My brother sent me this clip (has to be watched on YouTube) where the host, Hawk, makes the point that the cuts to healthcare in the Big Billionaire Blowjob will lead to the dismantling of the healthcare system, including employer-sponsored insurance. Then he says the cure is to vote for Democrats, but, wait, Hakeem Jeffries has backed away from Medicare for All.
That last bit surprised me — I hadn’t seen or remembered it if I had seen it, but sure enough:
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) has said that he now opposes Medicare for All, flipping on his previous stance just as Democrats are on the cusp of potentially winning back control of the House.
Medicare for All is “not legislation that I am currently cosponsoring or that I support,” Jeffries said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. Jeffries declined to say whether or not he would bring the legislation to a vote, though suggested that he wouldn’t, in the case that Democrats retake the House — which some pollsters say is a likely outcome.
This is a reversal of his stance from just a few years ago. Jeffries first announced that he was backing the legislation in 2019, and was listed as a cosponsor as recently as 2021. But he dropped off of the cosponsor list in 2023, after he succeeded Rep. Nancy Pelosi (California) to take the helm of House Democratic leader.
In the interview, Jeffries did not offer a different policy solution, but rather the vague promise that Democrats are “going to fight to make health care affordable for every single American,” he said.
This is the problem with Jeffries’ and the rest of leadership’s “affordability” message — it has no specifics. Medicare for All is one specific answer. There might be others. But “going to fight” from a the leader of a party that nobody believes will fight is the messaging equivalent of a fart in the wind.
I think what’s happening is a combination of butthurt and donor panic. This post that TBone linked in the comments the other day shows that Hayley Stevens sure is butthurt — she’s gone from a pretty decent promise to support El-Sayed on election night to this:
I wrote “donor panic” above, but it’s probably more like “mutual panic” between the donors and the electeds who rely on them. AES, AOC, Melat Kiros in CO-1, and other Democrats who have rejected corporate donations are able to finance their campaigns with small-dollar donors. But Jeffries and a lot of the centrist elected Democrats can’t do that — small-dollar donors give because they’re excited about something, and there’s no excitement for the formless, shapeless, uninspiring agenda that Jeffries et. al. are pushing.
This leads Jeffries and the rest of his “team” to ignore legislation that is incredibly popular in their party, and pretty popular overall:
With a lot of polling within the margin of error, and a lot of red state Republicans who will probably “come home” to the party that they constantly vote for, my guess is that Democrats will have a good night six days from today, but we’ll emerge with small majorities in the Senate and House. With guys like Jeffries in charge, it’s going to be at a minimum 2028 before Democrats can build any excitement for the party, and that’s only if our Presidential nominee backs things that people want, like Medicare for All, accountability for corruption, Supreme Court reform, and everything else that makes people like Jeffries uncomfortable.
