Hakeem Jeffries got two things out of the Hegseth impeachment:
He got to stand up and say he’s a “hard yes” on impeachment, thus making some people happy after his earlier mushy post-election statements.
He got to say that Republicans tanked the impeachment by referring it to committee last night.
But, I can use clerk.house.gov and I see this:
If 11 Democrats had voted, the Hegseth impeachment would not have been sent to committee. So who were those Democrats?
Julia Brownley (CA-26) , J. Luis Correa (CA-27), Laura Gillen (NY-4), Steven Horsford (NV-4), Jonathan Jackson (IL-1), Nancy Pelosi (CA-11), Brittany Petterson (CO-7), Melanie Stansbury (NM-1), Haley Stevens (MI-11), Marilyn Strickland (WA-10), Frederica Wilson (FL-24)
You can see the legend above. Nine of them were in town and could have voted. Haley Stevens is obviously a lost cause (she voted on Monday but did so hiding out in the Republican cloakroom). But 8 would have been sufficient for the measure to die.
Stansbury is out with this statement.
I don’t think she’d lie about that, and since she and Petterson, Brownley, Strickland and Gillen are all women elected around the same time, perhaps they were together and got caught in traffic. Still, it’s your job, show up.
Anyway, there were five Republicans who didn’t vote on the Hegseth impeachment who voted on other measures yesterday, so maybe it still would have been referred to committee if everyone had gotten to the floor on time. On the plus side, they did elect noted (alleged) abuse-enabler Gym Jordan as their new leader.
Tedious vote counting aside, the main thing I want to say is that I am so fucking sick and tired of checking up on the bullshit we’re fed by Democratic leaders. Jeffries gets no benefit of the doubt from me. Until proven otherwise, I assume he held back some members so that the Hegseth impeachment vote failed. Is that fair? Nope. We often treat people who lie and dissemble, repeatedly, unfairly. It’s part of human nature. Pelosi, Jeffries’ mentor, not showing up for the vote is a huge tell about what the establishment thinks about the Hegseth impeachment.
The good news is with a huge majority next year, these kinds of games won’t fly. A lot of the newly elected Democrats are going to want to impeach Hegseth, not as retribution, but as a just outcome for his many crimes.
Moving on to Jeffries’ dynamic counterpart in the Senate, Charles Schumer, Bernie Sanders and Elissa Slotkin had a press conference yesterday where they both said they wouldn’t endorse Schumer. I thought they both made good points that the process needs to be a vigorous debate, and also that the winner needs to have a clear agenda to respond to the mandate for change that happened last Tuesday night.
The first five or so minutes are enough to get the gist of both Bernie and Slotkin’s positions. Also, Slotkin said that Democrats need to be clear about how they’re going to get money into people’s pockets, which I took as a direct reference to AES’ campaign slogan (“Money out of politics / Money in your pocket / Medicare for all”).
I misspoke in the comments yesterday when I wrote that Slotkin was seeking the Majority Leader nomination — she specifically said she wasn’t at the press conference. I don’t agree with Slotkin’s ideology, but she’s showing some grit here. She wants a fight, many Democrats don’t, so she’s going to join with Bernie to force a fight. She’ll take many votes that I don’t like, but her vote for a different Majority Leader is one that I’m glad she’s going to take.
