It turns out that the Blue Dogs will increase their membership beyond the 51 they had previously announced. Now, they are targeting 56 members, although they aren't telling you who those members are:
Leaders of the centrist Democratic coalition have expanded their membership to 56 members, balancing the group's desire for influence in the caucus against the need to remain exclusive.
Under the 20 percent cap that was in place during the 110th Congress, they would have allowed only 51 members. That number was reached last week, causing many, including the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), to speculate that they'd reached their limit.
But leaders say that at least four new members are under active consideration, and there's actually room for five.(...)
They wouldn't give any clue about who those members are.
As an activist that has been a part of Act Blue pages that have helped raise over two million dollars for Congressional Democrats (see here, here and here), I find both the growth of the Blue Dogs, and the lack of transparency about the potential membership, intensely frustrating. I am so friggin' sick of raising money for Democrats who, upon their arrival in Congress, do whatever they can to openly distance themselves from both me and the causes I believe in. Why do I keep giving money to people who will respond by publicly slapping me in the face?
There is a fundamental, and intentional, lack of ideological transparency in the Democratic Party. When candidates are running for federal office, we rarely know what ideological caucus they will eventually participate in. This is intentional, because Democratic candidates want to tap into the large small door networks have appeared over the last decade, and the grassroots activists who make those networks valuable tend to be much more left-wing than the pro-corporate Blue Dogs and New Democratic caucuses that these candidates join en masse. Almost all of the new Democrats elected to Congress last year have apparently joined either the New Democrats (15 freshman members) or the Blue Dogs (seven or eight new members). Once in a while you get an Alan Grayson, they appear to be in a distinct minority.
It is high time that Democratic House candidates announce, during the primary season, which ideological caucus, if any, they intend to join should they end up in Congress. I am done raising money for Blue Dogs, although I will at least consider New Democrats (for example, the largely progressive Populist caucus was founded by a New Dem.) In 2010, unless a candidate directly tells me that they will not apply for Blue Dog membership once s/he is in Congress, then I am not raising money for that candidate, period.
This gets to a fundamental lack of transparency in the two-party system itself. Particularly on the Democratic side, you really don't know what you are getting in ideological terms when you work to help elect a Democrat to Congress these days. What baffles me is that many actually want to increase this lack of transparency even further, as they find partisan differences between Democrats and Republicans to be abhorrent. Calls for more bi-partisanship strike me as nothing more than calls for even less transparency in the ideological bent of congressional candidates. While that might attract some people, I am tired of the two-faced obfuscation, where right-wing Democrats raise huge amounts of money from largely left-wing small donors, and then, once in Congress, regularly work to thwart progressive governance.
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