Progressive Groups Eye Jim Cooper for Primary Challenge

Medicare For All, Green New Deal and impeachment stances disappoint lefties who want a ‘Southern AOC’


Eli Motycka expected more from Jim Cooper, Nashville’s long-serving Democratic representative in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Motycka is an organizer with the Nashville chapter of the Sunrise Movement, a political advocacy group focused on climate change. He grew up in Nashville, where he played on a youth baseball team coached by Cooper, who had a son on the squad.

So when Motycka and like-minded Sunrise members met with Cooper earlier this year, he expected to respectfully encourage the congressman to co-sponsor the Green New Deal, an aspirational but nonbinding suite of policy proposals put forth by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).

Instead, according to Motycka, Cooper corrected one of the young advocates’ grammar, assigned them reading and asked whether they drove cars. Motycka says Cooper’s tactic was “complete interference, obscuring the issue in order to not have to engage with it directly.”

Read more: https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/features/article/21083386/progressive-groups-eye-jim-cooper-for-primary-challenge