Two Colorado Primaries and the Democratic Party’s Future

Israel and Medicare for All reveal whether Democrats will reward ideological certainty or practical governing

Colorado’s Democratic primaries in CO-1 and CO-8 reveal two of the party’s deepest divisions: Israel and Medicare for All, and the broader conflict between ideological certainty and practical governing. I support Diana DeGette and Shannon Bird because both are better equipped to defend mainstream Democratic values, confront difficult policy tradeoffs and turn political goals into workable legislation.

Colorado’s June 30 Democratic primaries in the 1st and 8th Congressional Districts have implications far beyond Colorado. They illuminate two of the most important fault lines in the Democratic Party’s internal conflict between ideological progressives and pragmatic liberals: Israel and Medicare for All.

Israel is by far the more emotionally divisive issue. It raises fundamental questions about antisemitism, terrorism, national survival and whether unequivocally pro-Israel Democrats still have a secure place in the party.

Medicare for All presents a less visceral but equally revealing test: whether Democrats define commitment by adopting the most sweeping slogan or by developing reforms that can be financed, administered, enacted and sustained.

In CO-1, I strongly support Diana DeGette over Melat Kiros. I do not reach that conclusion reluctantly or simply because DeGette is the incumbent. Kiros’s statements about Israel reflect a moral and historical framework that I find unacceptable after October 7.

Her November 2023 letter about Israel formally says that there was no justification for the Hamas attack. But that sentence appears only after an extended argument portraying the massacre as the predictable expression of “violent resistance” to colonial oppression. The letter calls Israel colonial and apartheid, largely removes Hamas’s ideology and agency from the moral accounting, and invokes a passage asking what kind of hateful “gaze” an occupier should expect from the occupied: “We saw this gaze.”

I regard the letter as pro-Hamas in its moral framing and Hamas-apologetic at its core. It does not openly praise Hamas. Instead, it minimizes the organization’s choices and atrocities while devoting far more attention to explaining why Israelis supposedly brought the attack upon themselves. A formal disclaimer does not neutralize the argument surrounding it.

Kiros’s recent refusal to identify the Boulder firebombing as antisemitic reinforces my concern. The attacker deliberately targeted a predominantly Jewish gathering seeking the return of hostages held by Hamas. He shouted “Free Palestine,” later told investigators that he wanted to kill “Zionist people,” and killed one of his victims. Yet Kiros said she could not know what was in the perpetrator’s heart.

That is not moral nuance. It is ideological blindness.

Medicare for All creates a more complicated comparison because DeGette also says she supports moving toward it. I disagree with her. Replacing most American health financing with a single federal program would require enormous changes in taxation, employment compensation, provider payment, union benefits and existing private and public coverage. It would also concentrate decisions about medical benefits and contested treatments in the federal government, making them more vulnerable to changes in national political control.

But DeGette’s experience distinguishes her from Kiros. DeGette is the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee and could chair it if Democrats retake the House. She has worked on technically difficult health legislation, including bipartisan measures involving medical research, prescription drugs and Medicare transparency.

That record does not make her correct about Medicare for All. It does demonstrate that she understands Congress as an institution in which progress requires hearings, statutory language, budget estimates, implementation rules and coalitions that extend beyond one ideological faction.

I would prefer that DeGette move away from Medicare for All and consider a more practical alternative. My paper, “A Durable Path Forward on American Health Care,” proposes four mutually reinforcing reforms: catastrophic reinsurance to lower underlying premiums, portable employee-owned coverage, modernization of health savings arrangements and broader use of Medicaid where it provides more protective coverage at lower cost.

DeGette has not endorsed my proposal. But her knowledge and committee position make her far more capable of evaluating such ideas, improving them and incorporating workable elements into legislation. I would rather debate health policy with an experienced legislator who understands implementation than entrust it to a candidate whose politics place ideological certainty above complexity.

CO-8 offers the clearer moderate-progressive choice. Manny Rutinel is not Melat Kiros on Israel. He supports Israel’s existence, a two-state solution and continued military assistance. But Shannon Bird is more firmly situated within the mainstream pro-Israel Democratic coalition and has a much stronger record of practical governing.

Bird served on and ultimately led Colorado’s Joint Budget Committee. The Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked her Colorado’s most effective legislator for the 2023–24 term. She has negotiated budgets and worked on education, housing, health care and affordability. That is the often-uncelebrated work through which political promises become actual programs.

Rutinel’s health-care position has also changed. While seeking the Working Families Party endorsement in 2025, he supported single-payer health care. He now emphasizes Medicaid, Affordable Care Act assistance and a public option. Candidates may reconsider their positions, but voters are entitled to ask whether the newer position represents genuine rethinking or adjustment to the realities of running in a swing district.

Bird does not claim that a single enormous federal bill will resolve every weakness in American medicine. Her approach is more incremental, but incremental does not have to mean timid. Restoring coverage assistance, protecting Medicaid, lowering prescription prices, improving Medicare and developing a workable public option could materially improve people’s lives while creating a foundation for further reform.

The common thread between Israel and Medicare for All is judgment.

Can a candidate condemn Israeli policies without rationalizing terrorism or questioning Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state? Can a candidate pursue universal access to health care without insisting that only one immensely disruptive financing structure is morally legitimate? Can a legislator recognize complexity, compromise where appropriate and still retain clear principles?

DeGette and Bird have demonstrated a greater capacity to make those distinctions and to get things done.

That matters nationally. Congress is losing Democratic Representative Jared Golden of Maine and Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, two members from competitive districts willing to resist party pressure and work across ideological lines. A Bird victory in the primary and general election could give the House a new leader in that tradition: liberal on many goals, moderate in temperament, supportive of Israel and capable of building coalitions.

I care deeply about these races because I want the Democratic Party to remain both principled and capable of governing. I support reproductive freedom, an effective social safety net and serious public action where markets fail. I also support Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish democracy and its right to defend itself against terrorism.

I want universal access to affordable health care, but I do not believe the answer is to place nearly the entire health-financing system under one federal program. Moral seriousness requires more than adopting the most sweeping position available. It requires understanding tradeoffs, respecting contrary evidence and designing policies that can survive legislation, implementation and future elections.

DeGette and Bird do not agree with me on everything. But they are much more likely to translate Democratic values into durable results. CO-1 will test whether Democrats reject a politics that rationalizes Hamas violence and struggles to recognize antisemitism at home. CO-8 will test whether voters elevate a proven bridge-builder who could help replace the practical leadership Congress is losing.

Together, these races will say a great deal about whether the Democratic Party intends to govern—or merely to signal.

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Appendix A: Melat Kiros, Israel and the Historical Record

Kiros’s November 7, 2023, letter was written in response to law firms that had condemned antisemitism, Islamophobia and threats on university campuses. She objected especially to their characterization of calls for Israel’s elimination as antisemitic.

The letter does contain a sentence saying there was no justification for October 7. But the organization of the argument matters. Before reaching that disclaimer, Kiros describes Zionism as colonialism, calls Israel an apartheid state and says that people whose land is taken and whose existence is threatened inevitably “resist with violence in kind.” She then describes October 7 as an “obvious symptom” of violent resistance to colonialism and invokes the “gaze” passage.

That is why I view the letter as Hamas-apologetic despite its formal condemnation. Its moral structure shifts Hamas from perpetrator to symptom. Hamas’s antisemitic ideology, deliberate targeting of civilians, hostage-taking and independent political agency receive little attention. Israel and Zionism are treated as the originating cause from which nearly all subsequent violence follows.

The historical account is also one-directional. Kiros refers to violence inflicted by the Israeli government and settlers “since 1917,” although Israel did not exist until 1948. Violence during the British Mandate was not simply committed by Zionists against passive Palestinians. Jews were killed in the 1920 Jerusalem disturbances and the 1921 Jaffa riots. In 1929, Arab mobs murdered 67 Jews in Hebron, destroyed an ancient Jewish community and attacked Jews in Safed. Across the 1929 violence, 133 Jews were killed.

Jewish underground organizations later committed terrorism and atrocities, and Palestinians suffered mass displacement and loss during the 1948 war. But the broader context also matters. Palestinian Arab leaders and the surrounding Arab states rejected the United Nations partition plan, and after Israel declared independence, armies from five Arab countries invaded with the objective of defeating the newly established Jewish state.

The Palestinian exodus had multiple causes. Some Palestinians were expelled by Jewish or Israeli forces; others fled combat, fear, atrocities or the collapse of local leadership; and in some places Arab authorities ordered or encouraged evacuation. It is therefore too simple either to attribute the entire refugee crisis to Israeli expulsion or to claim that Arab armies generally told Palestinians to leave.

Both histories must be confronted. But a narrative that excludes the massacre of Jews before Israel’s creation—and omits the Arab rejection of partition and invasion of the new state—cannot credibly explain the conflict as an uninterrupted chain of Palestinian resistance to Israeli violence.

The apartheid accusation also requires greater precision than Kiros provides. Serious concerns exist about Israeli rule, settlements and unequal legal systems in the West Bank. Those issues should not be minimized. But Israel’s Arab citizens vote in national elections, serve in the Knesset and judiciary, and maintain extensive religious institutions. Public information appears in Arabic as well as Hebrew and English. Hundreds of mosques operate in Israel, and state-recognized Sharia courts exercise binding jurisdiction over important Muslim personal-status matters—authority that Sharia councils in the United Kingdom do not possess.

Those realities do not prove that discrimination is absent. They do demonstrate why treating Israel proper as an exact equivalent of apartheid South Africa is misleading and why the circumstances of Arab Israeli citizens must be distinguished from those of Palestinians living under occupation.

The colonial description is incomplete for another reason. A large portion of Israel’s Jewish population descends from communities in the Middle East and North Africa, many of whose members arrived as refugees or were displaced from Arab and Muslim-majority countries. Gadi Eisenkot, currently a serious contender to replace Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, is the son of Moroccan Jewish immigrants. His emergence does not resolve the Palestinian question, but it illustrates why Israel cannot accurately be reduced to a white European colony imposed on the Middle East.

Finally, there is the Boulder attack. Kiros initially declined to identify it as antisemitic even after the attacker targeted a predominantly Jewish hostage-support gathering, shouted a pro-Palestinian slogan and told investigators that he wanted to kill Zionists. Even progressive Democratic leaders who agreed with Kiros on many other issues criticized her response.

People have a legal right to express even harsh, offensive and anti-Zionist views. But free speech is not immunity from moral evaluation. Nor does the First Amendment compel a private law firm to retain an employee whose public statements it concludes are incompatible with the judgment, values or client responsibilities expected of its attorneys.

Sidley Austin had the right to fire Kiros. Voters have the same right—and obligation—to judge what her letter reveals about her fitness for Congress.

Appendix B: Why Medicare for All Is the Wrong Test of Democratic Commitment

The objective of universal or near-universal health coverage should not be confused with support for one specific financing structure.

A Medicare for All system would move most health spending onto the federal budget and require correspondingly large new revenues. Households might pay less in premiums and out-of-pocket costs, but those savings would be accompanied by major changes in taxes and compensation. Employers would no longer sponsor insurance in its current form, requiring difficult decisions about whether existing employer contributions would be converted into wages, taxes or savings.

Provider payment creates another unavoidable tradeoff. Private insurers frequently pay hospitals and physicians substantially more than Medicare. Paying Medicare-like rates could reduce national health spending, but abrupt reductions would impose major pressure on hospitals and medical practices. Paying substantially higher rates would reduce disruption but greatly increase the federal cost of the program.

A single federal payer would also concentrate authority over benefits, reimbursement and medical necessity. That could produce consistency and administrative savings, but it would magnify the consequences of elections. A future administration hostile to reproductive care, gender-related treatment or other contested services would exercise enormous influence over nearly everyone’s coverage.

The practical alternative is not complacency. The existing system leaves too many people uninsured or exposed to unaffordable premiums, deductibles and medical debt.

My proposal would use catastrophic reinsurance to reduce underlying insurance costs rather than relying entirely on back-end subsidies. It would make employer contributions portable so that coverage follows the worker rather than the job. It would reform health savings arrangements to help moderate-income households manage deductibles, and it would use Medicaid more broadly where it is less expensive and more protective than heavily subsidized private coverage.

These reforms could be enacted separately, tested and adjusted. They preserve choice while directly addressing identifiable market failures.

The relevant distinction is therefore not between politicians who care about universal coverage and those who do not. It is between those who treat Medicare for All as a test of ideological virtue and those willing to do the difficult work of designing a health system that is affordable, administratively workable and politically durable.

On that test, DeGette’s legislative experience and Bird’s record of practical governance make them better choices.

Additional Reading

Letter by Kiros

https://medium.com/@melatakiros/dear-us-law-firms-77ec63e838af

Universal Health Care Proposal by Bernstein