Leader Jeffries in his own words

I email or text with my son in Denmark every day about the deteriorating situation in the US. This is a decades long conversation - he’s been interested in politics since high school and remained a liberal through four years of attending a rural Ohio high school where his honors history teacher had a screen saver photo of the teacher meeting George W Bush at a GOP event. That kind of high school, where my son and the class Canadian were the only two liberals. When you are a political minority you become very, very clear on your own ideological leanings, because you’re always defending.

He’s given up on mainstream commercial US media (as have I) so I bought him a subscription to Jim Acosta’s Substack. I though Acosta would be a good proxy for “mainstream liberal-leaning” so a common source of information for our discussions.

Acosta gets a lot of big names on his show and the other day he had Hakeem Jeffries on. Acosta asked good, blunt questions and Jeffries (mostly) answered without dissembling or using his weird distancing language that so muddles what he says. Jeffries also did a robust defense of his tenure in the House. I was happy to see that. I don’t trust people who don’t defend their own work.

Here’s what Jeffries said on ICE.

Starts strong, “ICE is completely out of control, at the direction of Donald Trump. Okay then! Good so far. Calls the murder of Good “killing that is totally unjustified” - actually a good legalistic phrase.

Says if Congress is controlled by Democrats they will “push for aggressive accountability measures and guardrails so ensure that ICE is unable to conduct themselves in a manner that is above the law repeatedly and bring them in line with every other federal law enforcement agency”

Jeffries says “they will be held accountable” and says that the statute of limitations for a lot of their actions is 5 years - he’s not talking about the murder of Good, obviously, but instead is talking about civil rights violations.

Acosta asks Jeffries if Democrats have any leverage on ICE funding - can they refuse to fund ICE without guardrails? Jeffries says that the “Big Ugly Bill” lavished money on Homeland Security and ICE in “special appropriations” and ICE can operate on that for years - it’s 74 billion dollars. However, Dems WILL have some leverage on “regular appropriations” (the ongoing funding of the giant slush fund that is Homeland Security and that has ballooned every year since 9/11). Jeffries says Johnson brought forth a funding bill for Homeland Security and when every Democrat said they wouldn’t support it, Johnson pulled the bill.

I think most Democrats will find what Jeffries said encouraging. It’s not “abolish ICE”, which I have wanted since the day Joe Leiberman birthed the ridiculous “Homeland Security” behemoth that has been sucking up billions of dollars since, but it is a marker. They’ll oppose ICE funding until they get guardrails. That’s what he said.