LEADER JEFFRIES ON MS NOW: "WE ALL HAVE TO COME TOGETHER TO PUSH BACK AGAINST THIS UNPRECEDENTED ATTACK ON OUR DEMOCRACY"
Today, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on MS NOW's Velshi, where he made clear that despite efforts by extremists to rig our elections and suppress the right to vote, Democrats will win back the House and focus on lowering costs, fixing our broken healthcare system and cleaning up rampant corruption.
ALI VELSHI: The Democratic House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, joins me now. Congressman, thank you for being with us. Let me ask you this. At some point—the polling indicates the likelihood that Democrats will take the House in November. History suggests the likelihood that that will happen. Are you a little worried that this nutty, out-of-control gerrymandering actually compromises that possibility?
LEADER JEFFRIES: No, we're going to win back the House of Representatives in November. We are only three seats short. We historically over-performed in November, and that's one of the reasons why Republicans are in panic mode. Remember, Ali, when we took the House back in 2018, we were 24 seats short. We crossed over that hurdle and, in fact, in 2018 we flipped a total of 40 seats. So we're going to take back control of the House of Representatives. We're going to continue to make clear to the American people that we will lower their high cost of living, fix the broken healthcare system and clean up the corruption that we're seeing in the country, in the Congress, certainly with the Supreme Court and deal with the most corrupt administration in American history. Now, we're going to need nationwide judicial reform. We're going to need nationwide electoral reform. We're going to need nationwide campaign finance reform, which is why we have to take the House back, take the Senate back, keep pressing forward and then, in 2028, take the presidency back as well.
ALI VELSHI: So I'm going to talk to you about those three areas of reform that you suggest. You heard Elie Mystal saying he puts judicial reform at the top of that. But I want to talk about something else. Of those things, you say you're going to talk to people and win their votes over based on their cost of living and their healthcare. That message is being very clearly put forward by an increasing number of progressive candidates who are winning primaries. That sometimes feels out of sync with both the Democratic Party and who House leadership wants to run in primary elections. And you face some criticism for this. Where are you on this? Because the people winning elections right now tend to be putting that message forward very clearly.
LEADER JEFFRIES: Well, since January of 2025, in my first remarks to the new Congress, we made clear that we're going to center lowering the high cost of living. America is far too expensive right now. People are working hard, they're playing by the rules and they can't thrive, they can barely survive. That's a universally held belief amongst Democrats in the House across the ideological spectrum, from progressives to New Dems to Blue Dogs and all points in between. And what we've seen across the country, we've now won elections for 16 consecutive months, including in places like New Jersey, where Governor Mikie Sherrill ran on affordability, the New York City election—Zohran Mamdani ran on affordability, in Virginia Abigail Spanberger ran and won on affordability. This is a universally held belief. I don't get involved in open-seat Democratic primaries. We'll see who emerges. But the focus has got to be on winning in November, and that's what we intend to do.
ALI VELSHI: What about not open-seat primaries, challenges from progressives who say that establishment Democratic leadership has not moved fast enough and hard enough?
LEADER JEFFRIES: Well, we're going to continue to defend every single House incumbent. Ultimately, however, it's going to be up to the people, and that's the reality of serving in the House of Representatives, the institution the Framers designed to be the closest to the American people. We have only two-year employment contracts. We've got to go back to the people every other year. And everyone is going to have to make their case to the individuals that they're privileged to represent. And that's what they'll continue to do. And I've indicated, whether it's a progressive incumbent, whether it's a Blue Dog, whether it's a New Dem, I'm going to support Members of the House Democratic Caucus. And then we all have to come together to actually push back against this unprecedented attack on our democracy, unprecedented attack on free and fair elections and unprecedented attack on Black representation in the American South and all across the country, which is what the Supreme Court's decision and Callais has unleashed.
ALI VELSHI: Let's talk about that for a second, because you and I are from New York. We don't live—there's not a daily lived experience of Reconstruction and the end of it and Jim Crow laws. In the South, there still is. Like, people have either in recent memory or they still experience things like that. This is being described as like the end of Reconstruction. It's that serious. It took decades, seven decades, to get out of that mess and get back to 1965. How do you get people in New York and California and Minneapolis and places like that to think about the fact that this is everybody's fight right now, this isn't just Black people's fight?
LEADER JEFFRIES: It's certainly everybody's fight. Listen, Dr. King once eloquently made the observation that 'injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' And that's the reality of what we confront right now. So it is everybody's fight to show up and stand up and speak up. Now, the American journey has always been characterized by moments of progress followed by moments of backlash, and then a new generation of Americans have to show up, stand up, speak up, fight, get into good trouble to usher in an era of progress. We went from the progress of emancipation to the backlash of Jim Crow, the progress of the Civil Rights Movement to the backlash of mass incarceration, the progress of electing Barack Obama to the backlash that has resulted in the elevation of Donald Trump, MAGA extremism and this behavior that we're seeing coming out of the Supreme Court of the United States to throw the American South back into the Jim Crow era. So it's going to take an all-hands-on-deck effort, and everybody has a stake in preserving a multiracial democracy as part of the effort to preserve American exceptionalism as we move forward into our next 250 years.
ALI VELSHI: There's nothing that Republicans are doing now that's anything of a surprise because they wrote it all down in a 922-page book that Donald Trump denied having anything to do with, and then they're implementing all of it. Should there be a Democratic equivalent of that? Should there be a this is actually how we're going to fix all of these problems—judicial reform, electoral reform, non-partisan redistricting, campaign finance and everything else.
LEADER JEFFRIES: Yeah, well, certainly, I think a lot of that has been laid out by House Democrats, and we will continue to lay out what we think needs to be done in order, one, to solve the problems that the American people want us to address in terms of an affordable life, a comfortable life, giving them the ability to live a middle-class life or beyond, live the good life. At the same period of time, we do have these structural problems that need to be addressed. We've got to, for instance, make sure we pass the John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act so we can end the era of voter suppression in the United States of America once and for all. We have to end Citizens United, dramatically reform our campaign finance lawsto stop the ability of these deep-pocketed special interests to intervene. And we are going to have to explore massive judicial reform, state by state and at the federal level. And everything should be on the table as far as I'm concerned.
ALI VELSHI: Congressman, good to see you. Thanks for being on the show this morning.
Full interview can be watched here.