Stubbornness can make it hard for people to admit when they are wrong. This tendency is particularly pronounced here in America, as our country was founded in an act of defiance, and our culture tends to glorify the stubborn and determined underdog while all too often viewing compromise as “selling out.” With that, it can be especially hard for 161,000 of 220,000 voters to admit that they selected the wrong candidate. Nonetheless, as hard as it may be for the average St. Louis voter to admit, the tenure of Cori Bush as Congresswoman for Missouri’s 1st Congressional District has been a complete failure, a fact that is apparent to an outsider, even if it is hard for the voters of her district to see.
To an outsider, St. Louis looks like a once-proud lion dying of starvation. It is a rightfully proud city, a historic one, filled with some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. It is thus a tragedy to the United States, that from a population of 857,000 in 1950, the Gateway to the West now struggles to stay afloat above 290,000. The city is in a race with rivals to be the most crime-ridden in the nation. One can be taken aback when driving through rapidly changing neighborhoods, staring down a row of mansions, and then be instantly confronted with a caricature of an impoverished, rundown family and house. The former glories of the city present a number of interesting “what if” scenarios where it could have avoided its decline. Where Walt Disney opened a theme park in the 1960s (it could have happened) or where the Cardinals defeated the Royals in 1985 without The Call. Nevertheless, those “what ifs” are mere fantasies, and the city lives in the shadow of its own past, and major reforms must be undertaken to save it. St. Louisans understand that reform is needed, though this desire has been channeled into the political ambitions of Representative Cori Bush. When she was first elected in 2022, she declared that ‘We’ll meet the challenges of this moment as a movement: side by side, arm in arm, with our fists in the air’. However, after almost four years, it is clear that she has failed to meet those challenges, and it may just be time to back off and watch from afar, her still angrily shaking her fists at the sky. After all, historians in the future may quip (echoing the progressives in the aughts) that Cori Bush lied, and St. Louis died.
Bush’s use of cavalier language makes it impossible for her to compromise and work with those whom she opposes. For example, during a debate about funding military construction and avoiding a shutdown on the House floor, she yelled at Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise, “Your bills are racist”. When asked afterward about these comments, she doubled down, telling reporters “I said what I said,” revealing to all that she lives in an echo chamber devoid of any opposing views or differing opinions. How arrogant, how full of herself, how clueless in fact can one be to the effects that words have. The word ‘racist’ should be a powerful and rightful warning to anyone or anything that practices such sins against another based on the amount of melanin in another’s skin. What the word shouldn’t be is a watered-down, meaningless, generalized way to attack someone in lieu of a substantive critique– especially on a subject as benign as the budget. To throw such a serious accusation is not only insulting to actual victims of racism but to the true fighters for civil rights like MLK, John Lewis, and the many other heroes of the ‘60s. If there was a ‘reimagining’ for a modern audience the tale of the boy who cried wolf, it would be Cori Bush crying out racist. It can be because of her that when that word next comes hurdled at someone, no one will even bother to contemplate if indeed that person acted in a discriminatory way, because any power behind it will be long dead and reduced to childish squabbling. Furthermore, given that Steve Scalise narrowly survived a politically-motivated shooting by a deranged Bernie Sanders supporter, Cori Bush should be careful with her words as over-the-top Leftist rhetoric has proven to be a powerful motivator for physical violence against him. Bush’s cavalier attitude concerning rhetoric about race can also be seen in her absurd accusation that Florida congressman Byron Donalds (who is African-American) is a “prop” whose agenda “upholds white supremacy.” This impossible accusation reflects poorly on Bush, not Donalds, as it reveals Bush to be narrow-minded and insensitive. Donalds has shown himself to be his own man, and he has been willing to publicly disagree with Governor DeSantis on education. Bush is merely name-calling and ignoring her very own people merely for having views contrary to her. Representative Bush’s words (on this subject and others) have shown her to be deeply unserious in her throwing around of serious accusations. Furthermore, Bush’s divisive rhetoric directly ignores (and indeed marginalizes) many of her constituents. Despite representing a city with one of the largest Jewish populations in the country, she has deliberately shown her contempt and prejudice against those voters by voting against a simple resolution condemning antisemitism. She will back causes that personally help her, but for anything else that goes against her base, she won’t even do so much as glance.
But actions are said to speak louder than words, and Bush’s actions have failed to do anything to rebuild or uplift the constituents that she claims to represent. Despite claiming to do “everything…through a racial justice lens”, Bush consistently refuses to consider or promote pragmatic solutions that could find near-unanimous agreement and see fruitful results. Her steadfast conviction that top-down, nationwide reform packaged in one single bill that will with one stroke of the president’s pen put an end to ‘racist policing’ has done no good. Indeed, there is a genuine need for criminal justice reform, whether it be in the staggering incarceration rate, drug epidemic, or more relevant to Bush in saving her home city. But by continuing to promote the slogan “Defund the police”, in spite of fellow Democrats asking her to stop as the negative connotation of the three words harms their reelection campaigns, or refusing to back her own co-members of the Congressional Black Caucus to break up the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act into smaller, individual acts with the expectation that it would better pass that way, she is only doing harm to the police reform and criminal justice movement, and in doing so harming her very own constituents. Her recent vote against a resolution merely recognizing National Police Week is just indicative of her short-sighted approach to governing. And against the backdrop of her slogans in support of the “Defund the Police Movement,” a movement that disproportionately harms African-Americans, Bush herself pays close to $500,000 on private security, giving herself a level of safety that she wants to deny to her experiments. If Bush genuinely thinks that the police can be defunded to fund social services concerning “mental health,” and that there will be no change in public safety, why doesn’t she donate it to “mental health” groups? Can it be any more of a slap in the face than to those who look up to her, that the security company which she relies on, is in fact owned by her own husband and she had paid him over $60,000 for ‘security’. Following the American tradition of money laundering and throwing cash into fires, Bush wasn’t even reporting campaign donations to said husband’s company. Could it thus be more satirical if not for how truly sad it is that her husband in fact lacked any credentials for his company?
The city is in desperate need of aid and change, and instead of someone in power who not only relates to their constituents but has the awareness and competence to reach beyond her own circle of yes-men to find a unanimously positive solution even among those with differing perspectives and views to the same problem, the city is wrongly stuck with Cori Bush. No one wants to hate her, but when she makes no effort to reevaluate herself or come to the bargaining table, she makes herself a waste to the people in desperate need of an actual leader. Any actual leader would recognize the much larger benefit that comes with giving up something in exchange for something else, finding a multitude of means to a problem that otherwise might not have been considered, and thus be able to see in real-time the effects of such legislation. Instead, there is a stubborn and self-destructive person with power, who lacks any realistic prospect of achieving any of her goals, for her energies are never spent so as to actually aid anyone tangibly.
What kind of alternative candidate would best suit St. Louis? While it is next to impossible for St. Louis to elect a Republican, it is possible for it to elect a pragmatic Democrat, more along the lines of Henry Cuellar or Joe Manchin, who will care more about bipartisan cooperation and economic recovery than partisan soundbites to turn St. Louis into a model for recovery that all America can take pride in.