WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, wants her fellow Democrats to show some backbone and prove they won’t back down from political brawls.
“The American people are tired of us bringing a butter knife to a real fight, a real war,” the Dallas Democrat said in a recent CNN appearance.
She was defending President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, but it’s a sentiment Crockett, 43, has applied to her two years in Congress and two years in the Texas House. She says it’s past time for her party to aggressively counter Republican rhetoric and misinformation.
Her determination showed most famously during an Oversight Committee hearing in May where Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., took a dig at her false eyelashes.
Personal attacks aren’t allowed in the House, but when the GOP committee chair refused to take action against Greene, Crockett asked whether referring to someone’s “bleach-blond, bad-built butch body” would violate the rules.
The viral exchange helped Crockett earn the title “Clapback Queen,” while “Saturday Night Live” declared her the “bad girl of C-SPAN” in a sketch.
Crockett is a serious legislator and effective political combatant, said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee.
“Jasmine Crockett is not going to start a fight, but I’ve certainly seen her finish a lot of them,” Raskin said.
Combining social media savvy with a brash style, Crockett has leaned into her growing fame, recently popping onto MSNBC from her seat on a plane.
Crockett has national name recognition that helped her land a prominent role in Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
Fans and critics pay attention to her social media posts, to the tune of 370,000 followers of her campaign account on X.
Her next role will be as a leading member of the opposition during President-elect Donald Trump’s second term.
Crockett’s admirers agree it’s time Democrats stood up for themselves.
“I just like how she refused to be bullied,” manufacturing facilities manager Leo Whitehead Jr. of Las Vegas said of the Greene exchange. “She’s going to speak the truth and speak her mind, and I love that.”
Whitehead and his wife, Leslye, attended this year’s Congressional Black Caucus Foundation legislative conference in Washington. Seeing Crockett in person was high on their priority list.
Crockett detractors describe her approach as attention-seeking style over substance.
“I think she’s divisive,” said U.S. Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Frisco, who serves with her on the Oversight Committee. “I think she wallows in identity politics.”
Nobody should be attacked for their appearance or personality, he said, but Greene was skewered in the press while Crockett got a pass.
“She seeks out media attention,” Fallon said. “She’s here to be a celebrity.”
Young achiever
Crockett grew up in the St. Louis area, the only child of parents who sometimes worked multiple jobs to maintain their middle class standard of living. Her father is Pastor Joseph Crockett and she describes herself as a “preacher’s kid.”
She started in public schools but by the time she reached junior high, her mother had grown nervous about the trajectory of the district.
Her mother, Gwendolyn, took on part-time work at Neiman Marcus so Crockett could attend a private Catholic school. After her parents divorced, Crockett landed a scholarship to the prestigious Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School. In 1983 three sitting U.S. senators were Country Day alumni.
She recalled filling her hours with extracurricular activities, including sports such as volleyball and track. A “band girl” who played clarinet, drums and piano, she was enrolled in a litany of programs for young achievers, including Top Teens of America.
Crockett was eying a career in medicine when she headed down Interstate 55 to Rhodes College, a liberal arts school in Memphis where she experienced something new – harassment over her skin color.
The student body was predominantly white, with relatively few Black students on campus. When Crockett was a junior in the 2001-2002 school year, she and other Black students found racist messages in their mailboxes, assembled with letters cut out of a magazine. The N-word was keyed into a friend’s car.
The school investigated but was unable to identify the perpetrators.
“I was always in a significant minority, but it was the first time that I felt like I was targeted in any way because of my race,” Crockett said.
‘This can’t be justice’
Crockett said an early-morning biochemistry class prompted her to switch majors to business.
Marcus Pohlmann, a longtime Rhodes political science professor, gets credit for helping divert her into law. Pohlmann recruited Crockett to join the school’s mock trial team and told her she belonged in a courtroom after she became a national all-American.
“She showed that kind of quick ability to absorb the rules of evidence and that kind of quickness on her feet,” the now-retired Pohlmann said. “She had a passion for justice. That came out clearly in interactions with her.”
After graduating from the University of Houston Law Center, Crockett landed in Texarkana working at Haltom and Doan, a firm that specialized in class action defense work.
Despite getting good experience on significant cases, she wanted more time in the courtroom and moved to the Bowie County public defender’s office.
“I was only there for maybe a year and a half or so before I realized that so much was broken within the criminal justice system,” Crockett said. “I had heard about how broken it is, but I hadn’t experienced it.”
One case stuck with her — a 17-year-old boy who was on probation for stealing less than $20 worth of candy from a school concession stand. He came from a poor family and didn’t have a car.
After he missed probation meetings scheduled during his class time, the judge revoked his probation and gave him two years behind bars.
“He gave him the max, and I was just like this can’t be justice, like this can’t be real, this can’t be right,” Crockett said.
When Bowie County’s district attorney ran for judge in 2010, 28-year-old Crockett launched a campaign to succeed him as prosecutor.
Her platform included creating a diversion program giving kids in trouble for trivial nonviolent offenses — like stealing candy — a chance to serve in the military in exchange for having their cases dismissed.
“This isn’t a kid that we want to have an ‘F’ on his chest who is limited in his opportunities for the rest of his life,” she said. “Whether it’s jobs or education or housing, we’re setting him up for failure versus giving him an opportunity to do something like go into the service and become this amazing taxpaying citizen.”
Jerry Rochelle defeated her in the Democratic primary.
It was Crockett’s first run for public office. It’s the only one she lost.
A move to Dallas, a short time in Austin
Crockett became chair of the Bowie County Democratic Party and went into private practice, working primarily as a criminal defense attorney.
While visiting defendants in jail, she’d leave mail-in ballot applications in the library and urged clients to fill one out.
She shifted her operation to Dallas in 2014, where she handled several police brutality cases, and five years later announced her campaign for Texas House District 100 against Lorraine Birabil, who had won a special election to replace Eric Johnson after he became Dallas mayor.
Birabel finished first in the 2020 primary, then lost to Crockett in a runoff squeaker despite a 700-vote lead after early votes were counted.
Crockett was a prolific bill filer in Austin but grew frustrated at the difficulty getting anything passed, particularly a bill involving a diversion program for nonviolent 17-year-olds that passed the House but stalled in the Senate.
‘Why her political enemies cower’
As the Legislature tackled redistricting in 2021, Crockett reached out to the U.S. House members whose districts overlapped hers to see if she could help. Eddie Bernice Johnson, the longtime representative from Dallas, was the only one to accept.
Crockett said she learned a lot from Johnson as they pored over maps and discussed the history of the district. In turn, she said, Johnson warmed to the notion of Crockett in Congress and asked her to run after Johnson opted to retire.
Johnson’s endorsement helped Crockett emerge from a crowded primary that featured plenty of sharp attacks, including criticism for a campaign website that incorrectly stated she had represented the family of Botham Jean, a Dallas man slain by an off-duty police officer in 2018.
Crockett said her former chief of staff put together the site and mistakenly thought she had represented the family.
The 2022 general election was a formality in the heavily Democratic district, giving Crockett time to mull her preferred committee assignments. She had her eye on Financial Services and was interested in Judiciary, but landed neither.
Raskin recruited her for the Oversight Committee.
“She just has dangerous analytical rigor and precision and wit, and this is why her political enemies cower,” Raskin said. “But she also has a real identification with people who are underdogs in life, and people respond to her feistiness and her solidarity with downtrodden people.”
He said she has been especially effective at refuting “nonsense” from the other side.
“To succeed on Capitol Hill today, you have to be a very serious legislator, which she is, but you also have to be willing to fight back against nonstop antics and provocations by the MAGA caucus,” Raskin said.
Growing national profile
After President Biden stumbled in his June 27 debate against Trump, Crockett emerged as one of his fiercest defenders, pushing back hard when fellow Democrats grumbled he should step aside.
When Biden bowed to the mounting pressure, she quickly took up Harris’ banner and stepped onto the biggest stage of her life to address the Democratic National Convention in prime time.
Crockett said she was physically sick for hours before her speech, fearing the possibility of letting Harris down. She said the speechwriter the party assigned to help write her remarks kept trying to strike some of her spicier lines but she insisted on preserving them.
“The question before us is, will a vindictive, vile villain violate voters’ vision for a better America or not?” she said in her speech.
Crockett believes Democrats face a perception they’re weak — and she’s determined to show that label doesn’t describe her.
Even worse, she said, Democrats allow misinformation to influence voters when they avoid confrontations.
“Being of a younger generation of members of Congress, it’s been really important for me to show that we not only are equipped to fight but that we can fight,” she said. “It is important that we shut down the lies immediately instead of allowing them to fester.”
‘She’s shameless and brave’
Crockett understands most people know her name because of the knock-down, drag-out committee fights – and that’s different from the reputation of her predecessor Johnson, who died at the end of 2023.
“She was known to be an amazing consensus builder, and I don’t think that anybody would characterize me that way,” Crockett said.
Still, she said the high-profile fights have obscured her work with Texas Republicans to help bring the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health hub, known as ARPA-H, to Pegasus Park, Dallas’ life science and business center. She said ARPA-H was the most important thing she worked on in her first term, and it involved working with “our more reasonable Republicans.”
“Any elected official, regardless of party affiliation, that chooses to prioritize Texas is somebody that I can work with.”
She also has worked with U.S. Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Terrell, to expand access to fentanyl test strips.
Gooden, who represents the neighboring 5th Congressional District, said he and Crockett have become friends even as he noted some of his colleagues can’t stand her.
He described a congressional trip to Qatar when they got into an intense dinner discussion that initially made their hosts uncomfortable but served as an example of how political opponents in America can sharply disagree yet remain friends.
“Jasmine is someone I disagree with vehemently, but she is a lovely person,” Gooden said. “She’s shameless and brave. It helps that she’s from a safe district and she’s just got a spicy personality that is attractive to her supporters and upsetting to her detractors.”
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