WASHINGTON - At a closed-door meeting of House Democrats last week, liberal firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that colleagues who backed a GOP amendment on new gun background check legislation could find themselves on a “list” facing primary election challenges in 2020.

Freshman Houston Democrat Lizzie Fletcher did not join the 26 Democratic defectors on the Republican amendment, which mandated that undocumented immigrants who try to buy guns be reported to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But the New Yorker’s threat did not go over well with much of the Democratic caucus, which has been wrestling with divisions over ideas and tactics since January, when their party took over the majority riding a blue wave of opposition to President Donald Trump in the 2018 midterm elections.

The tug-of-war between the far-left Democrats and moderates trying to move the party’s center of gravity toward the middle has put newly-minted lawmakers like Fletcher on the spot. More than 30 of the 40 GOP seats that Democrats picked up in November were won by centrist, New Democrat Coalition candidates like Fletcher, vying to wrest victories in potentially swing districts.

Fletcher defeated nine-term Republican John Culberson in November on the strength of a moderately progressive stance that appealed to educated, suburban women in Harris County who had soured on Trump and sought a less ideologically-riven alternative than her main Democratic rival, activist Laura Moser.

Now Republicans, who had represented Houston’s Seventh Congressional District since future president George H.W. Bush won it in 1967, already are keying on Fletcher as a vulnerable incumbent in 2020, a presidential election year where control of Congress will once again be up for grabs.

Although Fletcher did not run afoul of Ocasio-Cortez and the liberal faction that commands much of the party’s new energy, she did come under immediate fire from the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of the House GOP.

“The big story is how loyal she’s been to the Democratic Party line,” NRCC spokesman Bob Salera wrote in an email on Fletcher’s two-month-old voting record in Congress.

Whether that kind of attack sticks depends in part on what the Democratic Party line becomes over the next two years as centrists warn of lurching too far to the left and alienating independent and even Republican-leaning voters looking askance at a party remade in Trump’s image.

Several Democratic presidential candidates have set off a bidding war on the left by endorsing sweeping liberal policy proposals such as the Green New Deal to address climate change, a “Medicare-for-All” government health system, and reparations for historical injustices against African-Americans.

Fletcher has adopted none of those lines. In the election, she rejected a Medicare-for-All plan in favor of seeking incremental improvements to the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, a position that stood in stark contrast to Moser, who was backed by the Bernie Sanders group, Our Revolution.

After scarcely 10 weeks in office, Fletcher has kept a laser focus on local issues like metro transit and flood control, pragmatic concerns that blend with a pro-business, but socially progressive point of view.

“I have to do everything I can to define myself, and not let others define me,” she said in an interview. “That means not letting other members of my caucus define me, and not letting the Republicans who will run a candidate against me define me.”

But with much of the nation’s attention focused on brash young liberals in the House, Fletcher has had to contend with GOP efforts to brand the entire Democratic Party as a socialist fifth column. One irony in Fletcher’s dilemma is that since taking office on Jan. 3 she has received very little national media attention other than as a foil for the more provocative pronouncements of the protagonists of the political left.

No Twitter love for transportation, flood control

When U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American Democrat representing Minneapolis, suggested that some Jewish lawmakers might have dual loyalties or “allegiance to a foreign country,” the NRCC singled out Fletcher and several other Democrats to “stand up in the face of blatant anti-Semitism.”

Fletcher’s relative-low profile stands in contrast to two other Houston-area freshmen in Congress: Democrat Sylvia Garcia, who has championed the cause of Dreamers — immigrants brought to the country illegally as children — and Republican Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who emerged as a leading voice on border security - including walls - and received media coverage as “the future of the GOP.”

“I don’t get headlines, and I definitely could use more Twitter followers,” Fletcher conceded. “But for me, it’s about bringing the voice of my district to Washington.”

Fletcher, a Houston energy lawyer, campaigned on local issues like Houston’s transportation problems, slow rail development, and the shortcomings in flood control exposed by Hurricane Harvey. In Congress, her two major committee assignments reflect that focus: Transportation and Infrastructure, which includes railroads and pipelines, and Science Space and Technology, which oversees NASA.

“Her focus is Houston and Harris County,” said Texas Southern University political analyst Jay Aiyer. “It’s not national.”

While Fletcher may not endorse the Green New Deal, she won a position chairing a subcommittee on the environment, which she has used to warn of the dangers of “human” caused climate change on coastal communities like Houston.

She skirted mild controversy at the State of the Union Address, inviting as her special guest Rhonda Hart, a gun-safety activist whose daughter, Kim, was one of eight students and two teachers killed in the mass shooting at Santa Fe High School last year.

Fletcher cut her teeth in politics as an activist for abortion rights and a defender of Planned Parenthood. But in office she has eschewed many other divisive topics that get lawmakers face time on national cable shows.

She has nevertheless proven a stalwart ally of the House Democratic leadership, which took the unusual step of openly backing her against Moser in the Democratic primary. In the closing weeks of the general election, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi campaigned in Houston - but not with Fletcher, who sought a post-partisan appeal based on compromise and bridging political divides.

While Fletcher has yet to break with Pelosi on the sorts of procedural votes that have threatened party unity in recent weeks, she signaled that she is prepared to if necessary.

“We have to take tough votes all the time,” she said. “People in districts like mine won’t always be voting with the caucus.”

In the early going, some analysts see her building the political capital needed to go her own way when it fits the politics of the Seventh Congressional District.

“That will buy her flexibility when she needs to vote against the party on a final passage vote that might be a little more difficult for her,” said Craig Goodman, a political scientist at the University of Houston-Victoria.

For now, news coverage is dominated by the party’s more aggressive left wing - represented by democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. This month, Rolling Stone magazine featured Ocasio-Cortez, Omar and National Teacher of Year Jahana Hayes, a strong teachers’ union supporter and the first African-American to represent Connecticut.

But analysts say it is centrists like Fletcher who may be the key to maintaining Pelosi as House Speaker.

New Democrat Coalition wrote the book on tough wins

The New Democrat Coalition, with more than 100 members, remains the largest ideological caucus among House Democrats. In recent weeks, it has sought to flex its muscle through eight issue-oriented task forces to shape policy on health care, infrastructure and climate change.

“We’re largely people who come out of district’s like Lizzie’s,” said Connecticut U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, the chair emeritus of the New Democrats. “We’re pretty sensitive to being literally on the front lines … We’re the repository of knowledge on how you win in tough areas.”

Fletcher co-chairs a New Democrats task force on trade, a top priority in the Houston business community. Whether that would pay dividends in a future Democratic primary remains to be seen.

“The irony is that for Democrats to keep the majority, the people they need to worry about are primarily the centrist Democrats, because they are the ones who are most vulnerable in 2020,” said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones. “There’s no way Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to bet beaten by a Republican in 2020.”

To Jones, the divide Democrats face is not unlike what establishment Republicans confronted during the tea party movement of a decade ago.

Either way, lawmakers like Fletcher have to walk a fine line. Progressive activists in Houston argue that they, too, are part of the coalition that made Fletcher the first Democrat to represent the Texas’ Seventh Congressional District in a half-century. Some worry that the new Democratic majority will become too timid, uninspiring, and too ready to give in to Republican pressure.

“Democratic activists who took a lot of their time and put themselves out there and did everything that they could to retake Congress want to see change,” said Daniel Cohen, a precinct chairman in Fletcher’s district. “We want to see something bold that spurs change.”

Cohen said he’d like to see House Democrats like Fletcher make more aggressive moves toward universal health coverage, “preferably Medicare-for-all,” and make louder declarations about the environment and immigration. He also believes that more outspoken leftists like Ocasio-Cortez have gotten a bad rap in the media.

“They’re so used to people saying nothing,” Cohen said, “that when somebody finally calls out the problem, they think they’re a trouble-maker.”

“It’s also worth mentioning,” Cohen added, “that it doesn’t hurt your re-election odds to have a bunch of activists ready to roll.”

In the face of those divisions, Fletcher said she has a unifying message for Democrats. “Democrats in my district wanted to win,” she said, “and we did.”

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article/Houston-Democrat-Lizzie-Fletcher-Life-in-the-13671083.php