Congress

House scrambling to host hockey teams at State of the Union, Johnson says

Published

8 months ago

February 23, 2026

Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday House officials are scrambling to find a way to accommodate the gold-medal-winning U.S. men and women’s hockey teams at Tuesday’s State of the Union address.

Johnson told reporters Monday he’s working to “figure out logistics” now for a potential visit from the teams, which were each invited by the White House and have dozens of players and coaches on their rosters.

“There’s no way to have special guests on the floor because it’s a literal session of Congress,” he said. “But we’re going to work and do what we can to accommodate.”

The speaker added that House officials are “trying to work out logistics to see if there’s some way to perhaps get them into the gallery and the doors, wave and receive the applause that they’re due.”

Neither team has announced plans to attend the speech, though Trump personally invited the men’s team in the immediate aftermath of their overtime win Sunday, offering to send a military jet to bring them to Washington.

A spokesperson for the women’s team told NBC News that while its members are “sincerely grateful” for the invitation, they cannot attend the speech “due to the timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments.”

Congress

Democrats are on track to control Congress. What will they do with their power?

Published

2 hours ago

November 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Democrats are poised to control Congress next year. And once they’re done celebrating their sweeping midterm victory, they’ll have to confront their next challenge: leveraging their power to legislate with President Donald Trump still in the White House the next two years.

While much of Democrats’ time will be spent wielding their new subpoena power to haul in Trump’s top officials and allies, they have no shortage of ideas for policies they also want to pursue — on everything from technology and artificial intelligence to health care and taxes.

Many of the proposals Democrats put forward will inevitably be messaging bills that try to shape public opinion ahead of the presidential contest in 2028 — and lay the groundwork for a legislative agenda they can jump on if they win a governing trifecta that year.

“We’ll aggressively prepare to get off to a fast start on January 3rd in the new Congress,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, on track to become speaker, said in an October press call.

The party will honor its commitments, he continued, to “relentlessly focus on the affordability crisis” and “drive down the high cost of living, because life is way too expensive in the United States of America.”

Democrats will ultimately be under enormous pressure to show they can actually get things done, including within their own caucus, where progressive members will be fighting for influence against moderates. Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — set to be the Senate majority leader in the new Congress — will have to carefully navigate those divisions to secure unity, even on party-line bills.

Progressives are going to push to advance policies like a wealth tax, “Medicare for All” and strict regulation of AI that could involve a ban on developing “superintelligence.”

“Next year, Democrats must pass bills powerful enough to actually tackle the cost of living crisis and root out rampant corruption. We cannot be the party of nervous lawyers who just tinker around the edges,” Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar of Texas said in a statement in the days leading up to the midterms.

Casar was responding directly to the likely incoming No. 2 Senate Democrat, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who suggested on BLN that Democrats should wait until 2028 to “make more bold policy changes.”

Moderates may be looking to rework bipartisan bills that have languished during the Republican governing trifecta while pushing back against proposals they view as too extreme.

The debate over regulating AI will be one where warring Democratic factions could come to blows over how to rein in a potentially dangerous technology without stifling innovation and ceding ground to China. Progressives, led by Casar and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, are pushing to pause advanced AI development and ban superintelligence, which more centrist lawmakers say is untenable.

“The [AI] discussion so far is … pretty populist, pretty devoid of fact, and I think we have to be more realistic about it,” Rep. Scott Peters of California, a moderate Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a recent interview.

The easiest way for Democrats to achieve legislative victories will be by jamming Republicans on must-pass bills, such as for government funding, a debt ceiling increase and the annual defense policy measure. Otherwise, Democrats could find bipartisan potential around issues like cryptocurrency if lawmakers are unable to finalize an industry overhaul during the post-midterm “lame-duck” session. The same goes for passing a farm bill and legislation to reauthorize surface transportation programs.

Democrats could also try to entice GOP privacy hawks, like Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, with legislation to rein in the proliferation of Flock cameras, which automatically capture moving vehicles and can share the data with law enforcement.

Some Democrats will also push to restore some clean energy subsidies after Republicans slashed several renewable tax credit programs as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025. Both Jeffries and Schumer have said they would introduce legislation to restore the phased-out wind and solar credits, but they could run into opposition from some industry players who want to disprove arguments from Republicans that renewables can’t compete without help.

Health care is another area where Democrats could find themselves divided. The party will need to decide whether to preserve the 2010 Affordable Care Act’s formula of expanding the health insurance safety net bit by bit — or propose blowing up the system through “Medicare For All.”

Progressive Reps. Debbie Dingell of Michigan and Linda Sánchez of California — senior members of Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means, respectively — are expected to be among those pushing the latter option following an election cycle centered on Americans struggling to pay bills. If successful, the effort would plant a flag going into 2028 and signal that Democrats no longer fear backlash from voters who prefer their private plans.

Democrats could come together in seeking to undo the $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid that Republicans enacted in last year’s megalaw, restore the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that Republicans allowed to expire at the end of 2025 and expand the Medicare drug price negotiation program they created during their last governing trifecta in in the 2022.

“We can have reasonable prices for these drugs, and guess what? These pharmaceutical companies, they’ll be just fine,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), who was influential during the drug price negotiations at that time, said in an interview in September.

In any event, Democrats will need to move quickly to implement an affordability agenda in line with their campaign promises to lower the cost of living. Proposals include legislation to prohibit grocery store price gouging, expand the child tax credit and reverse Republican cuts to federal nutrition programs.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is expected to become the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, has also consistently pushed follow-up legislation to the bipartisan housing package that became law in July. She could team up on that effort with Rep. Maxine Waters of California — though her House Financial Services gavel is up in the air as the 88-year-old fends off possible challenges from Illinois Democratic Reps. Sean Casten, 54, and Bill Foster, 71.

More broadly, though, some Democrats have been eager to downplay divisions in their party.

“At the end of the day, the things we don’t agree with, we’ll figure out,” said one House Democratic aide granted anonymity to speak candidly. “I don’t think folks will want to come out of the gate with a circular firing squad.”

Simon J. Levien, Katherine Hapgood, Brian Faler, Gabby Miller, Owen Dahlkamp, Jasper Goodman, Ari Hawkins, Nico Portuondo, Connor O’Brien, Mackenzie Wilkes, Robert King, Alice Miranda Ollstein, and Riley Rogerson contributed to this report.

Congress

Democrats are ready to run Congress — and investigate all things Trump

Published

2 hours ago

November 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Democrats are on track to win complete control of Congress, setting the stage for an unrelenting oversight platform in the next Congress that will zero in on both the Trump administration and the special interests that Republicans were reluctant to scrutinize over the last two years.

According to interviews with more than a dozen lawmakers, aides and attorneys, Democrats plan to use their new subpoena power and agenda-setting authority to target possible corruption among members of President Donald Trump’s family, Elon Musk’s leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency and the Department of Homeland Security’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics.

They could demand testimony from the chief executives of Big Tech on social media addiction, the dangers of artificial intelligence and the negative impacts data centers are having on local communities. They could haul in the heads of leading oil companies to answer for allegations the industry waged a decadeslong climate misinformation campaign to continue reaping massive profits.

And these are just a few items on the to-do list.

“I’d expect some pretty epic battles between the administration and Congress, as well as private sector targets that are prepared to fight back against Congress,” said Aaron Cutler, a partner at Hogan Lovells Cadwalader and former aide to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Many major Washington law firms, expecting a favorable night for Democrats, have already started hiring experienced lawyers to help their clients navigate new congressional scrutiny, Cutler added.

“LAWYER UP,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, posted on social media Tuesday as the party’s House majority was coming into focus.

The risk, however, is that Democrats’ vast investigative ambitions backfire, sucking up oxygen that might otherwise be spent trying to legislate. Though Trump is unlikely to sign many, if any, bills Democrats send to his desk that aren’t considered “must-pass,” Democrats will still be under pressure to show they can do something, even if it’s just laying the groundwork for a legislative agenda the party can enact if they also retake the White House in 2028.

“I think we would put the priority on things that have had an impact on cost of living for the American people — so any kind of corruption with the administration that has raised costs,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who, as a member of the House, led impeachment proceedings against the president in the first Trump administration.

Schiff suggested one such potential line of inquiry could be into Amazon.

“If federal contracting decisions are made not because a vendor has the best product or is offering it for the best price, but because, in the case of Amazon, it was willing to pay $40 million for a crappy movie about Melania [Trump], is that resulting in Amazon getting an advantage in cloud computing contracts or other defense contracts — that’s the kind of thing that costs taxpayers money, costs consumers more money, and there have been so many business payoffs of one sort or another,” said Schiff, referring to the first lady.

Over in the House, Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wants to look into surveillance pricing, in which AI tools track a customer’s online habits to determine how much they should be paying for basic goods like groceries — and potentially driving up costs for everyone in the process. It’s an issue that energizes progressives, like Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar of Texas, as well as Republicans: Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri held a hearing on the issue in August.

Democrats are likewise expected to build on their oversight of data centers, including operators’ commitments to cover the full energy costs associated with their infrastructure, according to several senior committee Democrats and Democratic congressional aides.

They say they will also try to expose ways in which the administration’s actions could be contributing to high energy prices and more pollution, from the Iran war to the cancellation and slow-walking of renewable energy projects. Inquiries into prescription drug pricing could also lead to policy recommendations aimed at lowering health care costs.

But Democrats also could be heading towards a clash with some members intent on pursuing a more partisan, take-no-prisoners approach toward their oversight duties.

For instance, Garcia and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committees, have made clear they consider the Jeffrey Epstein investigation unfinished business. Raskin, a week before the midterms, released a staff report detailing sexual assault allegations against Trump by five separate women in a possible preview of the lines of inquiry Democrats could pursue.

The possibility that Democrats could undertake politically divisive impeachment proceedings against any number of Cabinet officials also looms large. Some Democrats are eager to oust the president himself, with Raskin saying over the summer he would not rule that out — even though the party is certain to remain well short of the two-thirds needed to convict in the Senate.

“I want to go straight to the top: Donald Trump,” Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said in an interview regarding impeachment. “And then everybody who was complicit in allowing him to do what he’s done, or working in concert with him on illegal things.”

One person in Trump’s orbit likely to absorb much of Democrats’ scrutiny is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is already the subject of a House impeachment effort.

Hegseth and the Defense Department could face even more scrutiny next year if Rep. Adam Smith, the Washington Democrat in line to be the next chair of the House Armed Services Committee, decides to revive a subcommittee dedicated solely to Pentagon oversight issues.

Smith will need to balance a need to reach bipartisan compromise on an annual defense policy package with the whole list of Pentagon controversies his members want to pursue. That includes a full accounting of the cost and impact of the Iran war, politicization of the military and Hegseth’s own performance.

“To be candid, Donald Trump should have already fired this guy,” Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. “I think this Iran war has been disastrous. It’s a major part of contributing to the cost of living emergency. American people are mad about it.”

On the House Ways and Means Committee, Democrats want to put forward new proposals to expand the popular child tax credit and beef up breaks for child-care expenses, and potentially work with Republicans on tax issues relating to retirees. The Senate Finance Committee could take up an idea floated over the summer by the likely incoming Senate Democratic Leader, Chuck Schumer, to quadruple a tax on stock buybacks by corporations.

But Democratic taxwriters are just as likely to spend next year scrutinizing the controversial decision to excuse Trump from IRS audits as part of a broader settlement between the president and the Justice Department, as well as the tax agency’s collaboration with Homeland Security to crack down on illegal immigration. They’ve also signaled plans to look into the tech industry’s use of corporate tax breaks, including whether Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s should be allowed to claim a research subsidy in conjunction with his company’s data center construction.

Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who are expected to return as chairs of House Ways and Means and Senate Finance, could face renewed calls to seize Trump’s still-hidden tax returns — a demand both men contended with during the first Trump administration.

The Senate’s primary oversight panel, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, could center on DHS’s execution of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.

Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), who is in line to chair Homeland Security next year, has spent the past year building a team to help her use her position to “investigate and hold President Trump and his Administration accountable for its widespread corruption and wrongdoing,” said a person granted anonymity to describe her private planning. Members of that team have experience working in the White House, DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Hassan’s staff, the person said, will deploy resources to focus on “egregious” wrongdoing where there is “clear disapproval from the majority of Americans.”

Ari Hawkins, Andres Picon, Alfred Ng, Brian Faler, Connor O’Brien, Gabby Miller and Owen Dahlkamp contributed to this report.

Congress

What Hakeem Jeffries’ Albany years reveal about how he’d lead the House

Published

2 days ago

November 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

NEW YORK — On the road to becoming House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries toiled for years under top-heavy leadership. He bore witness to corruption in the highest ranks of government. And, as he rose in stature, he established himself as a persuasive orator, hyper-engaged colleague and prolific fundraiser.

And that was before he got to Congress.

As the 56-year-old legislator seeks to become the first Black speaker of the House, clues to how he engineered such a rapid rise — and how he’ll govern if Democrats win the House — can be traced back to the rough-and-tumble world of statehouse politics in New York, where he served as an assemblymember representing parts of Brooklyn from 2007 through 2012.

While in Albany, Jeffries hardly mastered the levers of power. He wasn’t around long enough to earn a committee chair position. He wasn’t senior enough to carry the conference’s marquee legislation. And he passed only a fraction of the 242 bills he sponsored.

Yet he carved out a legislative record establishing himself as a credible voice on criminal justice issues. And the lessons offered by Albany at the time — with half of its Legislature beset by factionalism and a hard-charging executive damaged by scandal — offered a valuable preview of what he could face in Washington.

Jeffries could inherit an unwieldy House. He could face a Senate with razor-thin margins. And he already has plans to launch probes into President Donald Trump and many of his aides.

But the leadership style he began developing in Albany is in many ways an odd fit with the current political moment.

In an age where voters are gravitating toward partisan pugilists, Albany colleagues almost universally recall Jeffries as a cerebral and studious legislator willing to work with peers of all ideological persuasions. They remember his speeches in conference meetings and the Assembly chamber that, while demonstrating a deep grasp of logic and policy, were delivered only infrequently, as if to maximize their impact.

“He thinks things out like a chess player, four or five moves in advance,” said David Paterson, a Democrat who served as New York governor during some of Jeffries’ tenure in Albany. “To me, he’s like a modern-day Columbo. While you’re putting him down, he’s planning how to take you out.”

As Jeffries now seeks one of the most difficult jobs in American politics, his origin story underscores a broader change in Democratic politics.

Once an insurgent candidate who so thoroughly irked the New York establishment they drew his apartment out of the Assembly district he eventually won, Jeffries is now facing criticism from the party’s left. From their perch, the Democratic leader is out of touch with the issues animating the party base and far too reliant on a bygone way of doing business.

Whether he can prove them wrong will not only write the next chapter of his story. It will influence where the cartoon dust cloud of infighting that is today’s Democratic Party drifts next.

“He comes off as someone who fits more directly into the prior generation: Very buttoned-up, very message-tested talking points,” said one New York Democratic consultant granted anonymity to candidly discuss Jeffries’ political standing. “There’s a handful of issues that are driving the extremes of the party, and he tends to fall squarely into the older thinking on them: Israel is one. Medicare for All is another. I’m not saying the vanguard is right. But he’s not on the vanguard.”

At least, not anymore.

After stints at a white-shoe law firm and as a corporate lawyer for Viacom and CBS, Jeffries launched his first political campaign in 2000 at the age of 29, going hard at incumbent Roger Green over accusations he was failing an Assembly district that included the Brooklyn enclave where Jeffries was born, raised and had moved back to with his wife.

“You’re out of touch,” a mustachioed Jeffries said during a heated debate in which Green later stormed off the set.

Jeffries, a devout Baptist, had brought up Green’s Muslim faith on air, which the incumbent found divisive. It ultimately didn’t matter. Jeffries lost by 18 points.

When New York redrew its Legislative boundaries two years later, Jeffries was meticulously notched out of the seat, an act of institutional retribution for his perceived insolence, giving him an early taste for creative line-drawing that has parallels to today’s redistricting wars between Democrats and Republicans. He challenged the incumbent anyway, this time with even worse results.

It wasn’t until Green gave up his seat to run for Congress that Jeffries won in 2006 after moving back into the redrawn 57th District.

Scott Levenson, head of political consulting and lobbying firm the Advance Group, was hired by Jeffries on those early campaigns and said his client had a congenital predisposition for public service: His mother was a social worker and his father was a state substance abuse counselor. Politics, activism, Black history and the expectation of academic achievement were very much discussed at the dinner table.

“He comes from an active political family,” Levenson said in an interview. “He didn’t grow up in the restaurant business.”

Even back then, Levenson said, Jeffries was exhibiting qualities that would come to define him in Congress.

“The guy bangs the phone all the time; and he’s got a nice way about him, so people want to talk to him,” Levenson said of Jeffries’ efforts to raise money and build coalitions. “I talk to Republicans who don’t hear bombastic, they hear thoughtful and balanced. And with the margin he’s going to be served, that’s probably a good thing.”

In January 2007, at long last, Jeffries arrived in Albany as a backbench legislator. What he found was the country’s third-largest public institution — second only to the federal government and the State of California — in chaos.

The state Capitol during that era was riven by Democratic infighting and scandal — giving Jeffries a front row seat for how dysfunction and small majorities can dash legislative dreams and how more disciplined institutions can fill the power vacuum.

Beginning in 2009, Democrats spent an unhappy two years leading the state Senate, an era marred by intraparty feuds and a debilitating leadership coup. Several senators would go on to be accused of engaging in public corruption during these years.

The governor, Eliot Spitzer, charged into office as a national political celebrity, only to squander that momentum by waging war with Democrats and Republicans alike. He resigned in 2008 in the middle of a prostitution scandal, paving the way for Paterson, his lieutenant, to take over for the remainder of his term.

The brunt of governing fell to Jeffries’ colleagues in the Democratic-dominated state Assembly.

“It definitely weighed on the Assembly that we were the adult institution in the room,” said Rory Lancman, a colleague who worked with Jeffries on several pieces of legislation. “But also, that meant we could dictate terms to an unusual degree.”

By that time, the chamber had been led for over a decade by the powerful Manhattan Democrat Sheldon Silver. His top-down approach — deciding which bills came to the floor for a vote, doling out leadership stipends to allies and punishing dissenters — rankled lawmakers. But Silver, who would be ousted from power in 2015 after being accused of felony fraud and corruption, maintained one of the few stable centers of power in Albany until Andrew Cuomo’s election as governor in 2010.

It was in this atmosphere — a combination of deep Democratic Party disarray and iron-fisted rule — that Jeffries came of political age before ever working under the velvet-gloved iron fist of California Rep. Nancy Pelosi and prosecuting Trump’s first impeachment.

By the numbers, Jeffries was a middle-of-the-pack legislator, according to a Blue Light News analysis of his performance in 2011, his penultimate year in office. He sponsored 87 bills (the 27th most in a 99-person Democratic conference), backed four that were approved by both houses of the Legislature (45th) and voted the same way as leadership 98 percent of the time (62nd).

In his final year in the statehouse, Jeffries was fighting an intense congressional primary against then-New York City Council member Charles Barron. As is common for state lawmakers seeking higher office, he missed 75% of votes in the Assembly.

But numbers aren’t everything in the state Capitol, where much of the action takes place behind closed doors. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, Silver’s successor, said Jeffries’ oratory supporting legislation to change the way prison inmates are counted in the U.S. Census stood out. That measure, which tallied people according to their home communities rather than the districts where they were imprisoned, ultimately passed as part of Paterson’s state budget.

“There’s certain legislators where, when there’s a debate that they’re in, you stop whatever you’re doing because they have such command of the issues,” Heastie said.

Jeffries, he added, “is one of the best communicators I’ve seen in my 26 years in the Legislature.”

While in Albany, Jeffries also began to develop an understanding of legislative institutions, which would go on to aid his meteoric rise in Congress.

Several years into his tenure in the state Capitol, Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke called a meeting of Black elected officials in Brooklyn to address one of the most explosive issues of the day: The NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk to target mostly Black and Latino men for invasive and often public searches.

At the time, police officers were on track to stop and frisk more than a half-million New Yorkers with nearly no criminal charges to show for it. Clarke wanted something done.

At the close of the meeting, members of the New York Civil Liberties Union approached Jeffries with an idea, according to Donna Lieberman, executive director of the organization since 2001: Would the assemblymember carry legislation to bar the NYPD from electronically retaining identifying information about people stopped and released without further legal action?

Jeffries agreed, and, after introducing the bill, gave what several colleagues recalled as a stirring floor speech about the need for urgent action. The initiative turned out to be a relatively easy sell in the deep-blue Assembly. It was in the state Senate, where Democrats had just won a narrow and ultimately fleeting majority, where one of Jeffries’ most memorable legislative victories was at risk.

Selecting a cosponsor in the other chamber is an art unto itself. A successful pick requires knowing alliances, rivalries and the proclivities of leadership in a separate legislative body. Jeffries’ decision demonstrated all of those things, according to one person involved in negotiations who was granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations. But it also showed a willingness to reach outside his circle of core allies — in this case, by tapping Eric Adams, then a freewheeling state senator with an overlapping district and, years later, New York City’s mayor.

The two men have long had a cool relationship, even if they’ve mostly praised each other in public. Polar opposites in style, they had backed different candidates for city comptroller and public advocate in 2009 and would go on to fight numerous other proxy battles over the years.

In 2010, though, Adams, a former police captain, stood in well as a credible messenger and outspoken critic of overpolicing. During closed-door Senate Democratic conference meetings, according to the person involved in the bill negotiations who spoke with Blue Light News, Adams would patiently explain to members vulnerable to pressure from police unions why stop-and-frisk was not actually improving public safety.

Jeffries, meanwhile, agreed to limit the bill’s scope to New York City to garner support from upstate members.

“I think he was very shrewd,” said the person involved in the bill negotiations. “He was feeling his way into the politics of it and trying to get a read of how things were cutting.”

The bill’s passage gave both Jeffries and Adams a major legislative win, propelling their careers on upward trajectories and sparking a last-ditch and ultimately unsuccessful push for a gubernatorial veto from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond Kelly.

“Stop-and-frisk was becoming a national issue, and the NYPD, love ’em or hate ’em, is a force to be reckoned with,” Lieberman said, recalling Jeffries’ work on the legislation. “This was his first foray onto the national stage. It was important for him.”

Manhattan Democratic Chair Keith Wright, a former state assemblymember, summed up Jeffries’ Albany years by recalling longstanding bipartisan basketball games in which they both participated.

“He didn’t have to be the one scoring the points, but he was down underneath the basket getting the rebound,” Wright said, noting that Jeffries was not a trash-talker. “He was making sure other people were scoring the points.”

That approach has proven fruitful. During his latter years in state government, he was already drawing comparisons to Barack Obama. And once he got to Congress, he rocketed up the pecking order to become chair of the House Democratic Caucus in just six years before being elected minority leader at the end of 2022.

It may not have been fast enough to keep up with an increasingly fractured Democratic Party.

While he enjoys strong support among House Democrats broadly, the Jeffries school of politics is already seen as passé by the young activist class, portending a potentially difficult speakership that will require him to manage factions with deeply disparate goals. The left sees him as too deferential to Israel supporters and has criticized him for taking his name off Medicare for All legislation after co-sponsoring it for years.

Ironically, though, it’s a dynamic Jeffries has dealt with his entire career, according to Basil Smikle Jr., the former head of the New York State Democratic Party and generational peer of the presumptive House speaker.

Green, the Assembly incumbent Jeffries ran such a spirited campaign against, got his start in the civil rights movement. And along with an entire generation of Black activists, he paved the way for younger leaders like Jeffries. That generational transfer of power, however, did not always come easily, according to Smikle.

Ambitious young New Yorkers like Jeffries, who broke with the establishment to endorse Obama for president in 2008, were eager to have their shot at shaping government. Battle-hardened activists, though, remained skeptical of their juniors, who came of age long after the struggles against racism, voter suppression, segregation and outright violence began.

“In a way, it has come full circle,” Smikle said. “Hakeem has had to prove himself as an activist throughout history. And he’s still trying to prove that he has that muscle.”

Madison Fernandez contributed to this report.