If you want to hear AOC talk for 1 hour and 40 minutes in a livestream recording about how a Democratic House Leader worked conventionally based on her experience, why it’s difficult to replace Jeffries, and answering some other questions, here you go.
She went over the fact Jeffries is running unopposed but the rest of the TLDW is:
The House Majority Leader has to spend their time herding 200+ legislative cats with the whip, and also be the public face for the caucus, leaving little time for advocacy, organizing and taking leadership roles on committees (which sounded like the main reason why AOC doesn’t want to volunteer herself)
The Majority Leader has to mobilize lots of financial resources for the next election and the DCCC (she said the DNC is the fundraising arm for presidential and state races, the DSCC for Senate races and DCCC for House, they are weirdly not integrated).
Many “campaigns” for House Leader start years in advance so that you can develop relations with individuals, regional subgroups and identity subgroups and class subgroups across the Democratic party spectrum.
The Democratic party has long let seniority be valued a lot higher than, in AOC’s opinion, needs to be.
The Majority Leader election is followed by the Whip then the Chairs and members of various House Committees. So there is a lot of horsetrading going on because many house reps have a particular committee they want a seat on. They will often voice to a speaker candidate, they will support their speakership, if that candidate will recommend the rep for the committee position. Some are more highly visible positions, some committees get way more bills than others, so there is fierce competition for some seats and others may feel shunned if put in a committee that feels irrelevant to them.
Any challenger would have to rally all this support, make hundreds of calls and hundreds of deals in the span of a few weeks. Which is why Schumer is easier to replace than Jeffries.
The Republicans took dozens of tries to elect a Speaker and landed on Mike Johnson who was very ineffective, and thus was really only able to get one major bill passed in two years. The Democrats don’t want to emulate that.
I feel like part of it, not being said, is that the rising stars might have future plans which don’t involve the House. AOC is already being floated to run for Senate or President in 2028. You might have a problem right now where the rising stars in the House may not want to put forth the effort to rise up House leadership positions because they see other positions opening up soon.
You’re right. Basically Democratic voters are asking for someone in the party to take one for the team in ousting Jeffries, itself an uphill battle but also even if they are successful, stymies their chance of advancing to the Senate or Presidential cabinet, or even some House positions for several years. And if they fail, they risk internal consequences of being labelled an outsider or splinter-party rebel. Not an easy thing for any of them to simply stick up their hand and volunteer for.
If you want to hear AOC talk for 1 hour and 40 minutes in a livestream recording about how a Democratic House Leader worked conventionally based on her experience, why it’s difficult to replace Jeffries, and answering some other questions, here you go.
She went over the fact Jeffries is running unopposed but the rest of the TLDW is:
I feel like part of it, not being said, is that the rising stars might have future plans which don’t involve the House. AOC is already being floated to run for Senate or President in 2028. You might have a problem right now where the rising stars in the House may not want to put forth the effort to rise up House leadership positions because they see other positions opening up soon.
You’re right. Basically Democratic voters are asking for someone in the party to take one for the team in ousting Jeffries, itself an uphill battle but also even if they are successful, stymies their chance of advancing to the Senate or Presidential cabinet, or even some House positions for several years. And if they fail, they risk internal consequences of being labelled an outsider or splinter-party rebel. Not an easy thing for any of them to simply stick up their hand and volunteer for.