After coming under fire from progressives, DCCC chair Cheri Bustos announced on Wednesday that she was pulling out of a high-dollar fundraiser next month in Chicago for conservative Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski.
In a statement, Bustos alluded to Lipinski's hostility to abortion rights, saying she is "proud to have a 100 percent pro-choice voting record" and noting that she and Lipinski "do not agree on women's reproductive healthcare"—a very polite way of explaining that Lipinski thinks men should have the right to pass laws controlling women's bodies. At the same time, Bustos praised Lipinski's work to secure federal money for infrastructure and insisted that her decision would "not change how I will work as DCCC chair to protect our big tent Democratic caucus."
And indeed, we can still expect Bustos to continue to help Lipinski as he faces another serious primary challenge from his 2018 opponent, businesswoman Marie Newman. While Lipinski said he agreed it was "in the best interest of House Democrats" that Bustos bail on his fundraiser, he also told Politico that the two are "friends," claiming he had rounded up votes in her race for DCCC chair and "was the first one to tell her she had won."
Lipinski added that Bustos had supported him in last year's primary and said of this year's race, "She said she'd do anything to help me in any way." The New York Times Jonathan Martin further reports that unnamed DCCC staffers "would not rule out using the committee's resources" to support Lipinski.
We can also expect Lipinski to continue to be a raging jagoff. He not only said he plans to attack Newman for supporting the Green New Deal, he told Martin that the refusal by Democrats to welcome in anti-choice politicians like himself was "how we got President Trump—people felt like they weren't welcome in the party."
There's another problem looming for progressives, though, on top of the prospect of D-Trip assistance for Lipinski: a split primary field. Last year, Newman was fortunate to run one-on-one against Lipinski, meaning the anti-incumbent vote wouldn't be fractured among multiple challengers. (Newman wound up losing by a narrow 51-49 margin.)
This time, however, there are two other contenders to deal with: attorney Abe Matthew and now activist Rush Darwish, who served on the transition team of newly elected Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and just entered the race the other day. Newman and her supporters told Martin they're concerned that Lipinski's allies would recruit other candidates in order to undermine her campaign, and while of course such charges are usually unprovable, as Martin suggests, these kinds of tactics are very much in character for creatures of Chicago's machine politics like Lipinski.