Greg Casar takes Austin lessons to Congressional Progressive Caucus

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

WASHINGTON — In 2019, Austin repealed a ban on camping in the city. It was a priority championed by the city council’s most progressive members who said the measure would help homeless people access housing by keeping their criminal records clean.

Soon, encampments sprung up across the city. Residents complained about littering and noise. Pandemic social distancing rules pushed more people out of homeless shelters, making the issue even more visible. Conservative opponents of the city council said the city’s lax laws were drawing more people from outside Austin to pitch their tents. Gov. Greg Abbott protested. Conservatives mobilized, and by May 2021, the city’s residents said they had enough. A 57% majority of voters voted to reinstate a ban on camping in the city.

At the center of the initiative was a young city councilmember, whom conservatives delighted in caricaturing as the face of the most progressive policies in one of the most liberal cities in Texas. Greg Casar, who was elected to the Austin City Council in 2014 at the age of 25, had a leading hand in many of the city’s most progressive initiatives.

Casar is now a freshman congressman elected unanimously this month to lead the Congressional Progressive Caucus, one of the largest and most influential groups in Congress. The group of nearly 100 members drives much of the Democratic Party’s ideological compass and includes a wide range of members — from the ultra-visible Squad who became famous for bucking then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2018 to more muted members who also belong to the moderate New Democrat Coalition.

He has a lot of lessons he’s learned from his time on city council, particularly the camping fight that colored his political career for years after. Though he stands by the move to lift the camping ban, he says the city council didn’t do enough to communicate to voters how the measure helping homeless people aligned with the priorities of a majority of voters.

He is taking those lessons to Congress as Democrats reel from mass losses in this year’s elections. He would rather build coalitions than pass ideological purity tests that have pushed voters away from the left. He espouses a more working class message, steering away from the culture wars and back to economic concerns that dominated voters’ minds this year.

That doesn’t mean abandoning the vulnerable people that make up much of the progressive coalition, including immigrants, people of color and LGBTQ communities. But it means returning messaging to issues that all voters can relate to.

Casar is the first chair of the Progressive Caucus to come from a Republican-controlled state. He’s seen Democratic losses and their policy consequences first hand, and he says it isn’t enough to be ideologically right — Democrats also have to win.

“In the past, there were some progressives, including people I’ve been friends with for a long time who used to say, I’d rather see you lose righteously than win politically and strategically,” Casar said in a lengthy interview from his Capitol Hill office. “And I’ve learned to respectfully disagree with those people. We can’t afford to lose anymore because the cost of losing is just so high.”

Forged in Austin

Casar’s public service started in the Austin City Council, where he was often listed as one of the most progressive members in an already extremely liberal city. He was a fierce advocate for worker rights, having entered public service after years as a labor organizer going back to his time at the University of Virginia. Even today as a member of Congress, he tries to always visit the kitchen at formal events in Washington to speak with workers.

“This is my 23rd year in public service and every once in a while, you come across people who would be in it for the right reasons. And that’s how I felt about Greg,” said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Progressive Caucus member who encouraged Casar to run for city council when he was still a labor organizer.

Steve Adler, the Austin mayor during Casar’s time on city council, said Casar often drove the council to the left but was always open to hearing alternative ideas. He cited Casar’s work on sick leave in Austin, a contentious fight that left much of his agenda on the cutting room floor (after Texas courts ruled that a city did not have the power to mandate sick leave for private sector workers as Casar had advocated, Casar pushed sick leave for temporary and part time city workers). Adler said moderating goals was necessary to “give them greater hope for life in a red state.”

“He was also amenable to sitting and talking with people who disagreed with him,” Adler said. “Probably not to the degree some of those folks wanted him to. But he was always willing to talk and to listen and make some adjustments.”

But not everyone had as rosy an assessment. Casar’s work on the city council drew significant and coordinated attention from conservative and moderate residents who attacked him as an idealogue. After the city passed Casar’s measure allowing camping in much of the city, hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent pinning him to the effort during his first congressional election in 2022, casting him as a radical leftist.

The Save Austin Now PAC, founded by former Travis County Republican Party Chair Matt Mackowiak, pushed for a city referendum, dubbed Proposition B, to recriminalize camping in the city and panhandling. The PAC called Casar’s efforts “an unmitigated public health and safety disaster for our beautiful city.”

The proposition gained momentum, with Abbott toying with a legislative ban on homeless encampments in urban areas. Proposition B passed in May 2021.

“The fact that the electorate rose up and rejected that policy as clearly as they did, making Austin the first major U.S. city to overturn a camping ordinance was an incredible feat,” Mackowiak said. “And I don’t say that to pat myself on the back. I say that to reflect the strategic misjudgment, the disastrous miscalculation that [Casar] made on that policy.”

Looking back on the episode, Casar recognizes the need to get ahead of the message to prevent opponents from controlling the narrative. Save Austin Now PAC asserted that Casar intended to get more people visibly on the street to advance a universal right to housing, though Casar asserts he was trying to make sure people did not have a criminal record that could disqualify them from housing. The police union also pushed that the law was more lax than it was, letting people pitch tents in areas like public parks and sidewalks, he said. Both were rebuttals that Casar said he did not sufficiently anticipate or counter at the time.

He also said it was a mistake of the city government not to build more housing more quickly, another priority popular with most of the city’s residents, though he could not predict the pandemic forcing more people out of shelters and raising the homeless population.

“I underestimated having an active opponent that wanted us to fail as a city council,” Casar said of the movement for Proposition B. “We lost people that would have been with us.”

Taking Texas lessons to Washington

As Casar and the rest of his party seek a path forward to win future elections, he is tapping into many of the lessons he learned from his fights on city council. He thinks the caucus should be wiser in picking its fights to win and get ahead of negative messaging from his opponents. He is centering first and foremost a message of support for those suffering economic hardship.

It’s a return to the party’s roots but also in response to a wave of anti-trans messaging from Republicans that pummeled Democrats in this year’s elections. In battleground races around the country, Republicans invested millions of dollars into television ads claiming Democrats wanted to use tax dollars for gender transition surgeries for children.

Democrats were largely caught off guard by the ads, with only a handful willing to contradict the ads on camera, even though gender transition surgeries for children are exceedingly rare. The ads proved effective, casting Democrats as distant from everyday voters, focusing on a small population instead of on rising costs. One ad for President-elect Donald Trump finished with the line: “Kamala is for They/Them. President Trump is for you.”

“People’s main association with the Democratic Party was the party for the working class from the post-war era up into the early 2010s,” Casar said. “And since then, we’ve lost a lot of that and Trump has capitalized on it.”

Casar said there is room within the progressive movement for disagreement, particularly on issues where “we don’t have the vast majority of the American people with us.” Since the election, several moderate Democrats have denounced some of the left-wing priorities pushed by social interest groups, including defunding the police and transgender athletes.

That doesn’t mean leaving vulnerable people in the dust, Casar said, adding “we have the majority of the American people with us on common decency.” But it does mean linking social progressive priorities back to an economic message more voters can support.

“Instead of just saying Gov. Abbott is bullying LGBTQ kids … I think we need to make clear to people that Greg Abbott, instead of working on lowering your housing costs or lowering your taxes, he’s spending today, again, picking on LGBTQ Texans,” Casar said.

Casar also has little patience for more economically moderate members who view robust social spending as a political gamble. He cited West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin, who was the most conservative Democrat in the Senate before leaving the party and becoming an independent in May. Manchin opposed several social spending provisions within President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, including an expanded child tax credit and a $15 minimum wage, fearing it would expand the already swollen federal deficit. He also criticized Democrats for being out of touch with average Americans who would rather work than have social welfare.

“I can’t abide by the most conservative elements of the Democratic Party saying that the Democratic Party needs to focus on bread and butter issues, when sometimes it’s those most corporate and conservative elements that blocked the very policies that they say that we should be running on,” Casar said.

The caucus’ future

Casar takes the mantle atop of the Progressive Caucus after serving only one term in Congress. At 35, he is one of the youngest members of Congress and was elected in 2022 to replace U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett in a deep blue district that runs from Austin to San Antonio along Interstate 35. Doggett ran in the newly drawn 37th district. He has served as the caucus’ whip during his first term in office — a heavy workload for a group that has minimum requirements on how often members vote with the caucus agenda.

It’s a rapid rise in a group that has ballooned in recent years, going from a small cohort founded by then-Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont “where a few people came to complain,” to nearly 100 members, said outgoing Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Washington. Along with Castro and Casar, U.S. Reps. Lloyd Doggett of Austin, Veronica Escobar of El Paso and Jasmine Crockett of Dallas are also members.

The caucus pushes for protections for working people, including universal health care, increased minimum wage and child tax credits, as well as robust investment to combat climate change. They advocated for those priorities in Biden’s domestic policy agenda, squaring off with more fiscally minded Democrats including Texas Reps. Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar.

Casar hopes to use the caucus’ large membership to direct the House Democratic Caucus as it pushes back on Republicans’ agenda for the next two years.

Democrats are steeling for what they say will be a uniquely tumultuous time in Congress. Republicans will have control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, leaving Democrats responding to and trying to stop conservative policy.

“We’re going to be on offense over the next two years in this upcoming Congress. Those of us who have lived through a Trump administration know how dangerous the administration is, especially for vulnerable communities,” Escobar said. “I have no doubt that Greg will be able to lead us to the best plan forward.”

Casar sees hope of influencing legislation through public pressure campaigns. He cites Democrats’ resistance to Republicans’ attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017, which failed “because Democrats voted as a bloc and then were able to create such a clear message to the American public that people like John McCain came over and voted with us.”

“My goal is to organize our members to vote as much as we can as a bloc on key issues, and to mobilize our members to make joint asks of our leadership to move the entire Democratic Party,” Casar said. “If we move the entire Democratic Party on votes, we can actually stop some of Trump’s most extreme policy proposals.”

Casar is also open to working with other ideological blocs within the Democratic Caucus on common goals. When U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Illinois, was elected chair of the moderate New Democrat Coalition last month, one of his first calls was to Casar, Schneider said. Both agreed that they had common objectives in tackling economic issues, even if they differ on tactics.

“There are some advocates that are so committed to their cause that it is difficult for them to compromise or seek middle ground,” Adler said. “I don’t think that’s Greg.”