Hakeem Jefferies was elected House Minority Leader - the first POC to hold that job.
Patty Murray was elected President Pro Tempore in the Senate - the first woman to hold that job.
In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the anthropologist turned storyteller Zora Neale Hurston wrote that there are years that ask questions and those that answer them.
Take 1972: an annum that asked. Better known as the year of the Watergate break-in and bungled cover-up that unraveled the Nixon Administration, 1972 was also the year that nearly 10,000 Black Americans—elected officials, policy wonks, community organizers, and ordinary citizens—convened in Gary, Ind., for what was dubbed the National Black Convention. Among the central questions before the group in Gary: Should Black voters remain loyal to the Democratic Party and try to wrest from it more influence, or should they break away and form their own political alliance?
Fifty years later, in the final weeks of 2022, one data point suggested the remain-and-influence strategy had its merits: Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York, was elected the first Black House Minority Leader, making him the first Black person to lead a major party’s caucus in either chamber of Congress.
“Hakeem, in some ways, is an heir of all of that,” says historian Komozi Woodard, author of Want to Start a Revolution?, speaking of the Gary meeting and what followed, especially the movement of grassroots Black activists into electoral politics in places like Jeffries’ hometown of Brooklyn, N.Y..
As the new Congress begins its work on Tuesday, he will take up a key role in everything from setting caucus priorities to making committee assignments. Had Democrats won just a few more seats in the midterms, Jeffries might have been elected the first Black Speaker of the House, second in line to the presidency and one of the most influential roles in American politics—a position it seems he is likely to pursue should Democrats gain a majority in the next election.
So it is perhaps reasonable to assume that 2023 will prove to be the year of yet another question: What, precisely, does it mean to be a “first”?
Americans will no doubt hear Tuesday lots of talk about Jeffries’ relatively rapid rise during his decade in Congress, an institution that Spencer Overton, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, says is one in which seniority typically dominates. But Jeffries’ rise, Overton tells me, comes as no surprise to those who have been watching the man some like to call the Brooklyn Obama. Jeffries, 52, comes from socially and politically engaged people, and was a feature of the New York civil-rights scene during his career as a corporate lawyer. He brings a GenXer’s ability to walk in many worlds, physical and digital, and, having come of age during some of the most difficult decades in America’s major cities, he is part of what Woodard describes as the hip-hop generation—a group skilled at making a way out of no way.
It’s also likely that people will speak of Jeffries’ assent as a testament to the power of ability and drive in modern America, and opine about the country’s progress in breaking down racial boundaries. But there are as many reasons to celebrate the Jeffries breakthrough as there are reasons to consider the complex truth about what his personal success may produce. Fifteen years after President Barack Obama broke what was considered the ultimate political barrier, and 51 years after that gathering in Gary, America should know better than to assume that changes in the face of leadership automatically produce real political change too.
In fact, research and political experience tell us that people who are the “firsts” get there precisely because of their facility for what their supporters call consensus building and their detractors are more likely to describe as accommodation. Others more rigid in their ideas about policy and process risk offending those who like things the way they are. Boundary-breaking leaders are most often installed in times of crisis, making leadership even more challenging and success at least a little less likely. And there remains the simple fact that just because a barrier has been broken, doesn’t mean that everyone is happy about it.
There are, of course, significant differences between Obama and Jeffries—and their political stories, the moments that brought them to power, and the roles they have held—as well as ways that the two men are, in fact, similar. Obama was elected after the global economy nearly collapsed. By his second term, he was met with public foot-stomping from the left about his alleged failure to move progressive dream policies through a Republican-controlled Congress. (Which is not to say Obama didn’t manage to accomplish anything—Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton, cites the Affordable Care Act as a once-in-a-generation change.) On the right, he was constantly confronted with a strain of racial paranoia that painted his very presence as a threat to the proverbial American way.
Jeffries too is a product of crisis: His rise was long-planned but ended up coming about after nearly three years of pandemic, amid rising levels of political violence and extremism, including the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“Like President Obama, the image of Hakeem Jeffries, leader, could represent to some that they are losing what they think is their country—as opposed to our, in the collective sense, country,” says Overton, who is also a professor at George Washington University’s Law School. Look out, he and several other people I spoke with in December say, for the ways this alone will create license for Jeffries detractors to develop false claims about what the era of his leadership may bring, including attempts to recast Jeffries as a threat, an outsider, an other with secret aims. It’s worth noting that, like Obama, Jeffries is a Christian and Black American with an Arabic name. “He could be racialized and demonized by some on the far right to stoke their base,” Overton says, “especially if Leader Jeffries becomes Speaker Jeffries in a couple of years.”
- more - (good stuff, BTW)
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) was elected Senate president pro tempore Tuesday, becoming the first woman to hold the job since its inception and putting her third in the line of presidential succession.
Murray, who was elected to the Senate in 1992 as a self-proclaimed “mom in tennis shoes,” was selected for the role after Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) declined to seek it. In recent years, the job has gone to the senior-most member of the majority party, which is the 89-year-old Feinstein. Murray, 72, is the second in line.
Murray in an interview Tuesday recalled joining the Senate when there were only two women in the chamber. “When I was elected, it was called ‘the year of the woman,’ and we were six. And I think a lot of the men, although they wouldn’t tell you this, were just sort of like, ‘Oh my God, what are those women going to do when they’re here?’” she joked. “And I think over time we have earned the respect of not only them but people around the country that we are serious about our roles.”
Murray, wearing her signature tennis shoes, was sworn in by Vice President Harris on Tuesday afternoon to the role.
The ceremonial job of presiding over the Senate and signing legislation comes with a security detail and increased funding for staff. Murray said she would also like to use it to be a “problem solver in the Senate” and help craft bipartisan solutions, including with the newly Republican House, to keep the government functioning — as she did in 2013, when she helped land a budget agreement with then-Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). Murray, who won reelection to a sixth term in November, is also set to lead the Senate Appropriations Committee this year — marking the first time the powerful committees is likely to be led by four women from the majority and minority parties in the House and Senate.
A 90-something in line of presidential succession? Experts say it’s time for a change.
While Murray ascended to her new role, House Republicans were locked in an ugly battle on the other side of the Capitol that foreshadowed what could be a new era of gridlock and infighting after two years of unified Democratic control of Congress. “If the House chooses to be dysfunctional amongst themselves and just not want our country to work, that puts us all in peril,” Murray said. “I hope they see above that. I think our country really does not want to see chaos or any kind of dysfunction.”
Murray said she’s brought a different perspective to Congress. When she became the first female chair of Veterans' Affairs Committee, she widened its focus to veterans’ caregivers, as well. And she sought to include reproductive rights and child care into budget conversations. “I think often we bring a voice to the table that would be missed when it was men only,” she said. “I’m not the only woman on that committee [now]. There are other women who echo my viewpoint, and who are respected for who they are.”
When Murray won the nomination for the role last month in a meeting of Senate Democrats, her colleague Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said she shared a bittersweet moment with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).
“I just looked at Amy Klobuchar and just said, ‘Historic,’” Hirono said. “It’s taken women this long — ‘Yikes,’ that’s all I can say.”
Hirono recalled when Murray was elected to Congress in the 1990s with a wave of “soccer moms,” and said she believes the Senate has changed significantly since that time. She said a male colleague whom she would not name recently told her he had taken Hirono’s feedback to men during the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Brett M. Kavanaugh to “shut up and step up” and worked to get women of color elected in his state.
“I’m going to be celebrating Patty,” Hirono said.
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