Abaca Press/Sipa USA via AP
A committee under Castro would have much more pro-worker trade priorities than under Meeks.
On Thursday, House Democrats will vote to pick a new Foreign Affairs Committee chair, one of the few contested leadership races of the new Congress. The seat, once held by the hawkish 16-term New York Rep. Eliot Engel, is newly available because of Engel’s June defeat at the hands of progressive Jamaal Bowman, one of the highest profile progressive versus moderate showdowns of the 2020 cycle. Bowman won it by 15 points.
Now, that progressive versus moderate battle is repeating itself in a new venue. The top two contenders for the powerful position are expected to be Gregory Meeks, a New Yorker who currently sits on the House Financial Services Committee and is a senior member on Foreign Affairs, and Joaquin Castro (D-TX), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and current vice-chair on Foreign Affairs.
Normally, Rep. Meeks would be expected to cruise to this position on seniority alone. And indeed, on Tuesday night he won the recommendation of the Democratic Steering Committee over Castro, 29-13. The full caucus does not often overturn the Steering Committee. But concerns about Rep. Meeks’s reputation for corruption, combined with growing calls for the party to embrace a more progressive foreign-policy vision more in line with its actual voters, have resulted in a considerable push for Castro. The Democratic base is overwhelmingly opposed to the war on terrorism, supportive of the Iran nuclear deal, and would prefer to end arms sales to abusive regimes. Leadership within the Democratic Party is uniquely far to the right of its base on these issues. But will that matter?
Having a credible and trustworthy Foreign Affairs Committee chair would not only make a difference in military engagements abroad; it could provide the basis for meaningful economic policy as well.
Castro has called for ending the war in Afghanistan and withdrawing support from the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen, as well as reforming the Authorization for the Use of Military Force and curtailing the president’s ability to wage war unilaterally. He’s even broached the forbidden subject of Palestine. Rep. Meeks, meanwhile, would be more likely to toe the old party line. His foreign-policy experience is based largely on his enthusiastic embrace of anti-union free trade policies like the Central American Free Trade Agreement and his outstanding personal advocacy for the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, a deal which resulted in the killing of unionists, as In These Times reported. He even co-founded the Friends of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Caucus at a time when most Democrats were opposed to the deeply unpopular trade proposal. Labor groups are currently pushing Nancy Pelosi to oppose Rep. Meeks’s elevation on his record on trade alone, Axios reported Tuesday.
A number of Meeks’s other forays in foreign-policy adjacent activity have ended in scandal. A 2013 trip he took to Azerbaijan was supposedly funded by nonprofits but turned out to be actually funded by oil companies BP, Conoco Phillips, and SOCAR, the national oil company of Azerbaijan. That corporate-funded junket violated House rules. Upon returning, he pushed to exempt an Iran-backed natural-gas project from U.S. sanctions, a move supported by those companies. And in 2006, Rep. Meeks traveled to Venezuela and spoke with President Hugo Chavez as a favor to a generous donor, financier R. Allen Stanford, about a legal dispute Stanford was having with Gonzalo Tirado, the head of his Venezuelan bank. Tirado was indicted by Venezuelan authorities in 2007; in 2012, Stanford was sentenced to 110 years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme.
Rep. Meeks’s record on domestic issues is even more concerning. For three straight years, he ranked on Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s list of the most corrupt congresspeople. “Given the breadth of his misdeeds, it is surprising Rep. Meeks hasn’t found himself in handcuffs already,” said CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan in the midst of that ignominious streak. Questions have loomed about a home in Queens that he purchased for nearly $200,000 under market value in 2007. A few years later the New York Daily News reported that Rep. Meeks had received a secret $40,000 loan from a Queens businessman to help pay off that home, which he, for three years, made no payments on and never disclosed. Only upon being investigated by the FBI did he pay it back, with interest, all in one lump sum.
That was only one of a handful of federal or congressional investigations into Rep. Meeks’s finances. In 2008, the Federal Election Commission fined him $63,000 for using campaign funds for personal expenses. The ethics watchdog group National Legal and Policy Center found in 2010 that a nonprofit founded by Rep. Meeks had functionally defrauded Hurricane Katrina victims, delivering just $1,392 of at least $31,000 raised for families hurt by the storm, which resulted in a subpoena from a federal grand jury.
While his personal finances have been a constant source of controversy, Rep. Meeks’s work on the Financial Services Committee has drawn plaudits from financial-services firms. Bank of America, KPMG, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock all gave money to his 2018 reelection campaign. (About the only positive repercussion from Meeks getting the Foreign Affairs gavel would be that it would get him off of Financial Services.)
But the most alarming of his transgressions came in a case involving a former aide, Andrea Payne, who worked in Rep. Meeks’s office between 1998 and 2000. In 2000, Payne filed a lawsuit against Flowers Physical Therapy, alleging she’d been sexually assaulted in the Queens clinic that happened to be run by Meeks donors Joan and Neville Flowers in Queens. According to subsequent court filings, Payne was then forced to work unpaid overtime before ultimately being fired by the congressman, though he claimed she resigned, which prevented her from collecting unemployment.
Payne complained to the Congressional Office of Compliance and sued Meeks in federal court in 2001. The case was settled five years later, with Payne’s payout coming out of a multi-million dollar taxpayer-funded slush fund historically used to pay off victims of sexual misconduct in Congress. In late 2018, as part of a #MeToo push, Congress passed a bill eliminating use of such funds for sexual-harassment redress.
It was, of course, a corrupt foreign deal with Ukraine that got Donald Trump impeached by Democrats in the first place. If the party is serious about restoring credibility and faith in government and leaving the corruption of the Trump administration behind, it will have to put forward a meaningfully different vision for international engagement. That, too, would lend credence to Biden’s campaign trail promises to draw down our engagement in foreign wars.
Of course, the position is also getting tied up in another Biden-era Democratic Party commitment: diversity. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus backed Meeks for the Foreign Affairs chair almost immediately after Engel lost, arguing in the wake of the George Floyd tragedy that diverse voices would be needed at the top of the party leadership. That was enough to give Meeks an edge over Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), another candidate who has more seniority on the committee, and received 10 votes himself in Tuesday’s steering committee. But Rep. Sherman formally withdrew from the running late Tuesday night, meaning Rep. Meeks’s majority is much narrower than it looked initially, giving Rep. Castro a better shot in Thursday’s vote. But Castro, of course, is himself Hispanic, and the Hispanic Caucus has endorsed him. He also has the support of the caucus’s large progressive wing.
Having a credible and trustworthy Foreign Affairs Committee chair would not only make a difference in military engagements abroad; it could provide the basis for meaningful economic policy as well. A committee under Castro would have much more pro-worker trade priorities than under Meeks, and a motivated chair could use the perch to go after international tax havens that have abetted the most flagrant corporate-tax dodgers. If Biden’s Democratic Party is serious about any of these issues, they will need House leadership who can speak to them credibly and be trusted to act in their interest.
