Rep. Jayapal Passes the Progressive Torch

https://www.commondreams.org/news/pramila-jayapal-progressive-caucus

After Building Progressive Power Among House Democrats, Jayapal Passes the Torch

The outgoing CPC leader is proud of empowering the caucus to fight for "an economic agenda that worked for working people and poor people."

JESSICA CORBETT
Dec 20, 2024

After six years at the helm of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, dedicated to "building the infrastructure" necessary to effectively fight for key policies on Capitol Hill, term-limited Rep. Pramila Jayapal is determined to ensure that the CPC's incoming leaders "are as successful as possible."

Jayapal (D-Wash.) spoke with Common Dreams on Wednesday about her time leading the caucus of nearly 100 lawmakers whose legislative priorities include "comprehensive immigration reform, good-paying jobs, fair trade, universal healthcare, debt-free college, climate action, and a just foreign policy."

She was elected first vice chair of the CPC in June 2017, just months into her freshman term in Congress. Explaining her foray into leadership, Jayapal affectionately said, "I blamed it all on Keith Ellison," a Minnesota Democrat who was then a congressman and caucus leader and is now his state's attorney general.

"He was very encouraging," she said of Ellison. "He knew that the whole reason I was running, because he had heard me talk about it on the campaign trail... was because I wanted to strengthen the power of the progressive movement inside Congress and figure out how we could be more effective working on the inside and the outside, which I was coming from."

Jayapal, who was born in India and came to the United States as a teenager for college, founded the immigrant advocacy group Hate Free Zone—which later became OneAmerica—after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Residents of the Seattle area elected her to Congress in 2016, during her first term in the Washington State Senate.

In politics, Jayapal has shared stories from her own life with the world, publicly writing and speaking about her experiences as an immigrant woman of color, a woman who had an abortion, and a mother to her trans daughter. She has welcomed the mentorship of Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), the first woman of color to co-chair the CPC and, as Jayapal put it on Instagram earlier this week, "one of the most courageous and effective progressive leaders I have had the privilege to know."

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