Hakeem Jeffries is poised to become the first Black speaker of the House
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., speaks during a press conference on election night with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee at a hotel in Washington, D.C.
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After helping to deliver a decisive victory for House Democrats in the midterm elections, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., appears all but certain to become the first Black lawmaker to be elected speaker of the House.
Jeffries was elected House minority leader in 2022 and is the first Black politician to lead either party in the House or Senate. As speaker, Jeffries would be second in the presidential line of succession, after the vice president.
His elevation to speaker would represent the pinnacle of a nearly 14-year House tenure, a span that has seen Jeffries rise from a rank-and-file member focused on criminal justice policy to a top party lieutenant under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and then minority leader.
It’s a rise that has meant securing buy-in from a diverse and often fractious House Democratic caucus — a task that may prove only more challenging as the Democratic Party now looks to make good on its promises to voters.
“This is a change election, and we understand as House Democrats that we need to deliver dramatic change,” Jeffries said on Tuesday night. “Things are broken. We need a Congress that puts the American people first.”
Criminal justice reform work
Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Jeffries has represented parts of the borough in Congress since 2013 and served as a leader in both the influential Congressional Black Caucus and the House Democratic caucus.
Before entering politics, Jeffries served as a lawyer in private practice and credits his time helping members of his community through a law school legal clinic as sparking his interest in criminal justice reform.
“I think over time it did inform that if I had the opportunity to go into the practice of law, or eventually public service, that I wanted to do something about the broken criminal justice system,” Jeffries said in a 2023 interview with NY1.
He served for six years in the New York State Assembly, where he worked on regulating warrantless stop-and-frisk searches by the New York City Police Department. As a policymaker in Washington during the first Trump administration, Jeffries led the effort to pass the bipartisan First Step Act, which reduced sentences for some drug crimes.
That effort required working closely with President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. He told Time that “to get things done in this town you need a coalition of unusual suspects.”
“There was a real partnership [with Kushner] that produced real results,” Jeffries said.
The lawmaker faced blowback from some inside his party this year for meeting privately with Kushner, first reported by The New York Times and later confirmed by Jeffries. He later said he took the meeting at Kushner’s request to discuss affordability, adding that Democrats intend to hold the administration accountable.
Political identity
Jeffries was once a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a sponsor of Medicare for All proposals, though he has long drawn skepticism from outside activists from his party’s left wing. As speaker, he will have to contend with how to best incorporate, or sideline, a growing flank of Democratic Socialists of America-aligned and far-left members in the legislative process in the new term.
“There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism,” Jeffries told The Atlantic in 2021. “Black progressives do tend to tackle issues first and foremost with an understanding that systemic racism has been in the soil of America for over 400 years.”
Though the party’s progressive members are as racially diverse as the rest of the caucus, Jeffries points specifically to his race as shaping his views on the drivers of America’s systemic inequities.
“Hard-left progressives tend to view the defining problem in America as one that is anchored in class. That is not my experience as a Black man in this country,” Jeffries said.
Jeffries also served as an impeachment manager during the Senate trial over Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine, in which Trump withheld military aid while pushing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce investigations into Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Like many elected Democrats, Jeffries has so far refused to commit to pursuing impeachment again in Trump’s second term. He told Fox News in April that it was not a top priority for Democrats and in September told ABC that Democrats “haven’t ruled anything in and we haven’t ruled anything out.”
Jeffries has maintained that the primary focus for the new Congress is lowering costs for Americans.
The House will hold a floor vote for speaker when the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3.
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