NR PLUS Politics & Policy

House Democrats’ New Leader Doesn’t Believe in Democracy

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Incoming Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) holds a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., December 13, 2022. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)

Hakeem Jeffries has a long history of denying the legitimacy of our elections and governing institutions. He’s entirely unfit for the job he’s been given.

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Hakeem Jeffries has a long history of denying the legitimacy of our elections and governing institutions. He’s entirely unfit for the job he’s been given.

A crucial value in a democratic system of government is the acceptance of defeat under the rules of the system. Elections are held, and the winners are legitimately entitled to exercise the powers of their offices. Losers need not lose with grace or even dignity; they certainly need not treat a single defeat as final when there is always another election to come. But it threatens the survival of the system when people in positions of authority tell the voters that elections are rigged and their outcomes are illegitimate. These are extraordinary charges that demand extraordinary evidence, which is typically not provided. That way lies political violence and the rule of rioters, mobs, and coups.

Prominent Democrats have been campaigning against the legitimacy of our elections since the aftermath of the 2000 election. In the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump attacked the legitimacy of the Republican contests after losing Iowa and Colorado to Ted Cruz, and signaled that he would attack the legitimacy of the general election if he lost it to Hillary Clinton. But only when Trump denied the validity of his 2020 loss, and it led to a riot at the Capitol, did our media and public discourse acknowledge how damaging this sort of thing can be.

I have previously catalogued at great length the many leading Democrats and pundits who have indulged this sort of destructive rhetoric over the years: Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer; Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Bruce Ackerman, Josh Marshall, Robert F. Kennedy jr. and Paul Krugman; Clinton again, Carter again, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Jerrold Nadler, Biden again, Stacey Abrams, Krugman again, and a battery of lesser progressive commentators; Schumer again and Elizabeth Warren; Abrams again and Terry McAuliffe and numerous House Democrat committee chairs; McAuliffe again (here and here); John Lewis; Jonathan Chait and Jamie Raskin; and Krugman again (here and here). The Republican National Committee’s opposition researchers have assembled an even more comprehensive list.

These deniers of the legitimacy of elections have made their case in public speeches and writings about past and upcoming elections, and also in legal and political challenges to election outcomes and efforts to strip elected officials of their power to govern. They’ve told pervasive lies about election law, eagerly bankrolled Republican “election deniers” in primary elections, and offered up endless one-weird-trick arguments for getting around the rules of the system.

Today, House Democrats formalized their choice of New York representative Hakeem Jeffries as their leader; indeed, while Republicans divided over Kevin McCarthy’s leadership, Democrats kept up a united front, giving Jeffries more votes to be Speaker of the House on the first ballot than McCarthy received. If you listened to the Democrats’ rhetoric about threats to democracy and “election denial” over the past two years, you might assume that they were chastened enough to select a leader whose highest value is safeguarding democratic outcomes and repairing the public legitimacy of our elections. Certainly, nothing in the corporate media’s coverage of Jeffries would lead one to believe otherwise. Bill Kristol argues that “election denial” should be an absolute disqualifier for a prospective speaker, in a column entitled “Should an Election Denier Be Speaker of the House?”:

The speaker is supposed, at least some of the time, to speak institutionally for the whole House of Representatives, which in turn represents the whole nation. . . . The new speaker—the first post-January 6th speaker—should not be an election denier.

Of course, Kristol qualifies this: “The constitutional officer second in line to the presidency should not be someone who tried to overturn the last election for the presidency” (emphasis added).

In fact, Jeffries is one of the House’s most persistent deniers of the legitimacy of elections when he dislikes their outcomes. I will credit the legwork done by the RNC’s research team, which has collected the leading examples. On Twitter and in House hearings, Jeffries called the 2016 election “illegitimate,” arguing that Russia — not American voters — “artificially” made Trump the president. He contended that Trump should be denied the power to appoint Supreme Court justices “with the legitimacy of Trump’s presidential election in doubt.” He claimed that Republicans had stolen at least one House seat, that Trump was a “Russian asset,” and that Trump and Russia were “trying to steal” the 2020 election.

Moreover, Jeffries has argued that the Supreme Court’s decisions are “illegitimate” because of Republicans’ “stealing two Supreme Court seats” by means of the votes of Republican senators. He has not specified whether he thinks those senators were not legitimately elected.

As Mitch McConnell noted when the Democrats tapped Jeffries:

The newly elected incoming leader of House Democrats is a past election denier who basically said the 2016 election was “illegitimate” and suggested that we had a “fake president.” . . . He’s also mounted reckless attacks on our independent judiciary, and said that justices who he didn’t like have “zero legitimacy.” . . . “Many of the same individuals and institutions on the political left, who spent the years 2017 through 2020 yelling about the importance of norms and institutions, have themselves not hesitated to undermine our institutions when they’re unhappy with a given outcome.”

As Bonchie at RedState notes, Jeffries already appears to be contesting the legitimacy of the Republicans’ newly elected House majority, tweeting yesterday that because Republicans intend to seat George Santos (who won his election), Democrats “must take back the House. Immediately.”

Lo and behold, we have Kristol cheering on not just this Jeffries tweet but the possibility that it signals “some scheme afoot to have a few Republicans join with all the Democrats” to elect a speaker beholden to the party that just lost the election.


More in House of Representatives

Democrats and their pundit class have learned nothing from 2020 or January 6. They will continue playing with lit matches while lecturing the rest of us on the dangers of fire. And then they will feign surprise when sooner or later they burn the house down.

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