Monday, April 29, 2024

Hakeem Jeffries on course to become first Black party leader in Congress Democrats

minority house leader

Those eight years actually made Hastert the longest-serving Republican speaker in history. But any luster left after 2006 was lost when he went to prison for bank fraud charges stemming from hush money payments he had made to a former student he admitted to having sexually abused decades earlier. In 1994, two years into the presidency of Democrat Bill Clinton, Gingrich organized a campaign around a 10-item agenda called the "Contract with America." It provided a unified message for the party's nominees, who flipped more than 50 seats and stormed into the majority. "I have to do my job. We have to do what we believe to be the right thing. What the country needs right now is a functioning Congress," Johnson told reporters, adding that the ouster of his predecessor, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., last fall resulted in three weeks of paralysis in the House. Jeffries will square off against Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy, a representative from California who has positioned himself as a steadfast ally of former President Donald Trump.

U.S. House of Representatives

Jeffries also worked as counsel at Godosky & Gentile, a litigation firm in New York City. Jayapal also noted that House Democrats’ top three leaders would for the first time be entirely “women or people of color”. “Today is a day of transition and hope and a renewal of the shared values of our caucus,” Clark told reporters. The list of the 10 speakers who served in the job longest includes just one Republican (and in the ninth slot at that). That speaker was Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois, notorious as the autocratic "Czar Cannon" during three two-year tours as speaker that ended with his party's historic defeat in 1910.

Current floor leaders

House Minority Leader Weekly Briefing March 13, 2024 - C-SPAN

House Minority Leader Weekly Briefing March 13, 2024.

Posted: Wed, 13 Mar 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]

"I'm a big believer in recorded votes because putting Congress on record allows every American to see the truth and provides transparency to our votes," Greene continued. "Americans deserve to see the Uniparty on full display. I'm about to give them their coming out party." In a statement moments later, Greene vowed to press ahead and force the vote on Johnson's future. "At the same time, House Democrats have aggressively pushed back against MAGA extremism. We will continue to do just that."

In working with House GOP leaders, Jeffries will keep an 'open mind'

Hakeem Jeffries attended the State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton University), where he received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1992. Two years later he earned a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Jeffries then attended New York University’s law school, graduating in 1997. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1997–98, Jeffries entered private legal practice. Mr. Jeffries is the first Black politician to lead either party in Congress. And, at 53, he represents a generational change for House Democrats after two decades under Representative Nancy Pelosi of California. Mr. Jeffries said Democrats would join Republicans to elect a speaker only if they agreed to change House rules to allow “governance by consensus”; in other words, allowing bills with bipartisan support to come to the floor.

minority house leader

In December, he announced he would retire before the end of the year, bringing his congressional career to a close. The minority party opposes initiatives of the majority party and offers its own proposals as substitutes. Five activities illustrate how minority leaders seek to accomplish this primary goal. Under Rule XIII, clause 6, the Rules Committee may not (except in certain specified circumstances) issue a "rule" that prevents the minority leader or a designee from offering a motion to recommit with instructions. Since Snell's description, other responsibilities have been added to the job. Before examining the institutional and party assignments of the minority leader, it is worth highlighting the historical origin of this position.

About two-thirds of that money was for Ukraine, an issue Greene had called her "red line" for moving against the speaker. That’s what Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia House of Representatives minority leader who ran for governor of the state in 2018, said four years ago about the prospect of turning Georgia blue. Greene wants to subject Johnson to the same fate as his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, who in October became the first speaker ever ejected by his own party. At his press conference, Johnson alluded to the chaos that followed McCarthy’s departure last fall, as House Republicans struggled for weeks to choose a new speaker. The gridlock brought the House to a complete standstill until Johnson’s election. “We need to wait until November and have a speaker contest,” congressman Bob Good, chair of the caucus, told Punchbowl News.

Afterward, Mr. Jeffries nodded to the historic nature of his election, saying, “I stand on the shoulders of Shirley Chisholm and others,” a reference to the former representative from his district who in 1968 became the first Black woman to be elected to Congress. The mood was jubilant on Wednesday inside the ornate committee hearing room across from the Capitol where Democrats met to elect their new leaders. Following law school, Jeffries clerked for Judge Harold Baer Jr. of the U.S. Jeffries practiced law for several years at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. He served as counsel in the litigation department of Viacom Inc. and CBS where he represented CBS in a civil lawsuit over Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction in her 2004 Super Bowl halftime show with Justin Timberlake.

minority house leader

A lawyer and disciplined tactician, Mr. Jeffries is the first Black politician to lead either party in Congress. Nolan D. McCaskill is a former staff writer who covered Congress for the Los Angeles Times. Before joining The Times in September 2021, he spent nearly seven years at Politico, where he covered breaking news, Congress, the Trump White House, the 2020 Democratic presidential primary and race and policy. He is an alumnus of Florida A&M University and serves as deputy chair of the National Assn. of Black Journalists’ Political Task Force. Jeffries’ launch as leader may prove a little easier with Democrats in the minority, no longer controlling the legislative agenda.

After violent night at UCLA, classes cancelled, UC president launches investigation into response

Starting with Republican Nicholas Longworth in 1925 and continuing until 1995, all majority leaders have directly ascended to the Speakership after the incumbent surrenders the position. The floor leaders and whips of each party are elected by their respective parties in a closed-door caucus by secret ballot.[3] The Speaker-presumptive is assumed to be the incoming Speaker, although not formally selected to be nominated for Speaker by the majority party's caucus. After this period, the Speaker-designate is also chosen in a closed-door session by the largest caucus although the Speaker is formally elevated to the position by a public vote of the entire House when Congress reconvenes. House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries is the first Black lawmaker and the youngest member to lead a party in Congress.

“I’m relieved as I think all of America is that the chaos in the House will be discontinued,” McConnell told reporters when asked about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) plan to force a vote on the motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair next week. It remains unclear whether McConnell will be serving as majority or minority leader in the new Congress, depending on the results of two Georgia runoffs Tuesday. In response to the Democratic leaders’ statement, Greene issued a lengthy statement of her own – and vowed to press on in her quest to remove Johnson from the speakership.

Like Johnson an era later, Hastert was a relatively quiet member of the leadership who enjoyed goodwill generally in the rank and file. Hastert was speaker through the last two Clinton years and first six of the George W. Bush presidency. But he voluntarily resigned after the GOP lost badly in the 2006 midterms, a defeat Bush called "a thumpin' " at the time. Gingrich managed to restore many of the powers of the speakership but clashed repeatedly with Clinton and even with Republican leaders in the Senate. In 1997, in his second Congress as speaker, he barely survived a largely covert challenge from within his own leadership team. And just shy of his fourth anniversary in the job, he was voted out by the full House Republican conference in December 1998.

The change risks tying the success — or failure — of the campaign committee’s chief to the Democratic leader, instead of holding the entire caucus accountable for the member it elected to help win House seats. An early test of Jeffries’ leadership could come in his appointment of a new chair of House Democrats’ campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He entered House Democratic leadership in 2017 as a co-chair of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, which works on caucus messaging. Clark will become the second woman in congressional history to serve as whip, which will require her to have a grip on where members stand on legislative issues and, when needed, to pressure them to toe the party line. Jeffries received thunderous applause from fellow Democrats during a poetic portion of his speech. Through the use of clever alliteration and every letter of the alphabet, the House minority leader appeared to highlight the contrast he saw between his party and Republicans.

Hakeem and his younger brother, Hasan, were raised in Crown Heights, an important Black urban center of the 1970s and ’80s. The ideals of social justice surrounded Jeffries, both in the neighborhoods that elected Shirley Chisolm, the first Black woman to serve in Congress, and at home. His father made an unsuccessful run for the New York State Assembly on a civil rights platform. Jeffries is a former lawyer who represents a diverse district in Brooklyn and Queens once represented by Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to serve in Congress. He is known on Capitol Hill as a disciplined tactician with a measured style and a penchant for pop culture references.

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