Progressive Groups Eye Jim Cooper for Primary Challenge

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.”

Motycka adds that Cooper is right that the Green New Deal is nonbinding, but says he had hoped the representative would support it anyway. 

“It is a nonbinding resolution that states the principles, the values, the scale, the speed and the scope of the response [to climate change] that we could craft as a country,” Motycka says. “And I was interested in knowing why he didn’t want to participate in that.”

Cooper’s reluctance to back the Green New Deal leads Motycka to the conclusion that progressives need to put forth a more liberal alternative to Cooper in the Democratic primary. Though the Sunrise Movement has a relatively small footprint in Nashville, it’s just one cog in a wider effort to challenge Cooper from the left, either in 2020 or 2022. 

There are those who question why Cooper co-sponsored Medicare For All legislation in 2017 but no longer supports it. Others ask why he hasn’t called for Donald Trump’s impeachment, as Rep. Steve Cohen — his Democratic counterpart from Memphis — has done. Another group wonders whether Cooper’s seemingly frosty relationship with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for whom he hasn’t voted since Democrats lost their majority in the 2010 Tea Party wave, leaves him ineffective. There’s also the question of dynasty and demographics: Cooper, the wealthy son of former Gov. Prentice Cooper and brother to the possible next mayor (Metro Councilmember John Cooper, who faces off against incumbent Mayor David Briley in next month’s runoff), has been in Congress for nearly 30 years. And in the middle of it all are local organizers with Indivisible, the national progressive organization, who check all of the above concerns. 

In July, when Indivisible’s local chapter hosted a presidential primary debate watch party at East Nashville Beer Works, organizer Aftyn Behn used commercial breaks to engage local progressives in a discussion about the possibility of primarying Jim Cooper. To a mostly enthusiastic crowd that included a handful of Metro councilmembers and even Mayor Briley, who was there with his teenage son, she flagged Cooper’s positions on Medicare For All, the Green New Deal and impeachment. Behn said she and her allies want to find “a Southern A.O.C.,” a reference to Ocasio-Cortez, who beat a longtime incumbent in the 2018 Democratic primary to win her seat. 

Justice Democrats is a progressive group that was an early backer of Ocasio-Cortez’s primary campaign and has supported liberal challengers around the country. Representatives from the group were in town late last month gauging the plausibility of a local primary challenge, though they declined through an intermediary to meet with the Scene. 

In an interview with the Scene, Cooper accepts the possibility of a primary challenge — something he has not faced in practical terms since winning the seat.

“Great,” says Cooper. “I welcome the competition. Competition is best.”

Cooper parries some of the complaints levied at him. He says he loves “the energy and the aspiration of the Green New Deal,” but it isn’t a legislative proposal, and he’s “in the legislature business.” 

On Medicare For All, Cooper emphasizes that he taught health policy at Vanderbilt for years before pivoting to a newer plan, one championed by Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. In simplified terms, this plan would offer “Medicare for all who want it.” When asked whether he would introduce such a proposal, Cooper suggests that it’s more important for the state legislature to pass Medicaid expansion, which both the body and Gov. Bill Lee have repeatedly opposed. 

“We’re already offering Tennessee a free billion dollars a year,” Cooper says. “Is there a greater gift in Tennessee history than a free billion dollars every year? And that’s under current law. All Tennessee has to do is say yes. They don’t even have to say thank you.”

On impeachment, Cooper allows that Trump “is the worst president probably in American history,” but insists that impeachment proceedings, almost assured of hitting a brick wall in the Republican-controlled Senate, would only make the president more popular, as it did for Bill Clinton. (Of course, Clinton’s party lost the presidency after the impeachment hearings.)

Cooper thinks progressive energy is appropriately directed at the state legislature in Nashville, and that if it turns federal, it should remain focused on replacing Trump with a Democrat in 2020 and reducing the Republican majority in the Senate. 

“How are you going to get Medicare For All through a Republican Senate? You have no hope,” Cooper says.

“All Mitch McConnell has done is stymie good legislation and rush through more Republican judges,” he later adds. “This is why if you care about justice in America, we have to have a closer Senate, if not a Democratic Senate.”

Those who would like to see a primary challenge of Cooper admit it’s getting late. With the primary election a year out, any upstart needs time to build a base of supporters and catch up to Cooper’s name recognition. 

“If someone’s going to do it, they really need to launch their campaign almost immediately,” says Eric Oetker of youngPAC, a small national group seeking to promote the political interests of young people. The organization has picked Cooper as one of its targets in 2020. 

In explaining his decision to vote “present” in the 2018 leadership election that resulted in Pelosi retaking the speakership, Cooper seemed to endorse such a youth movement.

“Now, with one of the largest, most diverse groups of new Democratic members ever elected, is the time to welcome a new generation of leaders to Congress, not just on the back benches, but in leadership,” Cooper said in a statement at the time.

Carol Paris is another Tennessean agitating for a primary challenge of Cooper. A past president of Physicians for a National Health Program, she has been calling for a single-payer health system like the one represented in Medicare For All since long before it became a popular stance in the Democratic Party. 

Paris was pleasantly surprised in 2017 when Cooper signed on to Medicare For All, but she felt let down by his backtracking. 

“I let him off the hook,” she says. “I didn’t pressure him to be a more vocal co-sponsor. I did not pressure him to announce it on his website. I didn’t sing it from the rooftops — how wonderful it is that Jim Cooper is a co-sponsor of HR676 — all over Tennessee, because I think he probably wanted to keep a low profile.”

Since Cooper backed away from the proposal, Paris decided she’s had enough.

“I think it’s time for someone to primary him,” she says. “And I think this issue is a legitimate issue to primary him on.”

Whether it happens this cycle or next, several activists identify Odessa Kelly, co-chair of Stand Up Nashville and a local organizer, as a prized candidate, though she insists she’s focused on her work here in Nashville. Other candidates, like Ocasio-Cortez at the start of the last congressional election cycle, could be lurking beneath the surface, readying the surprise launch of a hopefully viral introductory video. 

“I’m not a big shot,” Cooper says. “I’m a hired hand. I’m on a two-year renewable contract, and people can kick me out any time they want to.”