Rep. Greg Casar, in his own way, has been helping the Democratic Party woo some disenchanted voters.
U.S. Rep. Greg Casar is a politician in demand.
On Tuesday, the 35-year-old Austin Democrat flew to California for fundraisers and a meeting about the party's strategy for the upcoming midterm elections. Then he was off to Colorado for a rally Thursday evening in a congressional district that Republicans narrowly won in the last election, after an appearance in Arizona last month with progressive stars U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, during their "Fighting Oligarchy Tour."
"We've had to increase the size of the venue," said Shad Murib, chair of the Colorado Democratic Party. "The congressman has a fan base here for sure."
Less than three years after he was elected to represent Texas' 35th Congressional District, which stretches from Austin to San Antonio along Interstate 35, Casar has gone from a virtual unknown in the national political scene to chairman of the House Progressive Caucus and has become a sought-after messenger in Democrats' efforts to bring working-class voters back to the party.
This foray into national politics is nothing new for Casar, who has gone from a virtual backbencher to the face of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He has a plan to help rebrand the party — and Casar isn’t just blaming centrists like many on the left for the 2024 loss. He is blaming progressives for the loss as well.
Ever since they lost big in November, Democrats have talked about how much their party needs to change.
Representative Greg Casar is living it.
Last week, Casar, a 35-year-old Democrat from Austin, Texas, was elected as the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, becoming the youngest person ever tapped to lead the group of liberals at a moment when his party is struggling with younger voters. He’s also the first leader from Texas, a state Democrats find perennially vexing.
Casar, a former union organizer, will be tasked with leading progressives through a challenging period, one that has some Democrats blaming them for tugging the party too far to the left. He believes it was centrists like Joe Manchin, the former Democrat and departing senator from West Virginia, who caused the party to water down policies that could have galvanized working-class voters. But he says progressives need to shift their message, too.
Rep. Greg Casar went on MSNBC to give a brief outline of what he thinks the left flank of the Democratic Party needs to accomplish to win over more voters.
He is bold and not amenable to compromise with the GOP. He is part of a new generation of Democratic leaders that have no institutional memory of the halcyon days where the parties could hash out agreements on legislation. Instead, our generation sees politics as a scorched earth enterprise where the opposition needs to be conquered and not bargained with.
Who is this member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus with Texas-sized progressivism? What has Rep. Greg Casar accomplished in his three short years in Congress? What legislation has he sponsored or co-sponsored? Join me in checking in on Rep. Greg Casar below the fold!
Personal History
Rep. Greg Casar is another child of very successful immigrants to this nation. He is one to watch in the future in Texas.
Rep. Greg Casar was born on May 4, 1989 (younger than me!) to Mexican immigrant parents in Houston, Texas. The truth about his upbringing was a bit shocking to me given the more modest conditions that many of the CHC grew up in.
GREG CASAR WAS BORN into economic privilege. His father, originally from Guadalajara, is a physician at Baylor St. Luke’s hospital in Houston. The family home where Casar grew up is a sprawling Mediterranean build appraised at $1.7 million in the posh enclave of Bellaire. Casar doesn’t bring this up much. “It’s not what you start a speech with; it’s not useful,” he said, noting that if his folks were undocumented construction workers, he’d certainly talk about that more.
At the private Catholic schools he attended, Casar was a high achiever—using discipline he picked up from his doctor father. On top of excellent grades, he was the first track and field athlete at his Jesuit high school to ever qualify for state competition. It was at these competitions, including a mile race on Congress Avenue, that he fell in love with Austin. “He’s a dedicated athlete who eats right and trains right,” his high school coach told the Houston Chronicle in 2005. “He has a bright future.”
That Jesuit education paid dividends for Casar and sent him on a journey to hold progressive political views. He started very young in union organizing, getting his first taste on the campus of the University of Virginia in 2010. They fought for workers to receive a living wage and won.
This year, Casar and other members of Students and Workers United for a Living Wage are hopeful that a change at the helm of the University may mean a change for its employees. “It’s a new administration and I think the time to act is now,” Grace Hale, a history professor who moderated the forum, told the audience.
Students got ready for the possible shift. Back in March, Students and Workers United for a Living Wage sent a letter with about 60 signatures to then UVA President-elect Teresa Sullivan to solicit her help in the matter. “We hope to meet with President Sullivan very soon, but we have not heard back from her since we sent our last petition last semester,” Casar tells C-VILLE. “I really believe that this is something that can happen. We have heard from administrators who really support this, lots of faculty and students who think that a living wage is a right thing for this University to do.”
Casar then traveled to his beloved Austin, Texas and dropped on the scene like a political bomb. He joined the Workers Defense Project, where he admitted that he was a “thorn in the side” of businesses in the area.
AS soon as word got out in March 2012 that Apple was planning to build a $300 million operations center in Austin, the Workers Defense Project sprang into action. Gregorio Casar, the group’s business liaison — his title might more fittingly be thorn-in-the-side — learned that Apple hoped to receive tax incentives in exchange for promising to create 3,600 full-time jobs with salaries averaging at least $63,000.
But Mr. Casar, a University of Virginia graduate who is the son of Mexican immigrants, assumed that Apple’s construction contractors would pay much less than that. The typical wage for nonunion construction laborers in Texas is just $10 an hour — about $20,000 a year.
Relying on relationships that the Workers Defense Project had built over the years, Mr. Casar, 24, persuaded the Austin City Council to require Apple to hold talks with the group as a condition for $8.6 million in city tax incentives. (The group had previously persuaded the council to enact Texas’ first ordinance requiring rest and water breaks for construction workers.)
In these discussions, Mr. Casar demanded that Apple’s construction contractors pay at least $12 an hour, provide safety training and workers’ compensation, and allow the group’s representatives to go to the site to inspect working conditions.
“Like many companies, Apple resisted at first because they wanted total flexibility,” Mr. Casar said.
Rep. Greg Casar first entered electoral politics by running for a seat on the Austin City Council in 2014 on a platform ranging from affordable housing, paid sick leave, living wage increases, tenant organizing, immigrant rights, criminal justice reforms (such as “ban the box"), and police accountability.
He first caught the notice of Texas Democrats when he pointedly called for resistance to Donald Trump when he was first elected as President in 2016.
Lots of people, including Donald Trump, are calling for healing and unity today. I won't call for healing. I'm calling for resistance.
There is no healing today for the families who fear they will be arrested, deported, and torn apart by Trump. The proliferation of nuclear weapons, the acceleration of the destruction of our planet, the damage to our economy and our jobs, and all of the other horrible things Trump stands for, are not healing.
Those who believed in civil rights did not call for healing in George Wallace's Alabama. Where there were calls for unity, they were calls for unity in resistance. We protested, we sang, we marched, we prayed, and we picketed until we won change.
In Austin and across our country, we must do the same. We're going to fight back. We're going to fight back against any and all of Trump's policies and politics of fear and hate and division in our city. We're going to take care of one another. We're not going to stand by and let Donald Trump harm any of our families – any of them.
In Austin, we're not just going to resist through protest. We're also going to resist by being a powerful example of effective government. Trump will not bring solutions to our community. We will. We will pass policy that truly fights economic inequality. We will create jobs, and we will help those who desperately thirst for change and fairness in our society. I was re-elected to the City Council last night to do this work alongside our communities.
By the time 2020 rolled around, Rep. Greg Casar was seen as a rising star and the potential future of the Democratic Party in Texas.
Surprisingly, Sanders didn’t deploy a member of D.C. royalty to warm up the crowd: He turned to one of the rising stars in Texas politics, 29-year-old Austin City Council Member Gregorio Casar.
To appreciate the novelty of that moment, you’ve got to understand Casar’s unlikely path to prominence. Born and raised in Houston to immigrant parents, the city’s diverse community exposed him to systemic inequities from an early age. “With my parents being from Mexico, immigration issues were always top of mind,” he says. “It was always obvious that while everybody was a Texan, some folks were afforded more rights than others.”
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Despite this early success, Casar says his struggles to break through to City Hall—“I got zero meetings with the mayor (Lee Leffingwell) during that time”—are what ultimately convinced him to run for City Council as a 24-year-old upstart. When he was sworn into office in January 2015, the newly minted councilor made himself a promise that many politicians make, but few uphold: To choose policy over polarity and values over political expediency.
Nearly five years later, Casar has cemented himself as the most ambitious voice in Austin politics. Pushing for a more fair, forward-thinking city, the District Four Council Member has championed a variety of progressive ideals including affordable housing, accessible health care, expansive public transit, and addressing the root causes of the city’s growing homelessness issues. And while these efforts have earned him a great deal of fanfare, they’ve also yielded tangible results. Beyond passing 2018’s $250 million affordable housing bond (the largest in Texas history) and directing tens of millions of dollars to homelessness aid, Casar led City Council’s recent charge to reallocate up to $150 million from APD’s budget in 2021 (an initiative Gov. Greg Abbott has fought to reverse) and direct nearly $20 million in rent aid to Austinites struggling to make ends meet during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The rest, as they say, is history. Rep. Greg Casar easily won his first primary election for Texas’ 35th district in 2022 and has been serving in Congress ever since.
Issue Positions and Work in Congress
Rep. Greg Casar with his allies in Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
Rep. Greg Casar is a member of the infamous Squad. That means that he votes against some legislation from the left that other Democrats support. That dings him on DW Nominate, which only cares about straight up-or-down votes. His DW Nominate score is -0.41, which puts him near the median of the Democratic caucus with the other Squad members. Progressive Punch rates him MUCH higher, with a 99% lifetime rating and an A+ in voting intentions.
I chronicled Rep. Greg Casar early on in the 118th Congress and talked both about his issue positions and notable headlines he had made early in his freshman term. That is a good resource to supplement this article — especially since I don’t want to rehash ground that was already covered.
Rep. Greg Casar has not been the primary sponsor of any legislation that has become law in the two terms he has served in Congress. This can partially (but not entirely) be explained by the fact that he has served in the minority since joining Congress. He has compounded this by not being the primary sponsor of any legislation in the 119th Congress so far. He does better in co-sponsoring legislation, having done so for 103 different pieces of legislation so far.
There are two different roles to play in Congress — work horses and show ponies. Work horses deal with the nitty-gritty of legislation and usually do not seek the limelight. Show ponies grab all of the headlines and usually are weak when it comes to legislating. I’m NOT knocking either role as both are necessary and valuable in different ways. I bring this up because Rep. Greg Casar has clearly been a show pony in the two terms that he has been in office — and a rather effective one.
Rep. Greg Casar divined the weak point in the Trump 2.0 regime as Elon Musk, a figure more unpopular than Trump himself. He has been almost relentless in his criticism of the billionaire foxes being put in charge of the hen house.
Rep. Greg Casar is a member of the Squad, which means that I don’t trust him or particularly like his ideology. However, even I have to admit that he is charismatic and telegenic, and that makes him an asset for the Democratic Party. We shall have to see what happens if the Democratic Party ever gains the House, Senate, and Presidency in terms of his legislative prowess. Until then, expect Rep. Greg Casar to continue making waves on the House Oversight Committee and as the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus!
Congressional Chronicle: Week of May 12, 2025
The latest on Capitol Hill when it comes to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Monday, May 12
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The Senate voted to invoke cloture on Monica Crowley to be the Chief of Protocol. Cloture was invoked (53/47) on a party line vote. The 4 CHC Senators voted NAY.
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The Senate voted to confirm the nomination of Monica Crowley to be Chief of Protocol. The nomination was confirmed (52/45/3) with the 4 CHC Senators voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to invoke cloture on Reed Rubenstein to be Legal Counsel to the Department of State. Cloture was invoked (52/45/3) with the 4 CHC Senators voting NAY.
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Tuesday, May 13
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The House Ways and Means (the tax) Committee began a markup of the awful reconciliation budget bill.
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The House Energy and Commerce Committee also began its markup of the horrid reconciliation budget bill.
The Senate voted to confirm the nomination of Reed Rubenstein to be Legal Counsel to the Department of State. The nomination was confirmed (52/46/2) with the 4 CHC Senators voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to invoke cloture on Troy Meink for Secretary of the Air Force. Cloture was invoked (72/26/2) with Sens. Gallego and Lujan voting AYE and Sens. Cortez Masto and Padilla voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to confirm the nomination of Troy Meink for Secretary of the Air Force. The nomination was confirmed (74/25/1) with Sens. Gallego and Lujan voting AYE and Sens. Cortez Masto and Padilla voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to invoke cloture on James Danly to be the Deputy Secretary of Energy. Cloture was invoked (53/45/2) with the 4 CHC Senators voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to confirm the nomination of James Danly for Deputy Secretary of Energy. The nomination was confirmed (52/44/4) with the 4 CHC Senators voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to invoke cloture on Katharine MacGregor to be the Deputy Secretary of the Interior. Cloture was invoked (57/41/2) with Sen. Gallego voting AYE and Sens. Cortez Masto, Lujan, and Padilla voting NAY.
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Wednesday, May 14
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The House Ways and Means (the tax) Committee completed a markup of the awful reconciliation budget bill.
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The Energy and Commerce Committee completed its markup of the horrid reconciliation budget bill.
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The House Agricultural Committee started its markup of the reprehensible reconciliation budget bill.
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The House voted to confirm the rules package for the week. H. Res 405 was confirmed (216/203/14) with the entire CHC voting NAY.
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The House voted to pass H.R. 2243 — the LEOSA Reform Act (this would allow law enforcement to carry concealed weapons across state lines in restricted locations). The bill was passed (229/193/11) with most of the CHC voting NAY. Reps. Cuellar, Gonzalez, and Gluesenkamp Perez voted AYE. Rep. Trahan did not vote.
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The Senate voted to confirm the nomination of Katharine MacGregor for Deputy Secretary of the Interior. The nomination was confirmed (54/40/6) with Sen. Gallego voting AYE and Sens. Cortez Masto, Lujan, and Padilla voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to invoke cloture on Michael Rigas to be Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources. Cloture was invoked (51/45/4) with the 4 CHC Senators voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to confirm the nomination of Michael Rigas for Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources. The nomination was confirmed (51/46/3) with the 4 CHC Senators voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to invoke cloture on Emil Michael to be Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Cloture was invoked (53/43/4) with Sen. Gallego voting AYE and Sens. Cortez Masto, Lujan, and Padilla voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to confirm the nomination of Emil Michael for Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. The nomination was confirmed (54/43/3) with Sen. Gallego voting AYE and Sens. Cortez Masto, Lujan, and Padilla voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to invoke cloture on Eric Matthew Ueland to be Deputy Director for Management, OMB. Cloture was invoked (51/45/4) with the 4 CHC Senators voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to confirm the nomination of Eric Matthew Ueland to be Deputy Director for Management, OMB. The nomination was confirmed (52/45/3) with the 4 CHC Senators voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to invoke cloture on Sean Donohue to be the Assistant Administrator of the EPA. Cloture was invoked (52/47/1) on a party line vote. The 4 CHC Senators voted NAY.
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Thursday, May 15
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The House Agricultural Committee continued its markup of the reprehensible reconciliation budget bill.
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The House voted to pass H.R. 2255 — the Federal Law Enforcement Officer Service Weapon Purchase Act. The bill was passed (234/182/17) with most of the CHC voting NAY. Reps. Costa, Cuellar, Gonzalez, and Gluesenkamp Perez voted AYE. Rep. Trahan did not vote.
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The Senate voted to confirm the nomination of Sean Donohue for Assistant Administrator of the EPA. The nomination was confirmed (51/46/3) with the 4 CHC Senators voting NAY.
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The Senate voted to reject a motion to discharge S. Res 195 — a request for information on El Salvador and their human rights practices. The motion was rejected (45/50/5) with the 4 CHC Senators voting AYE.
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The Senate adjourned until Monday, May 19th.
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Friday, May 16
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This is embarrassing…
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SETBACK. The GOP's big sweeping bill just failed in the Budget Committee, 16-21. Five Republicans voted NO. "The NOs have it. The committee stands in recess, subject to the call of the chair," Jodey Arrington says.
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) May 16, 2025 at 12:02 PM
The House has business on Sunday, May 18th in the Budget Committee thanks to this failed vote.
