Do not elect Hakeem Jeffries to Speaker of the House

Congratulations to you and the entire Democratic Party on an extraordinary performance Tuesday night. The blue wave could not be more welcome, nor more hard earned. To sustain this momentum, it is imperative that Hakeem Jeffries not be reelected Speaker of the House. Voters did not hand Democrats the House to manage the decline of our institutions politely. They did it to put checks that has attacked them. Yet the morning after the election, Jeffries went on Morning Joe and said, “The American people don’t want us to get even.” It is difficult to imagine a more consequential act of unilateral disarmament than conceding the majority’s leverage before a single vote has been tallied. Jeffries is wrong about what voters want. The American people can tell the difference between revenge and accountability. Revenge is personal and arbitrary. Accountability is consequences under the law, applied to anyone who has abused their power. Voters want the latter, and a Speaker who treats the two as the same thing is certainty not equipped to deliver it. Consider what this president and his party have wrought. Their negligence during the COVID-19 pandemic cost more than a million American lives. They have plundered the public treasury, auctioned our interests to foreign powers, and corroded the most basic tenets of our democracy. They have empowered billionaires to gut the institutions meant to restrain them, and they have worked to bury the full truth of the Epstein trafficking network, one of the most notorious child exploitation operations in modern memory. Worst of all, they have funded and armed a Gestapo-like police force that abducts, brutalizes, deports, and kills our neighbors. These are the gravest offenses, but by no means a full list. Oversight is not a distraction from governance. It is the majority’s most solemn constitutional obligation, and the only meaningful deterrent against recurrence. Jeffries has repeatedly chosen caution where courage was required, and that pattern long predates this election. Americans want change, and they want progress. This victory presents a profound opportunity to deliver both. Do not squander it by elevating a timid leader who appears all too willing to capitulate to the worst this country has to offer. Choose a Speaker who will wield the gavel.