We keep insisting that all we need to do is elect better Democrats, but the conservative Centrists in the Party don’t see it that way and keep appointing their own to run the Party.
Case in point is the alleged Great Uniter that Speaker Pelosi graced us with as her replacement, Hakeem Jeffries. You would think that someone placing Democratic unity, at a time of existential threat from the far right nonetheless, front and center in his coming out speech would show some amount of self awareness and deference to the will of the base and not do anything stupid to self destruct his own future as a leader. But if you were talking about Jeffries you would be wrong.
Coming fresh off of an election cycle where Jeffries ran a PAC defending Centrists from progressive challengers, Jeffries topped that by appearing at a Bronx rally with far right “Democratic” Governor Kathy Hochul of the apparently hopelessly corrupt state of New York to back her far right insanely divisive pick for state Supreme Court Justice, Hector LaSalle.
The entire progressive wing of the Party are still in a state of shock trying to process what just transpired mere days before a highly anticipated confirmation hearing for this opponent of everything the Democratic base stands for:
LaSalle is currently the presiding justice of the New York Supreme Court's Second Judicial Department, and as Alexander Sammon and Mark Joseph Stern wrote at Slate, "his record as an intermediate appeals court judge demonstrates a deep hostility to the very values that Hochul claimed she wanted to uphold with this appointment."
In 2017, LaSalle ruled that a so-called "crisis pregnancy center"—where people are pressured into carrying unwanted pregnancies instead of obtaining abortion care—should be shielded from the state attorney general's investigation into whether the facility was practicing medicine without a license. The judge invoked the First Amendment when he ruled that "advertisements and promotional literature, brochures, and pamphlets that the [center] provided or disseminated to the public" should not be investigated.
He also joined other judges in 2015 in handing down a "shocking" opinion, Sammon and Stern wrote, that allowed Cablevision to sue union leaders for criticizing the company's response to Hurricane Sandy, and ruled in 2014 that a criminal defendant should be blocked from appealing his conviction after the defendant claimed he'd been subjected to an illegal search.
Although Hochul claimed she was planning to nominate a chief justice who would help "defend against [the U.S.] Supreme Court's rapid retreat from precedent and continue our march toward progress," if LaSalle is confirmed by the state Senate to a 14-year term, he "would entrench a reactionary majority that would fight tooth and nail against the priorities of New York progressives," wrote Sammon and Stern.
What is doubly troublesome about this flagrant betrayal on the part of Rep. Jeffries is the naked hypocrisy he is displaying as the newly appointed Democratic leader in the House. We were promised someone who could unite the Party around core Party values, values that our base overwhelmingly supports, things like women’s right to choose and the right of workers to organize.
But Jeffries is having none of that. He cannot see past his own extreme conservative views to place Party above self interest. His support for far right candidate LaSalle should invalidate him from the lofty perch he was given.