One full day of embarrassment over the party’s response to Donald Trump’s speech to Congress was insufficient for Democrats, who delivered a second helping on Thursday.
Despite House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declaring a censure of Rep. Al Green not worth the paper on which it was printed, nearly a dozen members of his party broke ranks to vote for it.
Green, who was escorted out of Trump’s speech Tuesday evening by the sergeant-at-arms, is not exactly worse off. He’ll likely receive a fundraising boost resulting from the rebuke.
“I would do it again,” he told reporters on Thursday.
Whether the same can be said for his 10 colleagues who flirted with what Jeffries called a “political and partisan game” is less obvious, as is the actual strategy that Democratic leadership is pursuing. The group included New York swing-district Democrat Tom Suozzi, who said on Thursday that he believed Democrats should show “deference” to the same president who’d a day earlier attacked a member of the Senate from the floor of the House, dubbing her “Pocahontas” — a racist dig at her claims of Native American ancestry.
Jeffries, at a caucus meeting before the president spoke to Congress, had urged his members not to become the center of a media story by causing disruptions.
Their Republican colleagues spent Wednesday and Thursday concocting a scandal around Green’s conduct. Despite the recent historical examples of Republican members like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene heckling Joe Biden (and going wholly unpunished) during his addresses to Congress, Speaker Mike Johnson seized upon Green’s shouted remarks during Trump’s speech to play an old trick: dividing Democrats with a censure resolution.
Now with Green in the crosshairs of the Republican majority after the fact, the minority leader and his colleagues remain at odds over a path forward. Thursday’s vote to censure Green, joined by a number of centrist Democrats closer to the minority leader than many on the progressive left, shows a total absence of a prevailing voice of leadership among the House Democratic caucus.
On social media, the minority leader continually faces accusations of failing to meet the moment.
“Hakeem Jeffries didn’t even attempt to fight for one of his own from a censure. Why should we expect him to fight for us?” wrote the progressive-aligned “Dear White Staffers” account, through which left-leaning congressional staff often vent their disgust.
Many more have echoed this sentiment, frustrated with a caucus leader who as of Thursday afternoon had not issued a statement about the official campaign arm of the GOP House caucus, the NRCC, falsely labeling a member of Jeffries’s leadership team (Adriano Espaillat) with the “illegal immigrant” slur — he was beaten to the punch by the new chair of the DNC, Ken Martin, who said that the NRCC’s tweet was racist.
“With Speaker Mike Johnson leading the charge, they wear their bigotry like a badge of honor—absolutely despicable!”, said the DNC chair.
There’s no sign that Jeffries has any control over the true renegades in his caucus — the conservative members of his caucus who threaten to erase his leverage on key votes and frequently side with Republicans to hand the president’s party messaging victories. As a result, the opposition party appears weaker than ever in a moment when Democratic voters are increasingly demanding the emergence of a vocal leader.
One senior House Democrat on Thursday summed up the situation succinctly to Axios: “Everyone is mad at everyone."
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