by Frank Holmes, reporter
Former President Barack Obama has long held a grudge against a certain member of his own party — and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is picking up where he left off.
She and the shadowy PAC that put her into office just stuck a knife in the back of one of Obama’s enemies, and she’s starting a civil war for the future of the Democratic Party.
Rep. Dan Lipinski is a Democrat from Chicago’s Southwest side — but he’s different than Ocasio-Cortez. A lot different.
He’s a pro-life Catholic who rejects his party’s far-left slide toward socialism. That makes him a “conservative Democrat” by today’s standards… and put him on a collision course with AOC.
Lipinski was one of the few Democrats in the House of Representatives to vote against Obamacare when it came to the floor in 2010. The far-left has wanted revenge on Lipinski ever since.
Worse yet, Lipinski didn’t just vote against Obama’s biggest accomplishment as president, he told the truth about it.
“I looked through the analysis, I determined it was not a good bill,” Lipinski said.
He deserves points for voting against Obama’s national healthcare system, which has gone into a swirling death spiral that insurance companies and customers have fled like a homemade raft in the middle of a tsunami.
But instead, his votes were seen as “grievous secular sins” that put “a target on his back for smears from the White House staffed by the guys from Chicago,” The Chicago Tribune reported back in 2010.
Obama’s cronies began to spread the rumor that Lipinski only ran for Congress because he’s diabetic — and he needed a healthcare plan!
“The sliming of Lipinski continues by those unnamed White House sources,” the paper said. It hasn’t stopped since.
The Democrat-on-Democrat bloodbath got so bad that Lipinski didn’t endorse Obama for re-election in 2012.
Fast forward six years: Obama’s long gone, and Lipinski is still in Washington. So, when a far-left Democrat named Marie Newman challenged Lipinski in the primaries, the far-left jumped at the chance for revenge.
“Congressman Lipinski was never a supporter of President Obama when he needed him most,” said John Atkinson, a leader in Obama’s community organizer group Organizing for Action — in what he thought was an insult to Lipinski.
Obama’s squad threw everything they had at Lipinski, but Newman lost by 2,000 votes. So now they’re turning it over to AOC’s Squad.
Newman is running against Lipinski again — and AOC has made beating him mission #1.
“Marie Newman (@Marie4Congress) is a grassroots fighter for working families,” AOC tweeted on Tuesday. She said her followers need to “WORK…Let’s knock doors.”
AOC also feathered Newman’s nest with the backing — and money — of the Justice Democrats, the socialist PAC that put her in office; it’s linked to her close advisor, who’s now under federal investigation.
Cortez hopes drumming a pro-lifer out of the party will set her up as a kingmaker, with candidates lining up to get a blessing from the queen of Queens.
She also wants to scare the life out of Nancy Pelosi and other so-called “centrists” — a warning that socialists will run them out of office if they don’t do her bidding.
“We are taking a look into how we can be helpful in transforming the party in 2020,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We’re certainly kind of actively looking through and see where we can bring in new people to this institution.”
The head of the DNC called her “the future” of the party, and AOC plans to make sure the party obeys.
But some of the party’s heavy-hitters have thrown their hats into this small-time suburban congressional race — the first battle in the civil war for control of the party.
Democrats who want to be president — Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, even former candidate Kirsten Gillibrand — lined up behind Newman to send a loud and clear message: All Democrats need to go far-left or get thrown to the curb.
But give him credit: Lipinski isn’t blinking… and he isn’t taking it lying down. Instead, he’s taking the fight to AOC and the Obama’s dirty Chicago campaign machine.
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Marie Newman makes crystal clear that Ms. Newman is an extreme candidate who is completely out of step with the voters of Illinois’ Third District who do not want to be represented by a fifth member of the ‘Squad,’” Lipinski said.
Lipinski said AOC’s Green New Deal and Medicare for All will mean “taking away private health insurance from 170 million Americans” and will do nothing to “truly help working families.”
Frank Holmes is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”