Congressman Hakeem Jeffries was sworn into office on January 3, 2013, and since then, he has been extremely busy attending to the People’s business.
“There’s a hip hop song [called] “Everyday I’m Hustlin’,” Rep. Jeffries said in an interview with New York 1. “And I kind of feel that way here in Washington, in a positive manner of course.”
But why does Rep. Jeffries hustle so hard as a Congressman? What drives him to do what he does and what has made him the politician he is today? When it comes to ideology, Rep. Jeffries’ avoidance of radical and hard left positions seems to indicate that he learned a good lesson from the controversy over allegedly racist and anti-Semitic statements made years ago by his uncle Dr. Leonard Jeffries, a black nationalist and political radical. Rep. Jeffries also seems to know how being a good Democrat and supporting the current Democratic President and Democratic policies in general will help him move up the political ladder. In addition to all of that, Rep. Jeffries knows that, as a representative of the 8th congressional district, at least part of his job is to actually voice the concerns of his constituents.
A quick search of Hakeem Jeffries on YouTube will reveal a politician who is not afraid to get in front of a camera or podium and speak to constituents, the media or his fellow politicians about the issues that he feels affects his district. Whether it’s the sequestration, federal funds for Hurricane Sandy victims, the Voting Rights Act or gun control legislation, Rep. Jeffries, a Brooklyn native straight from the streets of Crown Heights, is almost always talking about something that affects his constituents.
Luckily for Rep. Jeffries, he is very at ease with the media. He’s appeared on NY1, MSNBC, Fox News and local New York City news programs as well. This media-savvy swagger is obviously a very good talent to have as an ambitious, young politician and makes it difficult to avoid the cliche comparison to Barack Obama. He’s also landed spots on the House Budgeting committee and the Judiciary committee, two extremely influential Congressional committees. Rep. Jeffries has taken advantage of the fact that Rep. Paul Ryan, former Republican Vice Presidential candidate, is chairman of the Budgeting committee. He openly squares off with Rep. Ryan on issues like the sequestration, balancing the budget and student loans knowing that these clashes may well be the preview to a future Presidential debate. But besides his political ambition and his duty to be the voice of his constituents, Rep. Jeffries is also motivated and influenced by other factors.
Ideologically, Rep. Jeffries is a lukewarm, left-of-center Democrat with a pragmatist streak. He isn’t afraid to take anti-liberal positions if it’s in the interest of his constituents. A clear example of this would be when he took the anti-secular view that FEMA recovery funds (i.e. taxpayer dollars) should go to the rebuilding of houses of worship affected by Hurricane Sandy (i.e. the concrete, physical establishing of religious establishments). But most of the time, Rep. Jeffries, like a good Democrat, follows and supports the party line or the President’s line, and when he does disagree slightly with the President’s policies, as is rarely the case, Rep. Jeffries is always considerate enough to not make too loud of a fuss over it.
“My job, I believe, is to help the administration of Barack Obama help us back at home,” he said during an NY1 News interview. And with that statement, Rep. Jeffries combines his duties to his party’s leader (who happens to also be his country’s leader) and his constituents into one job. And this job keeps Rep. Jeffries anchored onto the center-left of the political spectrum. But that isn’t all that keeps him from floating too far to the left.
His uncle Dr. Jeffries was an Afrocentric professor of black studies at City College in New York City who made some controversial remarks on race and history during the 1990s. During a 1991 lecture in Albany, among other pseudo-historical claims, he asserted that rich Jews financed the slave trade, an old, anti-Semitic myth that historical scholarship has debunked. The backlash against that lecture was harsh with politicians and journalists calling for his resignation and Dr. Jeffries claiming that he was taken out of context.
Rep. Jeffries knows that he has to distance himself from his uncle in order to go anywhere in politics. He has said that he hasn’t even seen any of his uncle’s speeches. But Rep. Jeffries was close with his uncle while growing up and even went on a large group trip to Egypt (Rep. Jeffries’ first and only trip to Africa) led by Dr. Jeffries. And because of what his uncle went through, Rep. Jeffries learned very early that being perceived as the radical, crazy black man was not the way to rise up in the political arena. And this need to distance himself from a supposedly radical uncle with the same last name is another reason that Rep. Jeffries has kept his positions and rhetoric situated slightly to left of the political center.
These motivations behind the politician we know as Hakeem Jeffries are not necessarily mutually exclusive too. His ambition to move up in the political world via being a good party member, his desire to do what is in the interest of his constituents and his need to distance himself from the legacy of more radical relatives all push him to act they way he does and each of these motivations supports the other motivations. With these distinct yet mutually supporting motivations all working together, an ideological perpetual motion machine is constructed that keeps Rep. Jeffries firmly in the center-left, exactly where he needs to be to move up the political ranks.