekeepers showed up wearing “I support White Lodging” stickers. Several of the housekeepers were friends or relatives of the construction workers; Casar talked to the housekeepers in Spanish and found out they were being paid for their time, and were offered higher wages to side with White Lodging. Casar flipped the housekeepers, and unified opposition to undercutting workers.
After two years, the city council revoked White Lodging’s incentive deal. But Casar was frustrated. “This should not have been so damn hard,” he said. His allies thought they needed someone closer to the power, able to organize the council the way they organized workers. One supporter of Casar’s likened it to “salts,” experienced organizers who get hired at workplaces to coordinate unionization efforts. As Casar remembers it, she said to him, “You need to go be our salt on city council.”
CASAR’S OPPORTUNITY AROSE IN 2014 when Austin became the last big city to switch from at-large to geographic districts. Before then, the council “all came from the downtown Austin area, because that area had the greatest voter turnout,” said Steve Adler, who served two terms as Austin’s mayor from 2015 to 2023. That tilted priorities toward business and commercial real estate interests. But only one incumbent was re-elected in 2014; all the downtown councilmembers had to run against one another. Casar won election in predominantly poor, nonwhite District 4, and at 25 became the city’s youngest and likely most leftist councilmember ever.
He approached government work with an organizer mindset. “This world is replete with politicians who are politicians only,” said José Garza, who was executive director at Workers Defense Project at the time. “I quickly realized Greg was a lot more than that. Greg always gave not just Workers Defense but the progressive movement in Austin direction. He gave us guidance. Strategic vision.”
Casar wrote legislation making Austin the first municipality in the South to provide paid sick leave for all workers, while finding lawmakers in other Texas cities to spread the idea. He secured “fair chance” hiring, bringing together labor and criminal justice reformers to ban businesses from asking prospective workers if they had previously been incarcerated. He helped win living-wage increases, including for subcontractors who had historically been left out. The first unions for hotel workers and nurses in Austin were established with his support.
“He’s not just interested in symbolic victories,” Timm said. “He’s about what is going to win and deliver a victory for working people.”
Yet Casar’s initiatives to defy state immigration policy and make Austin a “Freedom City,” end a citywide homeless camping ban, and reallocate police department funds courted controversy in hard-right Texas. Conservatives caricatured his ideas and forced policy reversals. Police budgets were restored by the state legislature; the camping ban was reinstituted by Austin voters; even the paid sick leave ordinance was struck down in the courts.
Adler saw Casar as principled, despite attracting criticism. “He built a reputation for being kind of radical but was not,” he said. “He finds the path to bring along the greatest number of votes and achieve on his values, even if it’s not the path he would take.”
“I think we have to become the pro-worker, anti-billionaire party,” Casar said.
Early on, Adler asked Casar to chair the council’s Planning and Housing Committee. “Everyone told me that was just political suicide,” he told me. “And it felt like it, because we made so many people mad.” On one side were developers wanting to raze neighborhoods and usher in luxury housing; on the other were Not In My Backyard activists opposed to housing stock that disrupted neighborhood character. Casar listened to the fast-growing city’s one million residents, and their need for a better and less expensive place to live.
The showpiece was a bond for acquiring land and building affordable housing, which some city leaders wanted to top out at $100 million. Casar successfully raised that to $250 million, the largest in Texas history, and voters approved it with 73 percent of the vote in 2018. A subsequent transit bond had even more housing funding. He followed that up with an ordinance called “Affordability Unlocked,” which eliminated parking mandates, minimum lot sizes, setbacks, height limits, and other zoning requirements, as long as 50 percent of the development project was reserved for affordable units. All affordable housing torn down for new development had to be replaced one-for-one with affordable units. A separate measure enabled more accessory dwelling units on lots throughout the city.
“We broke through with saying we need more housing but at all different levels of income,” Casar said. “But that doesn’t mean that you go and knock down the existing working-class apartments that you have to put a glitzy tower on top of it.”
A broader zoning code rewrite failed in the council and then in the courts. But Casar’s changes did facilitate thousands of new housing units in Austin. In 2022, there were 18 new homes permitted in Austin for every 1,000 residents, more than seven times the rate of Los Angeles and San Francisco.
That last statistic came from the Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson book Abundance, which criticized blue-state housing policy and held up Texas as an alternative. But it rarely gets mentioned that the architect of housing changes in Austin is the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. And it certainly doesn’t mention his role in empowering the tenant rights movement in the city.
After helping residents at mobile home parks end forced electricity shutoffs and rescind eviction notices, Casar added funding in the city budget to stand up what would become Building and Strengthening Tenant Action (BASTA, the Spanish word for “Enough!”), which organizes tenant associations across Austin, educating renters on their rights and negotiating solutions with landlords. “It was really that initial support and vision that Greg and his team had that created the project,” said Shoshana Krieger, BASTA’s project director.
Working on housing left Casar with a nuanced assessment of abundance. He agrees with and has demonstrated the importance of increasing state capacity and delivering benefits for constituents quickly and universally. “If you want to add another bathroom into your house because your aging parents are moving in with you, and it takes two years to get done, that is dumb,” he said.
Yet he forcefully rejected “people that want to use abundance framing as an excuse to usher in the 1988 Republican platform into the Democratic platform.” And he named names, going after writer Josh Barro for saying onstage at the centrist gathering WelcomeFest that abundance necessarily means disempowering unions. “I think we have to become the pro-worker, anti-billionaire party,” Casar said. “And I think there are those folks that want the abundance frame to supersede that.”
ON THE SAME JUNE DAY AS WELCOMEFEST—which Casar prefers to call WalmartFest because of its partial funding from the Walton Foundation—he questioned Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the wrestling family tycoon with a net worth of $3.2 billion, at a House committee hearing. Casar asked McMahon how much she would personally benefit from the Republican budget bill extending the Trump tax cuts. “I’ve not sat down and worked with my accountants,” McMahon replied, and when pressed, she dismissed the “ridiculous line of questioning.”
“No, it’s not ridiculous because here’s what’s important,” Casar countered. “There are families watching at home from my district that could lose their health care … And what it’s paying for is, overwhelmingly, tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country.” Republican committee chair Tim Walberg (R-MI) tried to halt the questioning, and McMahon bobbed and weaved. But Casar made his point: Billionaires didn’t even know how many millions they would reap from creating devastation among the nation’s poor.
Later that day, Casar made an appearance at the Center for American Progress, discussing how to win back working-class voters. The other panelist was Rep. Nikki Budzinski (D-IL), vice chair for policy at the New Democrat Coalition, the largest caucus in Congress for the party’s moderate wing. In contrast to the leftist-bashing at WelcomeFest, these two representatives from separate poles of the party spent most of the panel agreeing with one another.
“To me it’s not a left-right issue, we’ve got to run directly toward working-class people,” Casar said at the panel. “We’ve got to make their concerns central to who we are as a party, central to our policy, central to the way that we talk about issues.”
Budzinski followed by proposing a “middle of the night” test: The party should prioritize subjects that keep families awake, like grocery prices or child care. Casar supplemented it with a “construction site” test: Those priorities should be explainable and relatable to someone working 12 hours a day on a construction site. If Democrats propose universal child care, he said, just cap the cost to a percentage of income, for everyone, without an extra form or a means test, and get it running within a short period of time, unlike the Democrats’ prescription drug price negotiations, which passed in 2022 and whose lower prices don’t begin to come online until 2026.
There does seem to be some consensus that Democrats need to rediscover their purpose as a party. “Whether you’re talking about AOC or Vicente Gonzalez, and that’s the entire spectrum of Latino Democrats, both of them believe in economic populism,” said Chuck Rocha, Democratic strategist and former Bernie Sanders adviser. Rocha called it “a uniting thing. It can bring together all sides of the party.”
With his labor organizing background, Casar is seen as someone who can authentically deliver that message. “Greg’s values around that are solid, they didn’t develop after the election,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Casar’s predecessor as Progressive Caucus chair. Levy, of the Texas AFL-CIO, believes that Democrats allowed an opening to Republicans by straying from working-class concerns, and marching with unionizing workers, as Casar has done in Austin and Washington, sends an important message. “The way to attract swing voters is not to say, ‘We’ll be your friend, we don’t believe in anything,’” Levy said. “It’s saying, ‘This is the way to make your life better.’”
To suggest that Democrats learned their lesson and now have one voice on economic issues would be far too optimistic. The prescription drug price lag wasn’t due to bureaucracy so much as oligarchy, as Casar acknowledged to me. Democratic allies of the pharmaceutical industry succeeded in delaying the price effects so companies could enjoy a few more years of unfettered profits. Those forces inside the party haven’t withered away. Some of them congregated at WelcomeFest, up the street from Casar and Budzinski’s less well-attended gathering. Some of them funded the Center for American Progress, where Casar and Budzinski were speaking.
Casar nevertheless insisted that the days of Chuck Schumer happily trading one blue-collar voter for two affluent suburban voters are over. He suggested a generational split: Democrats who came of age through the financial crisis and COVID, who experienced inflation as the culmination of a cost-of-living crisis, who watched their leaders deliver piecemeal reforms that didn’t resonate with the electorate, are ready to cast aside the old politics. “They are young and newer, they’re happy to get uninvited from Big Pharma dinner but win their election campaigning on cutting their profits,” he said.
He doesn’t pivot every political development to the price of eggs. He has forcefully condemned ICE roundups as undermining all Americans’ civil rights. When Trump bombed Iranian nuclear sites, he was among the first to call the strikes illegal. And though Democratic Socialists of America unendorsed his first campaign for Congress for refusing to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in Israel, Casar has supported a cease-fire in Gaza since the first month of the war, and opposed offensive weapons transfers to Israel.
But he can channel those values into America’s economic divides. At a stop on Bernie Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in McAllen, Texas, Casar marveled at “these right-wing politicians—they eat food cooked by immigrants, they get their fancy cars cleaned by immigrants, they do their corrupt deals in buildings engineered, built, and maintained by immigrants—then they have the gall to turn around and say immigrants are the problem.”
In March, Casar participated in an afternoon of House floor speeches that brought New Dems, Blue Dogs, and progressives together to promote economic patriotism and demand a stronger alternative to Trump. The project reinforced a challenge to the Democratic leadership to shed status quo governance and reinvent the brand. Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA), who represents a swing district in and around Pittsburgh, coordinated the speeches. “It’s about taking back the fight for the American dream and opportunity,” Deluzio told me.
Casar’s speech focused on corruption, recalling his past battles in Austin as a labor organizer. “We didn’t win by going on bended knee and begging big corporations for better treatment. We did it by unifying working people around some basic ideas … and this is what we need the Democratic Party to be all about.”
JAYAPAL KNEW OF CASAR THROUGH LOCAL PROGRESS, the network of local lawmakers where he served as a co-chair. After his election to Congress in 2022, she installed him as caucus whip. “I wanted somebody who was really grounded in the experience of standing up for working people,” she said. “I felt like he would have a great future.”
The chaotic, dysfunctional Republican-led House of Representatives of 2023-2024 offered no possibility for progressive victories. But Casar did his best to stand out. He pushed the Biden administration to propose nationwide heat safety protections, an echo of his first win at Workers Defense, by holding a thirst strike on the Capitol steps on a scorching July day. Biden’s Department of Labor did propose a rule, but it wasn’t completed before Trump took over.
Casar served on the House Agriculture Committee last year. After learning about 13-year-olds with “glittered school backpacks” working overnight shifts at meatpacking facilities, he proposed an amendment to the farm bill banning companies from federal contracts if they violated the decades-old ban on child labor. The initial pushback came not from Republicans, but from older committee staff, arguing the amendment would put frontline members in a tough spot with industry. “So then I went and spoke individually with every single member,” Casar explained. “And they all said to me, go ahead and run it, I’ll vote for your amendment.”
At the hearing, Republicans were flustered, voting down the amendment and reduced to arguing that the price of beef would go up if meatpackers couldn’t hire children. The same skittish committee staff told Casar that was the best moment in the markup. “Sometimes in these institutions there’s just built-in hesitancy and built-in caution of not pissing anybody off,” Casar told me. “But if you don’t piss anybody off then you’re probably not doing much.”
“He’s gone from spending time with construction workers to millionaire members of Congress … but Greg has not let any of that change him.”
During the 2024 elections, Casar was dispatched to working-class Latino communities as a surrogate. And he knew the election was over when an HVAC worker in Nevada told him that Trump was a jerk, but he might at least help him work year-round, while Democrats were focused on “other stuff,” which the man eventually admitted meant LGBT rights. Casar realized Democrats had to organize a bigger base, by letting workers know the party stood for them economically before anything else.
After the loss, House Democrats assembled for a listening session, where party leaders took solace that, in a challenging inflationary environment, they did better than incumbent center-left parties in Europe. “I was like, what about right next door?” Casar said, pointing to the Morena party’s re-election victory in Mexico. Casar cited two elements that he felt drove that win: the outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, dramatically increased senior pensions, and he communicated regularly to the public about his results. Casar took this lesson: “In a moment of massive cynicism in our democratic system, we have got to do things that will make a big difference.”
When Jayapal was termed out as CPC chair, Casar took over, and at the caucus’s first meeting, he read from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 renomination speech, which introduced the term “economic royalists” to the nation, describing the forces of oligarchy aligned against him. “The privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself,” Roosevelt said 89 years ago. But he could have been talking about 2025.
Casar was itching for a fight, and Elon Musk fell into his lap.
Musk is a quasi-constituent—the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin, where Cybertrucks are made and where the CEO sleeps on occasion, is inside Casar’s congressional district. But when the world’s richest man embedded in government to advance his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, threatening the careers of millions of federal workers and the lives of hundreds of millions who depend on U.S. government services, the reaction from Democrats was mixed. Some wanted to cozy up to a man who spent a fortune electing Donald Trump; others joined the “DOGE caucus” and found ways to agree that government could cut back some waste.
Casar disagreed, internally to his colleagues and in public. His organizing vehicle, unveiled within two weeks of the inauguration, was a simple line: “Fire Elon Musk.” Casar remembers deploying the phrase at a rally in front of the Department of Labor, and “the place lit on fire.”
To an almost comical degree, Casar took every opportunity to keep up the pressure, in press conferences, hearings, media appearances, and rallies. “We went after him every single day to try to drag down not only his popularity but Trump’s popularity with him,” he said. Casar perfected a talking point that Musk’s companies (like SpaceX and Starlink) were earning $8 million a day in federal government contracts; pretty soon, that figure was coming out of the mouths of the Democratic leadership. He exposed every example of Musk’s self-enrichment. And he pointed to a statutory obligation: As a “special government employee,” Musk could only work in the executive branch for 130 days in any calendar year. The deadline was May 30, and Casar led dozens of Democrats demanding that Musk follow the law.
The failures of DOGE to make much impact on government spending, while causing counterproductive chaos at home and abroad, had much to do with Musk’s plummeting approval ratings. But a Democrat pointing out the inherent corruption in oligarchical government didn’t hurt. Some anonymous Democrats whispered that antagonizing Musk would trigger a backlash, and that the focus was misplaced. The test of this was the Wisconsin state supreme court race in April, where Musk spent heavily on the Republicans. Democrats won the swing-state seat by double digits.
“Those voices suddenly shut up really fast when we won,” Casar said, laughing. And though earlier, the White House dismissed the May 30 end date for Musk, that’s precisely when he left. Casar saw it as proof of his theory of Democrats needing to return to populism. “I think taking the richest man in the world out of running the government himself is a pretty big win for a Democratic Party lost in the woods … If Democrats are willing to name a villain, be interesting and make news, we can actually win over public sentiment.”
CASAR HAS TRAVELED WIDELY IN HIS QUEST to rebuild the Democrats’ blue-collar base. He’s ventured into red America on the Fighting Oligarchy tour, and held town halls in the districts of Freedom Caucus Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and swing-seat freshman Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO), who was there in spirit as a cardboard cutout with chicken legs. Casar has organized fellow CPC members to do “Democrats Show Up” town halls in GOP districts, and dozens more have been planned.
After hearing from Evans’s worried constituents about Medicaid cuts, Casar read their letters in front of Evans’s office, and even directly confronted Evans, who claimed that the Republican mega-bill did not slash Medicaid. “It’s getting cut by a trillion dollars,” Casar replied.
“I recognize some of the viewers at home disagree with me on a variety of social issues,” Casar said on Fox News in March, “but I think we can agree that Republican members of Congress have no business going along with Elon Musk slashing Social Security, destroying Medicaid and Medicare, firing veterans, all to give out tax breaks to billionaires.” He told the conservative audience that “this should be the new message of the Democratic Party,” on Fox and even on Trump’s Truth Social.
These efforts did not sway Republicans from passing their mega-bill, which represents the largest regression of the social safety net in history, while also adding those billionaire tax breaks. But rather than mourn, Casar sees an opening to organize, in the wake of Republicans betraying the same working-class people they rallied to their side last year.
In advance of next year’s midterms, the Progressive Caucus is devising a “battleship bill,” full of economic-policy proposals that are popular across America yet prevented from passage by corporate resistance. Caucus members recently discussed the concept at a daylong retreat.
While CPC task forces will finalize the contents, Casar expected it to include a long-stalled idea that would ban members of Congress from trading stocks, and he discussed other possibilities, like scrapping the cap on Social Security payroll taxes and limiting prescription drug prices to the levels paid across the border in Canada. Based on some of his recent comments, the agenda will also feature planks about breaking up monopolies, reducing big money’s effect on politics, promoting unionization and protecting workers, and expanding benefits for seniors.
“He’s creating a process that is creating buy-in with a really wide swath of members,” said Elizabeth Wilkins, president of the Roosevelt Institute. “Not as this is the Greg Casar Show but lifting up other members, building coalitions.”
The CPC hasn’t really tried in its history to advance an agenda to unify the whole party. It has often authored “flagship” bills like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, things that define what it means to be a progressive and point to where Democrats should go in the future. But the battleship bill is an agenda for next year.
Casar pitched me on it. “The idea is to campaign on these issues in both blue and purple districts, win the election, and then pass these things soon after we win the majority,” he said. “And then if Trump doesn’t sign them, then we’ve established the platform upon which candidates can run for president … and then if we win a trifecta, actually pass them.”
Passing the legislation, in Casar’s conception, is as important as the campaign, even if in 2027 nothing good will get past Trump’s veto pen. “There are some members that say, ‘Why are you making me walk the plank. Why are you making me vote for something that will piss off the money donors, that’s never going to become law?’ The reason you do it is to show people that you campaigned on something and were serious and passed it. And then you can tell them who they need to unelect for it to go into effect.”
At a time when outside strategists are readying a Project 2029, the CPC-led bid to build trust with the electorate has a different feel. The success of Zohran Mamdani in New York City suggests that Democratic voters want something to believe in, and they want to see the politicians they support actually deliver on bold policies. Casar is following that script.
“Sometimes when you hear ‘I want to find things to run on we can all run on,’ that is code for [something] that the billionaires won’t get mad at us,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who has supported Casar since his first congressional campaign and appeared with him at rallies. “For Greg, what it means is let’s do something real … And that makes Greg more dangerous to the wealth class in this country.”
Organizing the Democratic caucus may be difficult. But José Garza, who is now Austin’s district attorney, thinks Casar is ready for the challenge. “He’s gone from spending time with construction workers to millionaire members of Congress,” Garza said. “But Greg has not let any of that change him. He figures out a way to change the culture around him.”
This article appears in Aug 2025 Issue.