Hakeem Jeffries Counts His Votes
What an endorsement of Ilhan Omar means
For almost the entirety of his career, Hakeem Jeffries has wanted to drive Democrats like Ilhan Omar from Congress. If Jeffries began his political life as an insurgent, running several times against a sitting state assemblyman, he never operated as the sort of primary challenger we’ve come to know in the last decade. Jeffries was a white-shoe lawyer who mobilized affluent residents in a gentrifying part of central Brooklyn against an older Democratic establishment. He pitched himself as a reformer, but not someone who was more liberal than anyone in office. If anything, the prior generation had more affinity for leftist and Black Power-style politics. When Jeffries won a House seat a decade ago, he defeated Charles Barron, a city councilman who was a proud Black Panther and anti-Zionist. Jeffries, an Israel hawk with a neoliberal economic outlook, was everything Barron wasn’t.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is very close to Jeffries, has been hunting about for conservative primary challengers to leftists like Ilhan Omar, a Squad member and fierce Israel critic. In a different time, Jeffries would have been tacitly backing AIPAC in their quest to weaken progressive, Israel-skeptical Democrats. On the question of Israel’s hard-right government and the fate of Palestinians, there is typically little daylight between Jeffries and the conventional congressional Republican. “There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism,” Jeffries declared as recently as 2021.
Last week, Jeffries endorsed Ilhan Omar’s re-election bid. The difference now is that Jeffries is the House minority leader and he is in the business of counting votes. In 2025, Democrats might have the majority again and he could be the next speaker of the House. Still in his 50s, Jeffries could be sitting atop Democratic politics for the next 30 years, given that Nancy Pelosi held the speaker’s gavel when she was 82. Pelosi was the kind of speaker who was a more committed progressive when she was a rank-and-file House member; to lead Congress, she had to pivot to the center, and she found herself at odds with the Squad in her final years. Pelosi’s liberalism probably burned brightest in the 2000s, when she led the Democrat-controlled Congress against George W. Bush. Overall, she was a center-left speaker and a pragmatist. Her San Francisco liberalism, despite the frothing of Fox News, was rather tempered.
To become the next speaker of the House, assuming Democrats manage a majority after the 2024 elections, Jeffries will have to undertake the opposite sort of ideological evolution. Jeffries will have to shed at least some of his centrism to be speaker. There are too many progressives out there who could, when the time comes, doom him.
It’s now Omar, besieged by AIPAC and the Democratic Majority for Israel, who holds the leverage. Jeffries needs her even more than she needs him.