Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-IL) announced on Wednesday evening that she’s cancelling her appearance at Rep. Dan Lipinski’s (D-IL) reelection fundraiser.
Both Bustos and the DCCC came under fire last week after the chairwoman was announced as the headliner at a fundraising event for Lipinski, a socially conservative Democrat with a notorious record of voting against abortion rights. Critics pointed at the hypocrisy of the DCCC condemning the Draconian anti-abortion laws recently passed in Alabama and Georgia while still throwing its support behind an anti-choice candidate.
“[Lipinski] asked me to attend a fundraiser for him several months ago, and I agreed to do so, but I’ve determined that I must cancel my participation in this event,” Bustos said in a statement tweeted by the DCCC’s communications director on Wednesday. “I’m proud to have a 100 percent pro-choice voting record and I’m deeply alarmed by the rapidly escalating attacks on women’s access to reproductive care in several states.”
However, Bustos signaled that her decision didn’t mean that the DCCC would stop supporting Lipinski or start boosting his progressive primary challenger, Marie Newman.
“While Congressman Lipinski and I do not agree on women’s reproductive health care, this does not change how I will work as DCCC Chair to protect our big tent Democratic caucus,” Bustos said.
“Even though we may not agree with each other 100 percent of the time, it’s a fact that every dollar spent trying to defeat one of our Democratic incumbents is a dollar that we cannot spend defeating Republicans,” she continued.
An update from Congresswoman Cheri Bustos: pic.twitter.com/iLHEbUfJDA
— Jared Smith (@JaredSmithJS) May 22, 2019
