Josh Gottheimer's Very Pathetic Amateur Hour

If you've been reading DWT with any regularity over the last several years, you would already know what viperous dick New Jersey Blue Dog Josh Gottheimer is. You would have seen posts like Overall, Who Is The Worst Democrat In The House? Hint: He Represents The Bada Bing Strip Club In Lodi, New Jersey and Josh Gottheimer-- The Worst Democrat In Congress... And So Far He Has No Primary Opponent and What We Learned From The Passage Of The GOP's Odious Rules Package-- The New Congress' 4 Worst Democrats Show Their Hand. Not enough for you? Well, from the new platform try, one of these. A creepy, crawly conservative climber, Gottheimer is a 46 year old piece of garbage who worked for Bill Clinton as a speech writer and then for the world's 3rd largest p.r. firm. In other words, Josh Gottheimer is a trained, polished professional liar... the way a turd is polished.

A Wall Street whore, Gottheimer ran against another Wall Street whore, Republican Scott Garrett right when Garrett's extremism turned Wall Street off to him. And in Bergen County-- Wall Street's bedroom community-- that means a lot. On winning election, Gottheimer immediately joined all of Congress' most conservative Democratic organizations: the Blue Dogs, Problem Solvers (co-chair), the New Dems, No Labels and started working furiously against the interests of working class Americans. One Democratic member of Congress told me if he could snap his fingers and see one Democrat defeated, it would be Gottheimer. Today, I would guess that dozens of Democratic members would agree. Believe me, it's not by chance that the Republicans contributors who finance and run No Labels put Gottheimer in the exact center of their little ad this morning:

Pelosi put him on the House Financial Services Committee where he has worked consistently in the interests of the corporations the committee oversees. He has used his perch there to raise immense sums of money (legalistic bribes). This last cycle alone he gobbled up more money than any other member of Congress from Wall Street, almost double what Kevin McCarthy-- considered the most corrupt man in Congress-- took in:

Since being appointed to the committee, Gottheimer has taken in $3,326,356, not just more than McCarthy, but more than any other person serving in the House! Anyone who has a big enough bankroll and who wants to bribe members of Congress knows they can go right to Gottheimer to get the ball rolling. "Yeah, he's corrupt beyond any other member I know," one of his very prominent colleagues told me today. "The guy doesn't belong in government... non one likes him but the Clintons."

This morning, Ryan Grim and Sara Sirota began their look at Gottheimer by comparing the House to high school. "Both have overlapping hierarchies that are at once defined and undefined, official and unofficial. There are official positions, like captain of the varsity basketball team or chair of the Ways and Means Committee, but there are also social hierarchies: who’s cool and who’s not; who has genuine power and who doesn’t." Gottheimer is about as cool as McCarthy. "Gottheimer’s colleagues," wrote Sirota and Grim, "simply do not like him-- and that would be trivial gossip of concern to nobody outside a congressional cafeteria if it wasn’t having a real-world effect right now on the prospect of the Biden administration enacting both its bipartisan infrastructure plan and the accompanying $550 billion in infrastructure spending. Gottheimer and eight of his colleagues have been facing off with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), insisting in a letter sent last week that she bring the bipartisan package for a vote 'immediately,' rather than holding it back as leverage to pass the bigger piece. The not-so-veiled goal is to strip progressives of the leverage they have to enact a big reconciliation package, making it more vulnerable to being cut down to size or stopped entirely. Gottheimer worries the larger legislation will mean painful tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy-- many of whom have supported his political ambitions."

Another Democratic congresswoman, who asked not to be identified, told me Gottheimer "is as bad as Sinema" [and] "the DCCC should stop recruiting and supporting candidates like him... I hope Pelosi makes his life a living hell."

During a House Democratic leadership call on Sunday night, Pelosi mocked Gottheimer’s effort as “amateur hour,” pledging to push ahead despite his threats to stop the legislation. Pelosi is not known for miscounting votes, suggesting that she is confident that enough of Gottheimer’s eight co-dissenters will not stick with him; she’s known to work the phones relentlessly and leaves little to chance.

In some respects, Democrats lucked out in the identity of the lead member of what’s been dubbed the “suicide squad.” Had the effort been organized by somebody less despised internally than Gottheimer, it may have gained more traction. “Josh Gottheimer continues his perfect streak of being the absolute worst member of the House Democratic caucus,” texted one member of Gottheimer’s business-friendly New Democrat Coalition. “A more likeable member could do more damage. But the fact that so many of my colleagues (and across the ideological spectrum mind you) consider him such [an unpopular figure] really does limit his influence.”

At least Gottheimer is making (some of) his donors happy with his challenge to Pelosi. Some of Gottheimer’s largest contributors this year work in private equity, investment banking, and corporate law-- all of which stand to gain from the infrastructure bill’s giant investment in public-private partnerships but stand to lose a small portion of their profits if new tax increases are enacted.

One of the most prominent New New Jersey political consultants has know Gottheimer for many years."Josh," he told me today, "likes to believe he's a tough New Jerseyan-- Tony Soprano. He grew up watching the series and looking in his midget sized mirror to practice his impression. First he wanted to play the role of Paulie Walnuts but then he learned he didn't have enough hair. Josh cares only about Josh and everyone in New Jersey knows it. He doesn't care one iota about people, other than himself. There will be many New Jersey Democrats thrilled to see him kicked to the curb in 2022. Maybe he can go back to working for Microsoft on another coast, then. That'll leave more room for real reformers like Mayor Steven Fulop to take the mantle in 2025."