‘World on fire’: Guaranteed another term in Congress, Cherfilus-McCormick reflects, looks ahead

Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick went to Congress thanks to the slimmest possible victory, just five votes. Now, she’s secured another term without appearing on the ballot at all, after no candidate came forward to challenge her reelection.

It was a last-minute surprise, and Cherfilus-McCormick will serve in the House at least until January 2027.

“It feels great, and (is) a big relief,” she said.

The Broward-Palm Beach County Democrat outlined her plans and priorities in a wide-ranging phone interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel in which she also expressed puzzlement about why a celebrity threatened to run against her but never ended up backing up all his talk.

She said, more than once, that the “world is on fire,” both at home and abroad, and said Americans are yearning for solutions rather than rhetoric from their leaders. “Americans are tired of the theater. They’re tired of being used like pawns.”

Congresswoman

Cherfilus-McCormick, 45, narrowly won a November 2021 special primary and easily won a January 2022 special general election to succeed the late U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings in the 20th Congressional District, which takes in most of the African American and Caribbean American communities in Broward and Palm Beach counties.

She won a full term in 2022, and when Florida’s 2024 congressional races were set last month, she became the only representative from the state to automatically win another term when no Democrat came forward to challenge her in the August primary and Republicans didn’t put forth a candidate to run against her in November.

Member of Congress is her first elected office. In the 2018 and 2020 Democratic primaries, she challenged Hastings. Though she wasn’t successful, those campaigns gave her invaluable experience and demonstrated that she wasn’t afraid to tread where seasoned politicians wouldn’t venture.

Arriving in the Capitol, she opted not to try to build name recognition with a constant presence on social media and frequent cable TV appearances. Her goal wasn’t capturing attention through viral videos.

Cherfilus-McCormick attributed that approach to her background. Before politics she went to law school was CEO of a family-owned home health care company. “Everything’s based on performance, and ‘what have you done?’” she said. “My district is not playing with me. They go, ‘Sheila, what did you do?’ That is always the question, ‘What did you do?’ And I can’t say, ‘Hey, I was on TV!’ They’d go, ‘That’s great, but what did you do for me?’”

Israel-Hamas war

Cherfilus-McCormick, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said she largely approves of the way President Joe Biden has approached the Israel-Hamas war, which is complicated. “How do you navigate this and protect Israel’s rights to defend itself but not bolster a terrorist organization?”

Cherfilus-McCormick said it’s essential to both “make sure that Israel can defend herself and ensure that we’re not having people on the other side lose their life without cause. It’s important and it hurts on both sides to see children dying. And it also hurts to see that terrorists kicked this off and raped and mutilated and did so many different attacks in Israel.”

She is not as supportive of approaches taken by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a controversial figure in his country and in the U.S. She said she’d like to see more transparency supporting assurances that Israel is “taking all the best steps to mitigate the loss of life among civilians,” adding, “that kind of transparency hasn’t really been there. … I wish Netanyahu was doing a better job of this, but he’s not doing the best job.”

“That’s a very narrow path, a line that we’re trying to navigate. And Netanyahu hasn’t been the best person in helping us navigate that,” she said.

Haiti

Cherfilus-McCormick is the only Haitian American member of Congress, and her district has a large Haitian population — which makes the gang-fueled violence and lawlessness consuming much of the Caribbean nation a vital issue to her and her constituents. She is a co-chair of the Congressional Haiti Caucus.

She said there are some promising signs with the establishment of a transitional presidential council, but lamented the slow start.

“Everybody still feels like they’re in despair. Gangs are still terrorizing people.”

Overall, Cherfilus-McCormick said, the efforts from the Biden administration have been positive. But when she condemned the administration’s resumption last month of deportation flights from the U.S. to Haiti as “atrocious cruelty” and a “misguided decision.”

Violence is so pervasive many people have difficulty getting food in Haiti, she said in the interview. “At some point, you know, you have to speak truth to power and the truth is, is that it’s unconscionable to do that,” Cherfilus-McCormick said. “You’re seeing people getting killed by gangs every day.” Resuming deportations in such circumstances is “just inhumane, and it had to be stated.”

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Airman

In the days after an Okaloosa County sheriff’s deputy shot and killed Senior Airman Roger Fortson in still-murky circumstances on May 3, Cherfilus-McCormick said in a statement that “we must do better to prevent such senseless tragedies from happening. Law enforcement officers have a duty to protect and serve all members of our community.”

As one of only four Black members of Congress from Florida — out of a 28-person delegation — Cherfilus-McCormick said she had “an obligation” to speak out about the killing of the Black Air Force service member.

“The Black community always feels like we’re being attacked,” she said in the interview. “With the killing of the airman, that brought up again the social justice issues that really haven’t been solved for us.”

“There’s still real people, real lives being lost. There’s still reconstruction and reimagining that needs to go into our law enforcement to make sure that these things aren’t happening. There’s still people who are crying every day because there’s things like this going on,” Cherfilus-McCormick said.

“Watching that video just broke my heart because even after they shot him and you saw the video, they’re still asking him to move his arms or commanding him to do this and you shot him. He’s dying. He can’t breathe. So the humanity of it has to be addressed,” she said. “And although this is happening in (the Panhandle), we know the truth of our history that this is really happening throughout the entire United States.”

Mike Johnson

Cherfilus-McCormick was one of the Democrats who voted on May 8 to block the attempt by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican from Georgia, to oust U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican, from the post of House speaker.

She did so, she said, “because there’s too much games going on and not enough work happening. You know, this Congress has really been the most ineffective Congress and we can’t get anything done.”

“This is not what the people expect, and to look people in their eye when you hear them talking about — they can’t afford housing, that they are suffering because of hunger, our elderly people have these (condo) assessment fees they can’t pay, the amount of insurance they can’t pay, when you’re seeing all of this — it just doesn’t make any sense to even play along with the games.

“And so I was a strong vote against what Marjorie Taylor Greene was trying to do because I won’t be part of her shenanigans and her games and that’s all it is. This is just playing games with people’s lives and I don’t want to have any part of that,” she said.

But, Cherfilus-McCormick said, the vote isn’t a guarantee that she and other Democrats will save him again.

Abortion

It’s essential for voters to pass Amendment 4, which would enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution, Cherfilus-McCormick said, pointing to the newly implemented state law that bans virtually all abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy. (When she was pregnant with her daughter, Cherfilus-McCormick said she didn’t know she was pregnant until two months had passed.)

“These abortion bans are not only ridiculous, but they’re just using them as a basis to expand control over women and our decisions,” she said. “We can’t give an inch when it comes to these extreme policies, because they’re not going to be totally content until they really are determining what women are doing in their entire existence.”

“I feel like all women from all walks of life can, can understand what the real issue is. This is about control,” she said. “Who is supporting this? It’s not women who support this.”

Celebrity challenger

Luther Campbell, famous as the rap artist and leader of the group 2 Live Crew and widely known as “Uncle Luke,” spent weeks teasing the prospect of challenging Cherfilus-McCormick in the August Democratic primary.

He attacked her in videos and posts on social media, at one point asking, “what the (heck) has this lady done” — using an expletive instead of heck.

He set up a super political action committee, and two days before the deadline to qualify as a candidate he filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to establish a campaign committee.

But he ended up not running.

Terming his efforts “interesting,” Cherfilus-McCormick still isn’t sure what to make of what he was doing. “Why are you doing this just to not run?”

“Part of our system, what makes it work, is that everybody has a right to run and you have to listen to why they want to run and do a self-evaluation. And if there is an issue, you need to do better,” she said. “When people were saying that someone was going to run against me, I immediately had to pull out all the receipts. When people say ‘I got receipts,’ I got receipts of everything we do — of everything.”

Cherfilus-McCormick said Campbell never communicated any concerns to her even though “he has my number. I have messages from him before where he’s (saying), ‘This is your friend, Luke.’”

Mail voting

Freed from having to campaign for votes for herself, Cherfilus-McCormick said she’ll be on the campaign trail, urging voters to sign up to receive vote-by-mail ballots.

It’s essential, she said, because people who’ve grown accustomed to voting by mail won’t automatically receive ballots this year.

All mail-ballot requests made before the 2022 gubernatorial election have been canceled under state law. Anyone who hasn’t submitted a mail-ballot request since the 2022 midterm elections, even if they’ve voted by mail before, needs to submit a new request, something many people don’t realize.

Republicans have well-funded, organized operations to mobilize voters for things like requesting mail ballots. Democrats don’t.

“It’s a huge concern,” she said.

Cherfilus-McCormick frequently visits churches — churchgoers are reliable voters — and when she asks if people have signed up again to vote by mail “they have no idea what I’m talking about. And this is every single church I go to, this is every person I speak to, who has no idea what’s going on.”

Lost cause?

Democrats have been struggling in Florida, and 2024 is the first time in decades it’s not a swing state seen as a place that could go either way in the presidential race.

Her party faces an ever-increasing number of registered Republican voters and difficulty attracting the kind of big-money financial support needed to help them dig out of their hole. Biden faces an uphill battle in Florida against former President Donald Trump, she said.

Still, Cherfilus-McCormick said, Florida is not completely lost, suggesting that voter interest in the proposed state constitutional amendments on abortion and authorizing recreational marijuana could help Democrats in November.

“If we didn’t have people who were excited about these opportunities, I would say it’s a lost cause,” she said. “I do think that Florida is in play. It’s only going to be in play, though, if everybody gets up and does the work that needs to be done and that’s going to be on the ground. … If we’re not able to do the hard work, the grunt work where you’re sweating and walking, then it will be a lost cause.”

Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Post.news