Newsweek: Diversity in Congress: Ambitious Agenda Calls for Great Expectations

emocrats have entered the Great Expectations era.

The 116th Congress, with its diverse, female and feisty class of new House members, is offering up some of the progressive wing’s wildest dreams. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has already broached a crowd-pleasing, eat-the-rich 70 percent tax on multimillionaires to pay for stopping climate change. Others are reveling—profanely—in the possibility of ousting a president. “We’re going to go in there, and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker,” Representative Rashida Tlaib told a crowd.

The progressives are unabashedly communitarian and social justice warriors, arriving in D.C. as a new socialism, somewhere to the left of Senator Elizabeth Warren, is ascendant. According to a Gallup poll in August, Americans aged 18 to 29 are as positive about socialism (51 percent) as they are about capitalism (45 percent), a 12-point decline for the c-word in the two years since President Donald Trump got elected. …

House watchers suggest that the 116th Congress might also have a chance at denting public corruption. House Resolution 1, the first bill introduced this year, is a sweeping proposal aimed at money in politics, voting reforms and ethics. Those issues have broad bipartisan support in many states and localities, according to Aaron Scherb, legislative affairs director at government watchdog Common Cause. “I think a lot of the reforms at the national level will help advance the ball for when there is a more favorable political climate after 2020,” he says.