United States | News & Politics

It would be easy to dismiss Kshama Sawant as a far-left radical with pie-in-the-sky dreams, if not for the fact that she was elected three consecutive times to Seattle’s City Council, narrowly survived a recall campaign, and won victories while in office, such as establishing a $15 an hour minimum wage in 2014 and fighting for a historic tax on large corporations such as Amazon. Now Sawant—who was born in India, immigrated to the United States in 1996, and describes herself as a Marxist and a revolutionary socialist—has tossed her hat in the ring to run for the U.S. Congress seat currently held by fourteen-term incumbent Adam Smith in Washington State’s ninth Congressional district.

Q: Now you’re running for Congress in Washington’s ninth district, against incumbent Democrat Adam Smith. On news broadcasts, he comes across as, and is treated like, one of the more liberal Democrats in Congress. Why are you challenging him?

Sawant: Adam Smith voted to send tens of billions of dollars for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. He voted repeatedly to ban any U.S. funding for United Nations food assistance in Gaza. He did that while there was mass starvation in Gaza. He voted for the Iraq War in 2002. He voted to create ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] by voting for George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Act, and for Bush’s PATRIOT Act, which unleashed a new wave of mass surveillance and attacks on peaceful protest.

In 1997, Smith voted for Bill Clinton’s so-called Balanced Budget Act, which savagely cut Medicare and Medicaid by about $120 billion. In 1999, Smith voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which deregulated banking and helped create the 2008 recession—he then voted to bail out Wall Street, instead of millions of ravaged working families. In 2022, Smith voted to break the railroad workers’ strike. For nearly thirty years, Adam Smith has been a dogged, unshakeable, loyal advocate for big business and the war-mongering interests of U.S. imperialism. In my view, Smith has blood on his hands—he should be on trial for war crimes, and thrown out of office.