Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) speaks at a Problem Solvers Caucus press conference in the Capitol, February 11, 2020.
If Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election loss didn’t bring an end to Clintonism in the Democratic Party, Joe Biden’s first bill as president should have finished the job. Some 25 years after Bill Clinton staked his reputation on welfare reform, paring back social services of every make and model, President Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan Act, which featured the broadest expansion of the welfare state in decades. Fourteen-hundred-dollar stimulus checks were sent to most Americans; federal unemployment insurance was enhanced; a new, substantial Child Tax Credit was enacted; funding for everything from health care to rental assistance was appropriated.
Now, part two of the two-part infrastructure package looks to build on that social welfare boomlet with everything from universal pre-K to child care, free community college, paid family and medical leave, and health care expansion ranging from home health care to dental, vision, and hearing coverage under Medicare. The strategy for squeaking that proposal through razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate, as laid out by the Democratic leadership for months, has been to marry it to the bipartisan infrastructure bill that recently passed the Senate. Everything that can be plausibly called the “Biden agenda” resides in the reconciliation bill, which would not be passed in anything like its current form—if at all—if the bipartisan bill didn’t depend on its passage, which is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has pledged to pass the reconciliation bill first, and the bipartisan bill immediately after, or even, most recently, to pass them simultaneously. The fate of each bill depends on the other.
And yet, a handful of “moderate” House Democrats have launched a kamikaze campaign, pledging to vote down the budget that’s the required prelude to the reconciliation bill if the bipartisan bill is not passed first, which, of course, would lead to the reconciliation bill not being passed at all in anything resembling its current form. That course is being spearheaded by Problem Solvers Caucus co-chair and New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer, who has taken it upon himself to undermine the entire agenda of the president of his own party. “I’m hearing from home how much they want us to get this [the bipartisan infrastructure bill] done,” Gottheimer told Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman. “I don’t understand why we would hold it up.”
Of course, everyone in Democratic politics knows why the bipartisan bill has to be held up, Gottheimer included. So why would a Democrat seek to undercut the Democratic agenda of a Democratic president, one who, like Gottheimer, has long identified as a moderate? If Joe Biden had ever served in the House, he would have been much more likely to belong to Gottheimer’s Problem Solvers than, say, the Congressional Progressive Caucus. And yet Gottheimer has made it his mission to undermine the Biden agenda.
It would be one thing if Gottheimer were a rogue, independent political outsider, but he’s a nightmare of the Democratic Party’s own making, a creation of the Clinton White House from his days as a college undergraduate. Gottheimer joined up ahead of the 1996 re-election campaign on the rapid-response team, the same year that Clinton’s signature welfare reform package was signed into law, setting in motion a process that increased poverty, lowered income for single mothers, ballooned the number of people in homeless shelters, and empowered states to eliminate welfare entirely. After Clinton rode that welfare reform, signed just three months before Election Day, into a second term, Gottheimer went to work as the president’s youngest speechwriter, serving in the White House alongside Terry Edmonds and Michael Waldman until Clinton termed out in 2001.
From there, Gottheimer followed Clinton staffers to and fro, serving as a teaching assistant to Waldman at Harvard’s Kennedy School and becoming a protégé of rightward-leaning Democratic operative Mark Penn, who consulted on both Clintons’ presidential campaigns. Gottheimer was hired by Penn to work at a public relations outfit for Microsoft in 2012, seeking to influence legislators and regulators in Washington, and then hired as a consultant at Penn’s Stagwell Group, a private equity firm.
When Gottheimer announced his intention to return to the public sector with a congressional run in 2015, he was promoted and funded by the Clintons personally. He made regular trips to Bill’s hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, despite running in New Jersey’s Fifth District, more than 1,000 miles away. At one point, Bill and Chelsea Clinton appeared at a Manhattan fundraiser for Gottheimer, which featured Chelsea introducing him as “something of a family member.” Gottheimer amassed an astonishing war chest for an upstart candidate ahead of the 2016 election, which rose into the seven-figure range. Clinton aides like Don Baer hosted events on his behalf early and often; Erskine Bowles, Samuel Berger, and Thomas McLarty III, all former high-ranking Clinton staffers, contributed. Ultimately, almost 20 percent of his fundraising came directly from fellow alumni of the Clinton White House or from major donors and operatives of consulting firms with close ties to the Clintons. “[T]he collection of Clinton associates aiding Mr. Gottheimer is striking in its breadth,” wrote The New York Times at the time.
Gottheimer went on to win the election over Republican incumbent Scott Garrett, after Garrett sparred with the Republican Party’s national leadership over its willingness to support gay candidates. Gottheimer arrived in Washington at the same time as President Trump, and went on to vote with him more than 34 percent of the time, more than almost any other congressional Democrat, which contributed to undermining the party’s attempts to enact some measure of restraint on Trump’s immigration ambitions and foreign policy.
It would be one thing if Gottheimer were a rogue, independent political outsider, but he’s a nightmare of the Democratic Party’s own making.
At first glance, Gottheimer’s current sabotage of the Democratic Party may look curiously like self-sabotage, since his stated policy priority is repealing the cap on state and local tax deductions, a tax cut that will benefit overwhelmingly wealthy Americans, especially those in high-tax, largely Democratic states. But the SALT repeal is part of the reconciliation bill, and his attempt to imperil that bill would also imperil his most sacred proposal.
But it’s also, crucially, a bit of self-promotion, and donor services to boot. New Jersey’s Fifth District, a suburb of New York, is awash with private equity money, and Blackstone has long been one of Gottheimer’s top donors, which makes it easier to understand Gottheimer’s motivations. Not incidentally, the reconciliation bill is where all the actual “pay-fors” come in, and most of the paying-for comes in the form of higher taxes on the rich and corporations, a closing of the carried interest loophole, and a beefing up of IRS enforcement, all anathema to the private equity sector and Wall Street more broadly. Meanwhile, his show of obstruction has raised his national profile, and landed him softball interviews from D.C. media shops like Punchbowl. “2022 should be a tough year for House Democrats. You have $10 million on hand, so I’m not sure it’s gonna be a tough year for you specifically,” laughed Punchbowl’s Sherman in a recent Q&A. The joke being, of course, that Gottheimer doesn’t need the Democratic Party to succeed.
But even that explanation doesn’t quite satisfy. Democrat Tom Malinowski, fellow Problem Solver from neighboring NJ-07, where private equity money also abounds, refused to sign on to Gottheimer’s letter, in which he and eight other centrist Democrats threatened not to vote for the budget bill the Senate passed—which paves the way for the reconciliation bill—unless they could vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill first. “I fear that forcing a vote now would undermine, not advance, that goal,” he told The Washington Post, that goal being having both bills passed into law. “Choosing interests of corporate donors over voters will only get you so far; you can’t flout the rest of the Democratic Party,” said Sue Altman, state director of the New Jersey Working Families Party. “Gottheimer is way out over his skis here in a very blue state. We’re definitely keeping our eyes on this situation; it could draw a lot of funding and attention for a primary challenge.”
“So many of his constituents in NJ-05 are baffled [about] him threatening to torpedo Biden’s agenda to shore up power for himself, to the detriment of the whole Democratic Party,” said Arati Kreibich, who ran against Gottheimer in a primary in 2020.
Gottheimer’s retrograde politics are similarly reflected in his recent launch of Team Blue, a political action committee co-founded with New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries that seeks to protect incumbent Democrats from progressive primary challenges. That move, according to sources, was not received warmly by Nancy Pelosi. And as Jeffries strives to position himself as Pelosi’s successor, his embrace of Gottheimer portends a different vision for the Democratic House than current leadership’s. Pelosi, in response to the Gottheimer campaign, said, “This is no time for amateur hour.”
Gottheimer seems to be the most zealous holdover of a bygone era of the Democratic Party, one that opposes expanding the welfare state, celebrates high-dollar fundraising through close proximity to Wall Street, and cares little for the overall well-being of the party as a whole. While Bidenism struggles to renew New Deal democracy, Gottheimer is working to reinstate a version of Clintonism that many presumed to have passed.
That has been richly rewarding for Gottheimer himself, but it remains a lonely campaign. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has a substantial voting edge over Gottheimer and his eight disciples, and Pelosi has given no indication she’ll cave to his demands. But it’s a rough reminder of the persistence of Clintonism’s sway over some Democratic politics and some Democratic pols—largely gone, but not forgotten.
