A newly elected Ohio Democrat says senior members of his own party threatened to end his career if he does not vote for Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker. Rep.-elect Don Leonard, who flipped a Republican seat last week, made the claim to Politico, and it has since been repeated across the political press. The leaders he accuses have not been named, and neither Jeffries nor House Democratic leadership has answered him in any report we found.
Jeffries is on course to become the first Black Speaker in the House’s history. Democrats won at least 254 seats on Nov. 3, which leaves him room to lose dozens of votes and still win the gavel when the new Congress votes on Jan. 3, 2027. The fight is over what he owes the voters who put him there.
Leonard, a former Ohio State professor who beat Republican Rep. Mike Carey, has made his support conditional. He wants a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, and an end to U.S. support for the war in Iran and for Israel, which he says led the country into it. He says the answer he got from colleagues was not a negotiation. Senior members told him “in no uncertain terms” that unless he backed Jeffries regardless, it “would basically mean both making my life a living hell for the next two years here in Washington as well as being sure to lose my election in two years.”
“The ‘big-D’ Democratic Party needs some ‘little-d’ democracy,” Leonard said. Of the pressure itself, he told Politico: “It’s part of the stuff you see in the movies. It’s a whole other thing when it’s in person.”
That is one lawmaker’s account, and it should be read as one. But it lands on a base that is already loud. A Change.org petition urging House Democrats to choose a new Speaker passed 1 million signatures over the weekend. Organizers cite Jeffries’s opposition to Medicare for All, his reluctance to take on corporate power and his position on military aid to Israel. House members say their phones are full: one told Axios he had received about 150 calls, another more than 500.
“Democrats have spoken loudly and clearly that they want new leadership,” said Corbin Trent, a former aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. No House Democrat has stepped forward to run against Jeffries, and the petition’s organizer has urged Rep. Ayanna Pressley to do it. Pressley has shown no interest.
Two things are true at once, and Black readers have a stake in both. Black voters are a core part of the coalition that gave Democrats their House majority, and a Black Speaker would be a first. That history is a reason to give Jeffries a fair fight, not a reason to spare him one. The petition’s complaints are policy complaints, the kind a progressive caucus is supposed to make of its own leader, and a leader who has the votes can afford to answer them.
What he cannot afford is a freshman telling reporters that the answer was a threat. If Leonard is wrong, Jeffries’s office can say so on the record. If he is right, the people who made the threat should be named. A party that won by promising voters a say should not be telling its newest member that having one will cost him his seat.
Jeffries has until the Jan. 3 vote to meet Leonard’s two demands, or to explain why he will not.
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