The gloves are coming off in the Capitol Hill brawl between Democratic moderates and progressives.
Queens Democratic boss and 11-term congressman Greg Meeks took a thinly-veiled jab at fellow Big Apple Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday, urging her to back off her racially-tinged feud with party leaders or face a fight for her political life.
In an interview with the Daily News, Meeks fumed over Ocasio-Cortez’s recent racial beef with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and pushed back against her left-wing allies at Justice Democrats for openly backing insurgent candidates trying to unseat members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
He also said the CBC can play the same game.
“Primaries go two ways,” Meeks said when asked whether his wing of the party would consider challenging progressive members next year, including Ocasio-Cortez. “If someone picks a fight with somebody else, you fight back. That’s what my parents told me.”
Meeks stressed there weren’t any current plans to challenge Ocasio-Cortez, but left the door open: “If you get in the ring, expect that people are going to start throwing punches.”
The Justice Democrats, a progressive political action committee that is closely aligned with Ocasio-Cortez and propelled her to victory in 2018, has already backed primary challenges against CBC members, including 10-term Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.).
The group, which is pushing to get corporate cash out of politics, has also made noise about possibly challenging Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn) and Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-Brooklyn), both CBC members. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-Bronx) is another New York lawmaker who’s being targeted by the group.
Meeks could also become a target for using his role as Queens Democratic Party chair to back establishment favorite Melinda Katz over leftist Tiffany Caban in the borough’s still-undecided district attorney race, which has become a microcosm of the national intra-party battle.
Meeks said the Justice Democrats and left-leaning lawmakers may be shooting the party in the foot.
“I would hope that these individuals would realize who the opposition is here,” Meeks said, referring to Republicans. “The focus should be to keep the majority, grow the majority and win the presidency.”
The escalating tensions come amid increasingly nasty clashes between party progressives and centrists, boiling over this week with Ocasio-Cortez accusing Pelosi in an interview of being “outright disrespectful” for privately scolding her and other “newly elected women of color” for picking Twitter fights with fellow Dems.
Meeks called Ocasio-Cortez’s Pelosi comments “intolerable.”
“We’re all on the same team,” Meeks said. “You don’t go after the speaker like that.”
A Democratic leadership source, who only spoke on condition of anonymity, was harsher.
“Justice Democrats in general are trust fund kids who are funding this with their parents’ money,” the source said, blasting the progressive group as “elitist” for criticizing black lawmakers from poor districts who take corporate donations. “It’s offensive for CBC members when these elites are looking down on them when they don’t have the financial ability to say, ‘I don’t want that money.'”
Asked for an example, the source pointed to Ocasio-Cortez chief of staff and Justice Democrats co-founder Saikat Chakrabarti, a millionaire Harvard graduate who worked on Wall Street before turning to left-wing politics.
A spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez declined to comment Friday, but the Justice Democrats took aim at the party establishment on her behalf.
“Senior members of the Democratic Party can make whatever false claims they want, but it’s clear that their bottom line is: no primary challenges,” Justice Democrats board members Alexandra Rojas, Demond Drummer and Nasim Thompson said in a joint statement.
“Let’s make one thing clear,” the trio added. “No incumbent is entitled to their seat. That’s why we have elections…Primaries are good for our party.”
The leadership source said the Justice Democrats and Ocasio-Cortez are getting some of their own medicine.
“They have attacked, attacked, attacked and attacked. For the first time, they were attacked back and now they claim to be the victim,” the source said, referencing the pushback from Meeks and Pelosi. “Ocasio-Cortez kind of operates like Trump. She’s hellbent on sowing discord and spreading chaos, but if you look at it, it always traces back to one person: her.”
President Trump, meanwhile, offered a rare defense of Pelosi.
“I think Cortez is being very disrespectful to somebody who’s been there a long time,” Trump said, cutting off the first half of the congresswoman’s last name. “I deal with Nancy Pelosi a lot and we go back and forth and it’s fine, but I think that a group of people is being very disrespectful to her. And you know what, I don’t think that Nancy can let that go on.”
So far, no Democratic challenger to Ocasio-Cortez has emerged for the 2020 race.
Joe Crowley, the former Queens Democratic Party boss who used to hold Ocasio-Cortez’s seat, joined a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm after his election loss, but remains active in New York politics and hasn’t ruled out running for his old post.