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After Pelosi (Hakeem Jeffries)
The AtlanticSometime in the not-so-distant future, probably after next year’s midterm elections, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will announce that she’s stepping down. Her top deputies, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, aspire to her job, but they’re also in their early 80s, and most Democrats in and out of Congress are counting on them to step aside too. Of course, they all have stock responses denying that anyone is ever going anywhere.
But the day is coming. For the first time since Barack Obama was a state senator, House Democrats are on the verge of getting new leaders. And pretty much every Democrat in Congress and beyond is confident that Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York will be the next speaker of the House, if Democrats manage to hold on to their majority next year—or the minority leader if they lose it.
Democratic members of Congress won’t talk about any of this publicly, as if Pelosi might suddenly appear and pull their hearts from their chests. Jeffries, carefully, left it at telling me that growing up in a Black church taught him to respect and value his elders. But none of the two dozen Democratic members of Congress and party insiders I spoke with privately could present a serious alternative to Jeffries. He’d have the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, which is stacked with influential members. He’s popular with his colleagues, even those who grumble that he was too meek to challenge Pelosi earlier—“Hakeem is really good at taking in both ideas but also criticism, and not being defensive about it,” said Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, Jeffries’s close ally in House leadership, who is expected to end up in the No. 2 spot if he’s No. 1. In conversations with colleagues, Clark and Jeffries have said they’re moving forward as a team, determined to avoid the rumbling rivalry Pelosi and Hoyer have had since their days as congressional interns, in 1963.
Jeffries was hesitant to talk with me for a story focused on speculation about his future. When he did, on a Saturday while bouncing around events in his Brooklyn district, and then over two conversations in his office in Washington, D.C., he very deliberately, very graciously talked past every attempt I made to bait him. He wouldn’t say whether he wants to be speaker, whether colleagues who have been in office since he was in high school are up-to-date enough, or whether newer and more aggressive members have what he considers a realistic sense of how to govern.
Jeffries is currently the Democratic caucus chair, which is a fancy title for being a conduit to Pelosi and for holding a weekly press conference to get Democratic talking points out. He thinks Democrats have failed repeatedly over the years, getting caught up in litigating details and nuances, too scared to assert themselves. He wants his party to speak in headlines—to learn from the Republicans, who have managed to win with ideas that consistently poll worse than theirs but are packaged better. So he gives boring answers to reporters asking questions about legislative negotiations, but loves to warn of “radical Republicans,” or tell the story of how he flipped a reporter’s question about critical race theory by asking the reporter to define critical race theory. He calls Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia the “titular head of the Republican conference,” and says that the white-nationalist and insurrection-denying Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona “is a disgrace.” Republicans “are part of a cult where they’re still bending the knee to Donald Trump.” As for the Republican minority leader who’s his competition to be the next speaker, “it’s impossible to take Kevin McCarthy seriously at this point—he has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump and the Trump machine.”
The activists who have asserted themselves as the arbiters of progressivism, including groups like the Justice Democrats, don’t tend to like Jeffries, and he doesn’t like them. The policy differences between them are hard to see. The bad feelings, though, can be traced to 2018, when he beat the left flank’s choice, Representative Barbara Lee of California, for his leadership spot. His victory prompted a retaliatory threat, sourced to people close to fellow New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that he would be a “highest priority” target in a 2020 primary. (No challenge ever materialized; Jeffries demurred when I asked about Ocasio-Cortez, and her spokesperson declined to comment—though only after asking what Jeffries had said about the representative.) The AOC wing’s main complaint with Jeffries is that although he talks often about climate change, he doesn’t endorse the Green New Deal. He doesn’t like feeling bullied into signing on. He believes that activists are too caught up in thinking about changing society around environmental goals, rather than the systemic racism that he wants to focus on.
But the day is coming. For the first time since Barack Obama was a state senator, House Democrats are on the verge of getting new leaders. And pretty much every Democrat in Congress and beyond is confident that Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York will be the next speaker of the House, if Democrats manage to hold on to their majority next year—or the minority leader if they lose it.
Democratic members of Congress won’t talk about any of this publicly, as if Pelosi might suddenly appear and pull their hearts from their chests. Jeffries, carefully, left it at telling me that growing up in a Black church taught him to respect and value his elders. But none of the two dozen Democratic members of Congress and party insiders I spoke with privately could present a serious alternative to Jeffries. He’d have the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, which is stacked with influential members. He’s popular with his colleagues, even those who grumble that he was too meek to challenge Pelosi earlier—“Hakeem is really good at taking in both ideas but also criticism, and not being defensive about it,” said Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, Jeffries’s close ally in House leadership, who is expected to end up in the No. 2 spot if he’s No. 1. In conversations with colleagues, Clark and Jeffries have said they’re moving forward as a team, determined to avoid the rumbling rivalry Pelosi and Hoyer have had since their days as congressional interns, in 1963.
Jeffries was hesitant to talk with me for a story focused on speculation about his future. When he did, on a Saturday while bouncing around events in his Brooklyn district, and then over two conversations in his office in Washington, D.C., he very deliberately, very graciously talked past every attempt I made to bait him. He wouldn’t say whether he wants to be speaker, whether colleagues who have been in office since he was in high school are up-to-date enough, or whether newer and more aggressive members have what he considers a realistic sense of how to govern.
Jeffries is currently the Democratic caucus chair, which is a fancy title for being a conduit to Pelosi and for holding a weekly press conference to get Democratic talking points out. He thinks Democrats have failed repeatedly over the years, getting caught up in litigating details and nuances, too scared to assert themselves. He wants his party to speak in headlines—to learn from the Republicans, who have managed to win with ideas that consistently poll worse than theirs but are packaged better. So he gives boring answers to reporters asking questions about legislative negotiations, but loves to warn of “radical Republicans,” or tell the story of how he flipped a reporter’s question about critical race theory by asking the reporter to define critical race theory. He calls Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia the “titular head of the Republican conference,” and says that the white-nationalist and insurrection-denying Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona “is a disgrace.” Republicans “are part of a cult where they’re still bending the knee to Donald Trump.” As for the Republican minority leader who’s his competition to be the next speaker, “it’s impossible to take Kevin McCarthy seriously at this point—he has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump and the Trump machine.”
The activists who have asserted themselves as the arbiters of progressivism, including groups like the Justice Democrats, don’t tend to like Jeffries, and he doesn’t like them. The policy differences between them are hard to see. The bad feelings, though, can be traced to 2018, when he beat the left flank’s choice, Representative Barbara Lee of California, for his leadership spot. His victory prompted a retaliatory threat, sourced to people close to fellow New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that he would be a “highest priority” target in a 2020 primary. (No challenge ever materialized; Jeffries demurred when I asked about Ocasio-Cortez, and her spokesperson declined to comment—though only after asking what Jeffries had said about the representative.) The AOC wing’s main complaint with Jeffries is that although he talks often about climate change, he doesn’t endorse the Green New Deal. He doesn’t like feeling bullied into signing on. He believes that activists are too caught up in thinking about changing society around environmental goals, rather than the systemic racism that he wants to focus on.
Meanwhile, I'm getting emails from a "real" progressive who's Primarying him.
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