From the veal pen to The Groups

Who they are and how they work

I’ve been complaining for years that Democrats are outsourcing too much of their thinking to “the groups.” And thanks to post-election commentaries from Adam Jentleson and Ezra Klein, this idea has now entered mainstream political discourse, where it has, naturally, encountered pushback.

For example, what about some other group that the left doesn’t like? Why isn’t that “the groups?” And how can something really be the fault of “the groups” when actually it’s politicians and elected officials who make decisions? I’ve also gotten questions for years from Slow Boring readers about what, exactly, the power of “the groups” is and why it matters what they think.

I think it’s worth trying to address these questions, and the best way to start is with two examples.

First, during the Trump/Biden transition, I was talking to a then-aide to Chuck Schumer about Democrats’ legislative agenda. He was giving me a list of ambitious-but-achievable goals and conceded that comprehensive immigration reform may not belong on such a list. So I asked whether Democrats would be open to narrow, standalone immigration bills. The party’s position for years had been that immigration reforms should be comprehensive — border security and legal immigration changes and a path to citizenship — but if Schumer was prepared to privately concede that the comprehensive path is dead, why not embrace standalone changes?

“Well,” he said, “it depends what the groups think.”

Years later, it’s now the Biden/Trump transition, and I’m talking to a different former Schumer aide about a version of permitting reform that Joe Manchin negotiated with some Republicans in 2022. He says Schumer and Pelosi wanted to do it, “but the enviro groups killed it.”

I mention these anecdotes just to illustrate that this business about “the groups” isn’t something that Jentleson (formerly John Fetterman’s chief of staff and before that, one of Harry Reid’s top advisors) and I made up one day. This is how Democrats on Capitol Hill talk. You don’t necessarily need to identity individual “enviro groups” unless the groups are divided. I didn’t ask which immigration groups specifically the former aide was talking about; he was talking about “the groups,” and the groups in this sense are more or less, by definition, progressive advocacy groups. Not that those are the only entities that one could call “groups” — there are, of course, lots of different organizations in DC. But the phrase is meant to indicate the advocacy groups that together constitute the progressive coalition. There are also business lobbies and still a few bipartisan single-issue groups, and they matter. But they are different, and they matter in different ways.

The veal pen

To understand the role and stature of the groups in Biden-era Washington, it’s worth reading some of the old articles about Obama-era Washington and “the veal pen.”