[“We have clear evidence that people that ran on progressive
platforms or were for working families won competitive elections …
For too long, there has been a backwards D.C. idea that progressives
shouldn’t run in competitive districts.” ]
[[link removed]]

PROGRESSIVE PROFILE: GREG CASAR’S ‘ROOTS IN ORGANIZING’  
[[link removed]]


 

Jarod Facundo
December 12, 2022
The American Prospect
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_ “We have clear evidence that people that ran on progressive
platforms or were for working families won competitive elections …
For too long, there has been a backwards D.C. idea that progressives
shouldn’t run in competitive districts.”  _

The newly-elected representative from Texas' 35th CD has a message
about how to win in competitive districts,

 

“I never thought I would be signing up for a Russian lit class,”
said Greg Casar, a representative-elect from Austin, Texas, referring
to his undergrad years. Casar, now 33 and soon to represent Texas’s
35th District, is one of the newest members of the Congressional
Progressive Caucus, and last week ran unopposed
[[link removed]] for
the caucus’s whip position. Casar called the _Prospect_ on the day
that the newest lawmakers had selected their offices. “We’ve got a
good office right up the hallway from Robert Garcia, a progressive
freshman classmate of mine,” he said. (Garcia, currently the mayor
of Long Beach, was just elected to California’s 42nd District.)

Since the early 2010s, Greg Casar has been a social movement, labor,
and immigrant rights organizer. In 2014, he officially entered public
office as a city council member representing some of the poorest and
most racially diverse residents in Austin’s northeastern side.

But before Casar entered the Austin political scene, he was a student
organizer at the University of Virginia, trying to figure out his
future: “I was choosing between whether or not I wanted to be a
schoolteacher or community organizer.”

_MORE FROM JAROD FACUNDO_ [[link removed]]

I found a college paper Casar wrote
[[link removed]] in an unorthodox
literature class called Books Behind Bars; he and his classmates read
iconic works from Russian authors alongside young incarcerated
juveniles. The final product was a paper titled “Brothers Behind
Bars: Salvation, Insult, and the College Education.” Casar expressed
no embarrassment when I asked him about the class or paper. “I
believed then as I believe now that we over-incarcerate our young
people, and especially people of color.” That paper, written more
than a decade ago, from a macro perspective outlines the beginnings of
the sort of self-empowerment through community organizing mode of
politics Casar would later embrace. 

He didn’t downplay what these young men had done to land themselves
in jail. “If upon reading this you wish to claim that I am naively
romanticizing and idealizing these young men—and perhaps I am,”
Casar wrote, continuing to describe the extreme circumstances the
juveniles committed their crimes under—“these young men do not
need saving”—then pivoting to how well-to-do suburbanites like
himself are the ones who actually needed salvation, for turning a
blind eye to economic, racial, and housing injustice. 

Casar, instead of lamenting over his economic and social privilege
[[link removed]]—Casar’s
family home in Houston is appraised at $1.7 million and his father is
a physician—channeled his discontent with the status quo into
becoming a community organizer. 

Now, almost ten years later, Casar has racked up several local
progressive victories across affordable housing, labor, criminal
justice, and immigration rights issues by cultivating strategic
alliances with forces inside and outside of government. But can he
scale up that approach amid a slim, unstable Republican majority in
the House of Representatives and a generational changing of the guard
in House Democratic leadership? He and his early supporters seem to
think so—though it won’t be easy, and it might require the return
of Democratic majorities.

“We would support workers who sometimes worked weeks, and in other
cases months, who were illegally not paid at all.”

“CAFETERIAS IN VIRGINIA WERE THE FIRST PLACES that I learned to
organize,” Casar said. That experience would push Casar to intern
with the Workers Defense Project in 2010, a worker organization that
is quite distinct from a traditional labor union. As
the _Prospect _previously covered
[[link removed]],
worker centers are organizations created for workers who do not have a
path to unionization because of the limitations in the laws that
govern collective-bargaining rights. These groups have typically
organized Black service sector workers, care economy workers, and
other immigrant laborers found at the fringes of the workforce. 

Casar after graduation joined the Workers Defense Project as a policy
director. “Over the summers, I’d put in 50 to 60 hours a week at
Workers Defense, and this really is my political home,” he said.
“My first time setting foot inside the U.S. Capitol was alongside
members from Workers Defense Project asking for immigration reform
back in 2012.”

But at the day-to-day level, Casar described his primary role as
helping workers with about the most basic possible demands. Rather
than raises, it was about getting them base pay that had been
promised. “It may not all be useful for your piece, but I’ll give
you a sense of the work … We would support workers who sometimes
worked weeks, and in other cases months, who were illegally not paid
at all.” 

“In the summers, [workers] would be put up on a scaffold early in
the morning and then weren’t allowed to come down until the end of
the day,” Casar said. His first campaign at the Workers Defense
Project was securing water breaks for construction workers. “We had
members and members’ family members who died on job sites because
they suffered from heatstroke.” 

That experience translated into Casar’s first campaign he led while
serving in Austin City Hall; he organized a thirst strike where he and
hundreds of others sat in the hot Texas sun demanding that the city
pass a law guaranteeing construction workers a water break. “We
successfully got that passed back in August 2011,” he said. 

Casar also served as a liaison between the worker center’s
membership and the building trades unions within the AFL-CIO.
Solidarity was fragile then. In this role, Casar was tasked with
convincing the broader labor movement that immigrant workers, and
particularly undocumented workers, were a labor priority just as much
as unionized workers. “You can’t talk about the needs of
working-class people in Texas without talking about immigrant
rights.”

The opportunity, as Casar saw it, was convincing the labor unions that
it would be best for them to support the water breaks campaign as a
matter of law rather than something just for their contract. “So we
actually organized that first strike alongside our building
trades.” 

Further nurturing that relationship, Casar described an instance where
the city gave a subsidy to a massive hotel developer that had
prevailing-wage requirements. Organizers discovered that law wasn’t
being followed. As a tactical concession, the developer offered to
raise wages for the lowest-paid, often immigrant workers, while
ignoring the requirements for trade workers. “It was a tactic to
divide us,” Casar said. The developer saw that if it offered
immigrant workers higher wages, they would “stop protesting and
leave the IBEW out to dry.” 

The non-union workers unanimously rejected this gambit, Casar said.
They believed that the developers needed to be held accountable,
regardless of the immigration status or classification of workers. In
the end, the developer paid back
[[link removed]] $2.4
million to the city.

“When I first announced I was running for city council, LiUNA [a
laborers’ union] was the first union to endorse me,” Casar said.
“My first campaign contribution came from the IBEW business manager,
and my second one from the head of our teachers union.” 

Aside from labor, Casar pushed affordable-housing reforms while on the
city council. “Housing is the most important issue for working
people,” he said. “We thought it was really important for us to
develop a constituency around housing investments.” He described an
instance where other members of the city council wanted to put a
moderate housing investment proposal on the ballot. Instead, his
theory was a maximalist one: The higher the proposal, the more likely
it would be to drive turnout. 

He turned out to be correct. In 2018, voters overwhelmingly passed
[[link removed]] a
$250 million affordable-housing proposal. And in 2022, a similar $350
million
[[link removed]] proposal
for affordable housing passed too. 

Casar has straddled two sides of the housing and development debate.
In 2019, he said
[[link removed]],
“We must be both pro-housing and anti-gentrification.” I asked him
what this meant; he gave the example of when he organized with trailer
park residents who years later bought the park back from the owners
who once tried to evict
[[link removed]] them
and talked about the potential of converting traditionally high-income
areas into mixed-income ones. 

Party solidarity will be tested as House Democrats’ ideological and
strategic fractures emerge in the coming Congress.

“[CASAR] HAS HIS ROOTS IN ORGANIZING,” Maurice Mitchell, national
director of the Working Families Party, told me over the phone. “His
trajectory is emblematic of the type of candidates Working Families is
investing in all across the country.”

During the primary, Casar’s opponent, state Rep. Eddie
Rodriguez, pitched himself
[[link removed]] to
voters as a “progressive that actually gets things done.” He
touted his nearly two-decade career in Texas politics, while
lambasting Casar’s efforts to reduce Austin’s police budget and
repeal the city’s public camping ban (i.e., homeless encampments).
The latter was overturned
[[link removed]] by
voters early last year. Still, Casar overwhelmingly beat Rodriguez by
45 points
[[link removed]].

“He is emblematic of what a clear, unabashed progressive looks
like,” Mitchell said, speaking to Casar’s blowout primary victory.
However, he hedged his point: “It was a competitive race … there
were a lot of people with deep pockets that did not want Greg to win
the primary.” That primary win guaranteed Casar he’d be going to
Congress in January. 

Governing from the minority is tough, but key moments will still arise
as House Republicans will have to pass critical government funding
bills. But Mitchell said that aside from holding out votes for
Democratic priorities, progressive lawmakers like Casar should focus
on developing a platform that convinces the public to vote for
Democrats in 2024, creating another “governing moment,” as
Democrats had earlier this year. 

It should be expected that Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will struggle
wrangling an unruly, slim majority. So I asked Mitchell what
opportunities that dynamic creates for progressives and their
relationship with the broader Democratic Party. He took a deep breath:
“Whenever there’s a leadership transition, it’s a moment for
resetting the dynamics in the [Democratic] caucus.” 

Following the midterm elections, Democrats rejoiced in unity as they
fended off what many strategists and the media expected to be a
disastrous red wave. However, that solidarity will be tested as House
Democrats’ ideological and strategic fractures emerge in the coming
Congress. Before November’s election, as the Working Families
Party juiced voter turnout
[[link removed]] across
New York City, the Brooklyn Democratic Party was nowhere to be found.
In the end, one of the borough’s leaders, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries,
inherited House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s throne. 

That tension is playing out elsewhere. Just last week, centrist Rep.
Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) beat
[[link removed]] progressive
Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-PA) to serve as the newly created leader of
the “frontline” bloc of Democrats who won in the tightest
elections. The ramifications are still to be seen. But it’s likely
that this new leadership position will have a large say in determining
Democrats’ messaging, and thus their policy ambitions. 

Mitchell continued to talk about the significance of House Democratic
leadership changing. Pelosi’s ability to maintain discipline in the
caucus came from her decades of building relationships with other
lawmakers by offering compromises in exchange for loyalty. Under new
leadership, “it’s going to have to basically start from
scratch,” Mitchell said. That opens an opportunity for lawmakers
like Casar to reset how progressives are regarded by the caucus at
large. 

When I asked Casar about the new House Democratic leadership, he
responded: “We have clear evidence that people that ran on
progressive platforms or were for working families won competitive
elections … For too long, there has been a backwards D.C. idea that
progressives shouldn’t run in competitive districts.” 

As the Progressive Caucus’s number three person—and while the body
is bigger than it has ever been—his commitment to reshaping the
Democratic Party is yet to be seen. But if Casar’s ascent and the
victories he has helped secure for working people over the last ten
years are any indication of what he can accomplish at the national
level, his future is promising.

_JAROD FACUNDO [[link removed]] is a
writing fellow at The American Prospect. He has previously interned
for The Nation, Dissent, The American Prospect, and the Institute
for Policy Studies. He is a graduate of Michigan State University's
James Madison College._

Read the original article at Prospect.org.
[[link removed]] Used
with the permission. © The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2022. All
rights reserved. 
Click here to support the Prospect's brand of independent impact
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