ALEX BRANDON/AP PHOTO
Financial industry donors gave Jeffries $1.1 million in the 2019–2020 cycle, including employees from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Blackstone.
This article appears in the November/December 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
When the credits finally roll on this year’s blockbuster production of Democratic Governance, the names will be familiar. Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi will tick by first. Then the breakout stars: intransigent conservatives Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and Josh Gottheimer; stubborn progressives Pramila Jayapal and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush. Familiar bit players will follow: Jim Clyburn, Steny Hoyer, Kamala Harris.
Only if you wait until the theater has emptied and the lights have come on will you see the name Hakeem Jeffries. As chair of the House Democratic Caucus, Jeffries is the party’s fifth in command in the people’s chamber. He’s a member of both of the caucuses that have arguably played the most important roles recently, both legislatively and electorally: the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus. And yet he’s been relatively silent in the party’s defining deliberations, a disappearing act made stranger by the fact that he is widely expected to take over as the new top-ranking House Democrat.
The octogenarians are on the way out. Some combination of Pelosi, Hoyer, and Clyburn—House Dems 1, 2, and 3—are likely to retire at session’s end. House Democrats instituted rules at the end of 2018 limiting the chamber’s top three leaders to no more than four terms, a number all three will have reached by the end of 2022. Add to that Dems’ portentous defeats in the November 2021 elections and the possibility of many years in the minority, given historical trends and successful red-state gerrymandering, and you can see why a bunch of 80-year-olds might finally be willing to step aside.
So, for the first time since 2002, Democrats have a legitimate succession drama on their hands. Replacing Pelosi will be one of the most important battles for the future of the party.
Jeffries is young numerically, but aligned with an older mode of Democratic politics.
Until recently, that torch-passing seemed to be all but a formality. Jeffries has long been seen as a rising star, and at just 51 years old, he’s a relative youngster compared to the rest of the leadership. A number of progressive groups that have vocally criticized Jeffries in the past declined to comment for this story, a possible indication of the presumption of his ascension.
In the case of a coronation, it might make sense that Jeffries has spent the past year-plus absent from the defining battles of the party. He would be expected to serve in the good-soldier role, letting the Speaker preside over her final act. But both the battles he’s chosen to sit out and the ones he’s chosen to wage signal otherwise.
While the CPC haggled with conservatives over health care, paid leave, drug pricing regulation —Biden’s agenda and Pelosi’s personal priorities—Jeffries, a CPC member, was publicly silent. While the CBC took on an outsized role in electioneering and crafting the police reform bill, Jeffries’s contribution was marginal, campaigning for New York’s Eliot Engel, a white moderate, and Missouri’s Lacy Clay, a Black moderate, both of whom fell to Black progressives in primaries, and staying away from those negotiations. When all New York City House Democrats sent a letter to Pelosi urging her to protect all $80 billion for public housing in the BBB, Jeffries was the only member not to sign that missive, especially surprising given that New York Dems are known to act as a bloc.
His signature maneuver in 2021 has been to start Team Blue PAC, a committee to protect Democratic incumbents from progressive primary challenges. Given that Dems are likely to lose the House in 2022, the next leader’s job will be to win back seats from Republicans, not protect safe blue seats from internal contests. And those right-leaning incumbents in safe seats were already most likely to support Jeffries in his campaign for the top job, all of which adds up to signal that the formation of Team Blue was less about winning potential votes for Democratic leader than about settling scores with young Squad-adjacent progressives. It’s made stranger by the fact that Jeffries insistently self-identifies as a progressive.
That he created Team Blue with Problem Solvers Caucus co-chair Josh Gottheimer was even more striking. Gottheimer went on to become the head of the band of corporate Democratic holdouts who imperiled the Build Back Better agenda, which Pelosi has called her legacy. “It should come as no surprise that the chair of the House Democratic Caucus plans to support the reelection of Members of the House Democratic Caucus who are working hard to enact President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda,” Jeffries’s office told The Washington Post at the time of the PAC’s creation, in a statement that was almost immediately proven false.
Jeffries is a mute member of the CPC, the largest caucus in the party, but has recently chosen to ally himself with its more conservative factions. And while the party’s moderate wing has moved left on everything from foreign policy to social welfare, Jeffries has not moved with it. Is he the great unifier willing to find common cause with all Democrats, or a score-settler, out to quash an ascendant leftward bloc? More importantly: Is he the next face of the Democratic Party?
“THE FIRST TIME I MET JEFFRIES, he was an outsider,” pines Edward-Isaac Dovere, in an August Atlantic profile of Jeffries. At the time, Jeffries was a lawyer at the infamous BigLaw firm Paul, Weiss. His mentor Ted Wells was busy defending corporate giants like ExxonMobil.
Jeffries ran a handful of abortive campaigns to get into the New York State Assembly starting in 2000, but didn’t get his big break until 2006, winning a seat after the retirement of a scandal-plagued incumbent named Roger Green.
Another fortuitous retirement allowed Jeffries to make the jump to the House in 2012, when incumbent Edolphus Towns retired from his Eighth District seat. Jeffries had only to best Charles Barron, whom he dispatched easily, after several former New York political luminaries teamed up to denounce Barron for his support of African nationalist strongmen like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi.
In Congress, Jeffries climbed the ranks quickly. In late 2018, Jeffries bested California congresswoman Barbara Lee, then a ten-term incumbent, to become chair of the House Democratic Caucus. That marked the highest-stakes leadership battle in the party in almost two decades, one that Jeffries won in part because congressional progressives were weaker then, and in part because he was billed as a Speaker-in-waiting.
As fast as Jeffries moved up, so too did the political ground beneath him shift in those crucial years. On financial services, on education, on Israel, many of his best-known positions rapidly became retrograde in today’s Democratic Party, both statewide and nationally
Jeffries was the leading congressional recipient of hedge fund money in 2020. He banked $1.1 million from the financial sector, real estate interests, and insurance industry in the 2019–2020 cycle. Everyone from JPMorgan Chase to Goldman Sachs to Blackstone contributed. Zimmer Partners, a hedge fund, is one of Jeffries’s top donors in 2021.
From the outset, he has governed with those interests at heart. While Democrats were reconsidering their coziness with Wall Street, he broke ranks to vote with the financial services world, including on a high-profile measure literally written by Citigroup lobbyists in 2013 that killed the Dodd-Frank “swaps push-out” rule, allowing banks to engage in risky trades backed by a potential taxpayer-funded bailout. Reporting by The New York Times found that “Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill.” His former chief of staff Cedric Grant left Jeffries’s office for a job as an H&R Block lobbyist.
Meanwhile, Jeffries has remained a vocal advocate of charter schools while the party has backed away from them. He was a top priority of Democrats for Education Reform, a pro–charter school PAC that was critical of teachers unions, which named him to their “hot list” immediately upon his announcement of a congressional bid in 2012. He has spoken at fundraisers and rallies on behalf of charter schools across New York City.
On Israel, Jeffries not only started out as an unequivocal hawk, but has maintained that position even as more and more Democrats have shown a willingness in 2021 to condition aid to the country after the siege that followed the evictions of Sheikh Jarrah. But not Jeffries, who signed a letter opposing making aid conditional as recently as late April. Two years prior, he supported the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which would impose criminal penalties on companies that supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
Those positions, though conservative, do have a home in the big-tent Democratic Party. But Jeffries is also one of the rare Democrats to have received donations from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp PAC, the political-donation arm of Fox News. Jeffries banked donations from them just a few months ago, as well as in 2016.
His presence in state politics has been similarly out of step with a rapidly realigning party. Jeffries has placed numerous protégés in the State Assembly over the years, but recently has seen a number of his acolytes downed by progressive insurgents. In the state’s 57th District, the seat he himself once held, socialist Phara Souffrant Forrest toppled four-term incumbent Walter Mosley, a well-known Jeffries ally; in the 25th District for state Senate, also his home turf, his hand-picked candidate Tremaine Wright fell to Democratic Socialists of America–backed Jabari Brisport. “In his own district, his constituents have shown they don’t want more of the same Democratic politics,” said Sumathy Kumar, co-chair of the NYC DSA.
Jeffries lobbied for Amazon to establish its HQ2 in New York City despite high-profile protests over proposed tax subsidies and labor concerns, in a battle that affixed Ocasio-Cortez in the national spotlight. At the same time that showdown was raging, Jeffries turned to Joe Crowley, the conservative congressman and once number four ranking Democrat whom Ocasio-Cortez defeated, for guidance on how to beat out Lee for caucus chair.
Jeffries returned the favor two years later by staging an ambush on Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign for a sought-after seat on the all-important Energy and Commerce committee, helping to install New York Rep. Kathleen Rice instead. Rice immediately used that promotion to torpedo the party’s signature drug pricing reform legislation and knock it out of early drafts of the Build Back Better Act.
Jeffries’s commitment to the old Democratic machine was seen, too, in his outstanding loyalty to Gov. Andrew Cuomo. As noted by Dovere in The Atlantic, Jeffries was “the only New York power player” not calling for Cuomo’s resignation following sexual harassment revelations, after Cuomo had raised money for him and repeatedly endorsed him in the past.
Age is at this moment an all-important consideration for Democrats, the party of young voters and ancient representation. Barely in his fifties, Jeffries is young numerically, but aligned with an older mode of Democratic politics, and has repeatedly distanced himself from the younger crop of Democrats that is almost categorically more progressive (and more popular). He’s made a reputation for himself as the party’s future by becoming a foremost representative of its past.
At the very least, all of these seem like legitimate concerns for a party somewhere between shift change and identity crisis. But when I asked Jeffries’s office for comment on these various counts, point by point, I received the most puzzling comment I’ve ever gotten to such an inquiry: “Like the fire needs the air, we won’t burn unless you’re there,” to be attributed to “Team Jeffries.”
IF IT WASN’T JEFFRIES FOR LEADER, who would it be? The name that’s gained the most momentum throughout the course of the year is Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal. After Jayapal overhauled the CPC, now the largest caucus in the entire party, and formed it into a voting bloc, her ability to lead on policy priorities shared by current leadership and the White house may have put her in a better position than even a few months ago. Given that Jeffries’s signature contribution this year has been to arm the party’s breakaway faction, there’s a stronger case to be made that Jayapal has been more committed to its core ambitions. She’s hardly a betting favorite, but she’s on the board, and according to people familiar with her thinking, interested in the role.
Part of the allure of a Jeffries nomination is its historical import; never has there been a person of color at the highest rank of the House of Representatives, and the Biden administration has made a signature out of appointing members of historically underrepresented groups to top posts. But that standard would pertain to Jayapal as well, a woman of color born in Chennai, India. And because she’s foreign-born, and cannot aspire to the presidency, the role would be a crowning achievement more than a stepping stone for another of the party’s rising stars. Add to that the fact that Jayapal is well liked, and shares an aptitude for tactical negotiation that’s Pelosi-like.
Contested elections yield concessions, and if the last 12 months have muddled Jeffries’s case enough to make the leader’s race a real contest, that could change the party as much as the eventual winner. The CPC, with nearly 100 members, could get any hopeful close to the 111 votes needed to win such an election. That means even a percentage of the caucus could trade their support for crucial priorities like the abolishment of PAYGO, guaranteed progressive representation on committees, or an overhaul of the notoriously opaque and powerful Steering and Policy Committee. Those things could mean more for Medicare for All or the Green New Deal than having a leader who supports them.
