Bloc Party

It’s time. The rematch for Texas' 28th Congressional district: Cisneros vs. Cuellar. Human rights attorney Jessica Cisneros, who fell 2,700 votes short of unseating incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar in March 2020, joins us to talk about how she recovered from a tough, narrow loss and why this race may still come down to The Wire. But first, Waleed Shahid takes on a new role as a private investigator, reporting on shady deals and probable crimes committed by the ruling Congressman of Texas’ 28th...

Build Back Better is dead. The Group Chat is resurrected. Welcome to Bloc Party Season 2. New episodes dropping twice a month, starting this week. Text your friends, call your representative, subscribe & share wherever you get your podcasts: ⏯https://podlink.to/blocparty 🟪

Putting the bloc back in Bloc Party. Freedom Caucus. Progressive Caucus. Blue Dogs. Why do we care? Justice Dems spokesperson and co-host Waleed Shahid sits down with Ruth Bloch Rubin, author of Building the Bloc: Intraparty Organization in the US Congress. Ruth tells Waleed that size matters when it comes to congressional voting blocs, but bigger isn’t always better. What can we learn from Congressional ideological factions of the 20th and 21st centuries? Why and how did they succeed and...

Is the AFL-CIO falling in love with the Democratic Socialists of America? Why is DSA’s PRO Act campaign drawing praise from unlikely allies in mainstream unions, the Democratic establishment, and beyond? What have these young socialists figured out about organizing towards working-class power? And why did this campaign come from [checks notes] DSA’s Green New Deal campaign committee? Guido joins Daniel Denvir, host of The Dig Radio from Jacobin magazine, to investigate DSA’s groundbreaking...

“Trickle-down economics has never worked.” In his Joint Address to Congress President Joe Biden discarded the prevailing economic consensus of post-Reagan Revolution America. What does that tell us about American politics in 2021? Is the Reagan era really over? Is neoliberalism really dead? Guido, Amira, and Waleed jumped into a Group Chat to capture their reflections and vent their fears as the Biden administration marches on past the first 100 days. After the break, Amira puts on the...

Folks… Odessa’s running. Justice Democrats’ Executive Director Alexandra Rojas makes her debut on the Bloc alongside a very special guest. Odessa Kelly, the first Justice Democrat of the 2022 cycle is running for Congress in Tennessee’s Fifth Congressional district, challenging Representative Jim Cooper and the Cooper dynasty. Odessa teaches Guido and Alexandra how to pronounce the name “Prentice” in the South, before telling us what led her to decide to run for Congress as a Justice...

45 million Americans hold a total of $1.7 trillion in education debt. How did we get here? Guido sits down with writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor to discuss the seeds of the current crisis. How did government-backed, private loans and an anti-civil rights, anti-peace movement backlash led by Ronald Reagan and neoliberal economists produce the historic debt crisis in higher education? Also, there’s a small bit of good news for student debtors in the American Rescue Plan, and AOC says: the...

This is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. But it’s not the Squad’s party either. Today, a very special Group Chat to discuss a very large stimulus bill. Amira and Guido are joined by Mary Small, National Legislative Director for Indivisible, to react to the passage of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan. What does the massive investment in stimulus checks, expanded unemployment insurance, and the child tax credit tell us about the state of the Democratic Party halfway through Biden’s...

Did the Sunrise Movement… negotiate a win? Guido sits down with Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, to check in on her well-being after four marathon years of campaigning for a Green New Deal. More than two years after the sit-in with AOC, Guido and Varshini look at Biden’s recent climate announcements and ask themselves: are we reading this wrong or did the Green New Deal.. win the debate over Democratic climate policy? And if the answer is “yes, we did notch some wins...

In 2010, the DREAM Act failed in a Senate vote when five Democrats refused to vote for the bill. Will the Biden administration learn from that defeat? Greisa Martinez Rosas was in the Senate gallery in 2010 when the DREAM Act died. Since then, she’s organized relentlessly to prevent the next Democratic trifecta from failing to protect immigrants. This week, Amira Hassan, Justice Democrats’ Political Director, takes the mic to speak with Greisa, executive director of United We Dream....

When the slavocracy needed to quash the rising tides of emancipation and free labor, they used the filibuster. When Jim Crow segregationists needed to stymie anti-lynching laws and preserve their poll taxes, they used the filibuster. Today, when the Republican Party must cling to power by strangling the American government and suppressing the American majority, they use the filibuster. But the filibuster is an accident of parliamentary history; an unintended consequence of minor changes to...

Group Chat returns after Senate Democrats win back the majority, the Republican Party incites a deadly coup attempt, and Joe Biden is officially sworn in as the 46th President. President Biden delivered his inaugural address, but what does “unity” mean after Republicans abetted violence against Democratic members of Congress? What does it mean to evoke Lincoln, who was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer, as a figure of unity? Why would Senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley ever stop...

President-elect Joe Biden ran against Medicare-for-All in the Democratic Presidential primary, and he won. Despite millions of Americans losing their medical insurance after being laid off in the midst of deadly pandemic, the crises of 2020 have not brought universal healthcare back onto the national agenda. So what do advocates for Medicare-for-All do now? And how should we think about using the leverage the Squad will wield inside a Democratic caucus that has only a slim, 222-seat...

Because this is not the Earth of Joe Biden’s childhood. This week, we take a break from the inside-the-beltway negotiations, zoom out, and ask the important questions: Is the stable foundation of human civilization unraveling? Does anyone or anything have the power to hold the apocalypse at bay? Journalist David Wallace-Wells synthesizes climate science to deduce whether we are still living on planet Earth, and what it means for the future if we’re not. Then journalist Kate Aronoff takes us...

Guido and Amira unpack interviews with two foreign policy experts, Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy advisor, and Yasmine Taeb, human rights attorney and progressive foreign policy activist, circling one central question: What happened to the reigning foreign policy consensus in D.C - also known as the Blob - when Congressman-elect Jamaal Bowman unseated the hawkish Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel this summer? Guido interviews Matt about his experience...

Will Team Biden repeat the mistakes of the Obama 2008 transition? Reed Hundt, author of A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama's Defining Decisions, sits down with Guido to figure out how and why the Obama administration made critical, Presidency-defining mistakes during the 2008 Presidential transition. Obama staffers on Team Biden are experiencing déjà vu as they navigate the current Presidential transition amidst another economic crisis; Guido asks Reed whether he's optimistic about Biden’s team...

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by millions of votes but Democrats in the House and Senate underperformed their polling. The Democratic majority in the House of the Representatives got smaller. People are mad, and they’re getting into fights. But what is this fight roiling the Democratic Party about? Is it really an ideological clash between progressive and conservative Democrats, or is it a fight about campaign strategy? When conservative Democrats claim “socialism” and “Defund The Police”...

A new show from Justice Dems about the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party, hosted by Waleed Shahid and Guido Girgenti.