Half a minute into this quick paced video is a CNN segment with corrupt conservative New Jersey DINO, Josh Gottheimer being lectured by a Chris Cuomo about his role in sabotaging Biden's Build Back Better Act. A couple of days ago, writing for The Intercept, Sara Sirota opened up on Gottheimer with double barrels. Though most congressional Democrats consider Gottheimer the worst Democrat in the House, his voting record is just the 4th worst-- fellow Blue Dogs Henry Cuellar (TX), Jim Costa (CA), and Jared Golden (ME) have created even worse records-- although just fractionally-- for themselves. Sirota, however went beyond just his miserable voting record. For example... "The New Jersey representative who led a few conservative Democrats to undermine President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda has hired a former top Republican staffer from the congressional office of then-Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), now governor of the state. Jordan Colvin has joined the office of Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) as legislative director, the lawmaker confirmed in a statement posted Friday on Twitter." Gottheimer has tried to softly cover up the relationship between DeSantis and Colvin.
While Gottheimer refers to Colvin as a “former” Republican who shifted to the Democratic Party after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, she led DeSantis’s legislative affairs between May 2015 and July 2016, according to her Legistorm profile, as he advocated far-right policies that Trump himself would go on to implement.
...More recently, Colvin began to participate in Democratic politics when she supported her husband Jesse Colvin’s campaign as the party’s nominee against incumbent Republican Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland in the 2018 congressional election. (Harris won.) In December 2020, the former DeSantis staffer began working for the Qatar Embassy in Washington, D.C. She received $10,000 per month to provide advice on “U.S.-Qatar relations and the business and political climate in the U.S.” as well as to lobby on behalf of the embassy. Colvin notified the Justice Department that she stopped working for the country on August 31.
She now joins Gottheimer’s Democratic team at a critical time for his party. By holding both chambers of Congress and the White House, Democrats have a rare opportunity to pass key reforms, but their slim majorities in the House and Senate make every single vote, including Gottheimer’s, essential.
Gottheimer made waves in August when he led eight other Democrats to demand that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., abandon her strategy to hang a floor vote on the Senate’s corporate-backed, bipartisan infrastructure bill on the completion of a pivotal reconciliation process. The representative and his allies wanted a vote on the former immediately, but that could have disincentivized him and other conservative Democrats from then passing a much more ambitious bill to achieve expanded Medicare coverage, universal prekindergarten, paid family leave, and other domestic priorities of the Biden administration.
Pelosi agreed to hold a floor vote by September 27 but ultimately delayed that deadline, with Biden’s support, after progressives threatened to withhold their support since the reconciliation process was not yet complete. Gottheimer chastised progressives for using radical tactics themselves, even though their maneuver functioned to preserve the original two-track strategy and safeguard a spending package that doesn’t even authorize their own policy goals, like Medicare for All.
NJ.com, the state's biggest news site, is blaming Gottheimer for the tensions over Biden's Build Back Better plan, which is extremely popular in New Jersey. But also buying into his lies about-- while derailing the bill-- supporting it. Jonathan Salant reported that "his actions made it more likely he would be challenged from the left in a Democratic primary next year. And he drew sharp criticism from fellow Democrats, especially after he fumed that Pelosi 'breached her firm, public commitment' when she called off the vote on the infrastructure bill. 'Josh represents his district but I think he overplayed his hand here,' said state Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, D-Bergen. 'He was sent there to get things done and in this case, attacking the enormously respected speaker of the House and doing it publicly, instead of working with her to get the best possible solution, was not a good move.' Democratic consultant Jim Manley, former aide to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), said Gottheimer miscalculated. 'It was an interesting move for a backbencher to make,' Manley said. 'I can only assume he and his eight other allies thought that they would try and make a name for themselves as a force to be reckoned with on Capitol Hill by demanding that the president and the speaker uncouple the two bills. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t have as much leverage over the process as they thought they did and lost.'... He made no apologies for splitting the House Democratic caucus by trying to split the two bills, demanding that the infrastructure legislation move now rather wait until the second measure also was ready to go."
“If the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed first, the more corporate-aligned Democrats like Josh Gottheimer would have all the leverage in deciding what to fund and how to much to tax corporations to get it done,” said Adam Green, an Edison native who co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “They would be able to decide 100% of the terms.”
Progressives already view Gottheimer warily, considering his biggest lifetime source of donations are from those who work on Wall Street, which he oversees as a member of the House Financial Services Committee.
This year, he is the No. 2 House recipient of donations from employees in the securities industry and the top House recipient of donations from private equity industry employees, according to the research group OpenSecrets.
That has helped Gottheimer become one of the House’s most prolific fundraisers. He entered July with $10 million in the bank, more than all but four other lawmakers, according to the Federal Election Commission.
That money helped him easily beat back a 2020 primary challenge from former Glen Rock Council member Arati Kreibich, who ran with the endorsement of U.S. Sen, Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Green said progressives haven’t given up trying to defeat Gottheimer. He said they already were working to take him down next year, including looking at whether to pressure county Democratic committees to withhold their endorsements and their all-important party ballot lines.
Still, the budget battle gave Gottheimer, a third-term lawmaker from North Jersey, the kind of attention most lawmakers in Washington can only dream about, appearing on the Sunday talk shows and seeing a swarm of Capitol reporters surround him whenever he stepped outside the House chamber.
Gottheimer sees himself as a senator and hopes to run when one of the seats opens up. Outside of Wall Street, K Street and his Bergen County district, very few people had ever heard of him. Now they have... and the first impression is very bad.
