FOCUS: Inside Hakeem Jeffries' Quiet Standoff With the Left

 

 

17 December 22

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FOCUS: Inside Hakeem Jeffries' Quiet Standoff With the Left
Sam Brodey and Ursuala Perano, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "On his road to becoming House Democratic leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has had a complicated - and sometimes tortured - relationship with the left."

Hakeem Jeffries ascended to the top spot among Democrats without a challenge. That doesn’t mean every Democrat is exactly on board.

On his road to becoming House Democratic leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has had a complicated—and sometimes tortured—relationship with the left.

In recent years, the Democrat has spearheaded efforts to protect his party’s incumbents from liberal primary challenges, clashed with progressives on issues like Israel-Palestine, and decried the “extreme left” for being “obsessed with talking trash about mainstream Democrats on Twitter.”

Progressives have long criticized Jeffries—with a Brooklyn district that is, in one place, about a mile as the crow flies from Wall Street—for his coziness with the financial industry.

When he was just a New York state assemblyman in 2011, Jeffries cosponsored a “payday loan” bill that consumer advocates said was “predatory.” When he got to Congress in 2013, he split with the majority of Democrats to vote to kill a Dodd-Frank rule against risky trades. And according to OpenSecrets, in 2022, only two House Democrats running for re-election received more contributions from the finance and real estate industry than Jeffries.

On several high-profile occasions, Jeffries and his team feuded with the House’s most visible progressive, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who is one of the few members yet to tweet or issue a statement praising Jeffries’ election to the leadership post.

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