Dem leader looking for leverage against Trump. Fort Worth visit shows he has a way to go | Opinion
On Saturday, in the throes of a constitutional crisis threatening to trickle its way to Fort Worth, gathered two born and bred New Yorkers with little power to change anything but a desire to be heard.
One of them was your local columnist. The other was Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Brooklyn Democrat and House minority leader. Jeffries, alongside Fort Worth Rep. Marc Veasey, held a press conference at Northside Community Health Center. Jeffries and Veasey came to discuss with health leaders how proposed Medicaid cuts in the next federal budget would harm health care in Texas, and get the word out about what could happen to communities here in North Texas.
I was intrigued to hear what Jeffries might say about his plans to thwart these efforts. because last week’s attempt at a rallying cry didn’t move me.
“I’m trying to figure out, what leverage do we actually have?” Jeffries asked in apparent exasperation. “[Republicans] control the House, the Senate, and their Presidency. It’s their government now. What leverage do we have?”
In fairness, Jeffries didn’t just whine — that’s where the Rapid Response Task Force he launched two days later could factor in. The House minority leader wrote in a news release that the task force reflects “an all hands on deck effort … in Congress, the Courts and the Community.”
Still, Adam Smith, a Democrat representing Washington state, said Jeffries’ despondency was “not the way to do it. I mean, there’s no point in talking about what you can’t do.” Constitutional lawyer Zephyr Teachout brainstormed answers to the House minority leader’s question free of charge. The problem is that he shouldn’t have to ask. Jeffries is undoubtedly correct about the GOP’s current control of Congress and the White House. (This did not stop the Republicans from pursuing unified procedural delay in recent years with a minority.)
But Jeffries argued that what the current administration is doing has placed the country on “an unsustainable trajectory” of high costs and lawless budget slashes, while “public safety is being jeopardized by efforts to decimate the FBI and the Department of Justice.” Cuts to Medicaid, Jeffries said, means “people here in the DFW area will get hurt, and in fact, it’s very likely that children or people with disabilities, pregnant women or older Americans, will actually die.”
So, our entire apparatus for enforcing democratic rule is crumbling under the weight of aggressive slashes of the federal workforce. Republican Medicaid cuts, if they go forward as GOP congressional leaders plan, will leave vulnerable Americans in North Texas and everywhere else unable to access lifesaving medical care. And eggs are still too expensive, in fact they just hit record highs. Sounds bad.
But if all the supposed opposition party — one that has campaigned and fundraised on nearly a decade of warnings about the existential danger of the Trump administration — has to offer is its highest-ranking House member resigning himself to two years of powerlessness, then the next thing that follows should be some literal resignations.
But by making a Texas tour stop, Jeffries shows he isn’t ready to turn over his lifelong seat in Brooklyn.
So in an intimate news conference — only two journalists were in attendance — where I had more face time than the political press typically gets with electeds, I asked Jeffries, point blank: What are you planning to do? And not just regarding the Republican budget, calamitous but still legal, but specifically, to enforce the law when the White House, enabled by the current ruling party, makes illegal cuts to health agencies like the NIH and CDC that further undermine public health.
Using a completely original turn of phrase, Jeffries told me that “It’s an all-hands-on-deck effort in the Congress, in the courts, and in the community,” touting the work of attorney generals such as New York’s Letitia James for suing the Trump admin over illegally slashing appropriated funding from American health agencies. “It’s our responsibility to make sure that funding that is allocated, passed in the House and the Senate and then signed into law by the president is actually spent.”
What that responsibility looks like in action wasn’t specified further. Jeffries ended the news conference there. As he left the health center, I overheard him tell his staff he would be heading to Whataburger while he’s in town. Necessary fuel for the tour.
This story was originally published February 17, 2025 at 5:28 AM with the headline "Dem leader looking for leverage against Trump. Fort Worth visit shows he has a way to go | Opinion."
