Robert Baird at The New Yorker takes a deep dive into the negotiations on President Biden’s agenda and the Congressional Progressive Caucus: The C.P.C.’s show of strength came as a surprise. Not since the Democratic Study Group, an organization of liberal House members who helped steer civil-rights legislation through the blockade of Southern Democrats in the nineteen-sixties, had a group of left-leaning members of Congress acted with such concentrated force. The C.P.C. was founded three decades ago, but, as recently as 2015, The American Prospect described the caucus as “a fragile informal coalition that has lacked the same kind of leadership, money, publications, communications strategy, or clout” as its predecessor. Jayapal told me that when she first joined, “People got together, and they got mad at what was happening, but there wasn’t infrastructure built for the caucus to be strong.” Read more