He probably didn’t realize it at the time, but U.S. Rep. Ed Case, a long time Blue Dog Democrat, helped spark a progressive movement in his home state of Hawaii that now wants to throw serious money behind the type of candidates that seek to unseat him.
Last year, when Democrats were trying to pass a $3.5 trillion spending bill that was part of President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda to address climate change and other social ills, such as childhood poverty and a growing lack of affordable housing, Case was one of a handful of moderates who helped hold the bill hostage for a time.
His obstinance caught the attention of two local millennials with lofty political ambitions and a knack for mobilizing their peers — Evan Weber and Kaniela Ing.
A new super PAC seeks to push the Democratic Party farther to the left on certain issues, such as climate change and affordable housing. Cory Lum/Civil Beat/2021
Weber, a 2009 Punahou graduate, is a founder of the Sunrise Movement, a national youth-based environmental activist group that worked to elect climate-minded candidates in 2018 and staged major protests in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, including a sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in an effort to force action on legislation, such as the Green New Deal.
Ing is a former state lawmaker, who unsuccessfully ran against Case in 2018 on a Democratic socialist agenda brought one of the leaders of that movement — U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — to the islands to stump on his behalf.
Together Weber and Ing launched Our Hawaii Action to mount a six-figure ad campaign that targeted Case for his stance on the Build Back Better bill.
Now they’re planning to re-double those efforts by creating a series of political organizations, including a super PAC and 501(c)4 social welfare group that will allow Our Hawaii Action to raise money and influence politics without disclosing its donors.
The goal, according to Weber, is to put the progressive movement on equal footing with other major players in Hawaii politics and push the Democratic majority in the islands to seriously address issues such as corruption in government, climate change, food security and the state’s relationship with Native Hawaiians and the U.S. military.
“Our mission is pretty simple, we want Hawaii’s politicians to actually represent the people of Hawaii, not special interests,” Weber said. “As young people who have grown up in this state we’ve seen our politicians play a lot of lip service to local values — ‘aloha this,’ and ‘malama that’ — but at the end of the day they’…….
Source: https://www.civilbeat.org/2022/06/a-progressive-super-pac-seeks-to-change-hawaii-politics/