House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries...

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., holds a news conference in the U.S. Capitol on Monday, June 23, 2025.

(Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Answer Me This, Hakeem Jeffries: What Do Democrats Stand For?

Twice Democrats lost to the corrupt, chronically lying, corporatist, and failed gambling czar Donald Trump when you should have defeated him and his GOP handily. It is time for serious introspection, a change of attitude, and tactics.

August 31, 2026

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries
U.S. House of Representatives
2267 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Rep. Jeffries,

Like other civic advocates, I read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles about your private meeting with Jared Kushner, Trump’s amateur Ambassador at Large, who is also furiously seeking investment opportunities while abroad. It is not difficult to read between the lines. You’re seeking a deal, should you be chosen as House Speaker in January. Trump also wants a deal as—you will hold off any Impeachment initiative, and in exchange, he will not oppose some undefined bills that you want to pass.

You can rebut this supposition by announcing very soon that you will seek to impeach Trump once the Democrats take over the House. About 90% of Democratic voters and two-thirds of independent voters want “Impeachment Now” (see Celinda Lake’s polls.) This is what the Bar of the City of New York urgently concluded, following two detailed reports on Trump’s executive violations of law in December and March. (See “The Abuse of Presidential Power and Breach of Public Trust” and “The Crisis Deepens: Congress Must Act Now to Address Escalating Abuses of Executive Power”.)

When asked about your stand on Impeachment in April by a reporter, you replied: “I don’t want to get ahead of that discussion.” What? Don’t want to get ahead of 90% of Democratic voters? Don’t want to move to fire an outlaw, corrupt, violent, raving racist, and serial sexual abuser of women? A dangerously unstable dictator (see April 30, 2026 Congressional Record) who is wrecking, endangering, and weakening America, making life more unaffordable for tens of millions of lower-income Americans and their children, many of whom are losing their Medicaid, food stamps, and health and safety protections? You are signaling that Trump has two more unchallenged years to destroy our Republic and the Constitution for which it stands. Adamant in drafting our Constitution to block any “monarchs,” what would our Founding Fathers have done?

Observers of your brand of politics know your game, Mr. Jeffries. Nonetheless, some weeks ago, your Executive Director Gideon Bragin told a respected intermediary that he was okay with receiving my suggestions for landsliding the GOP. You were sent a few pages, which your office received, but did not even courteously acknowledge, much less respond substantially. This is typical of the Democratic leadership’s incommunicado attitude toward independent citizen groups. (See the report The Incommunicados.)

Being control freaks, the Democratic leadership does not like “mandates.” Which is why they do not like popular Pledges, Compacts, or Contracts for the American People or for American Workers. When former Secretary of Labor, bestselling author, and popular podcaster Robert Reich sent his Party’s leaders a list of “What Democrats Must Pledge to America,” in December 2025, he probably expected a response. To date, not a single response from anyone in the so-called leadership of the Party. Many of his proposals are New Deal updates that test well with liberals and many conservative families where they live, work, and raise their families. NO RESPONSE!

We know the game, Mr. Jeffries. But in these times and with some stunning primary elections, it is a game that won’t be as easily played with impunity as in previous years under Speaker Pelosi. You may wish to refine your political antennae and answer the question most asked by voters, which is, “What does the Democratic Party stand for?” other than scapegoating when it loses to the most cruel, corrupt, anti-worker, corporatist GOP in history.

Having huddled with the genocide-backer Kushner, how can you continue not to meet with National citizen groups like Public Citizen, Common Cause, People for the American Way, Pension Rights Center, and others familiar to you as long-time advocates for policies that the past Democratic Party used to find commendable and support on Capitol Hill? No more excluding them, despite what your corporate-conflicted consultants advise. Also, no more of your silencing House Democrats from even talking about Impeachment. Under Rule 9, there will be a vote on an impeachment resolution after Labor Day, which you should support and NOT join Trump in opposing. (See Rep. John Larson’s H.Res 1155 and the April and July citizen impeachment symposiums on Capitol Hill.)

Ask yourself, is Trump going to continue becoming worse—violently and cruelly worse—both domestically and abroad without a mounting deterrence as in a fast-rising Impeachment Drive?

Would not such an Impeachment Drive led by the Democratic Party galvanize its voters—seeking fighters on their behalf—and increase voter turnout for a decisive November victory, not a marginal, unworkable majority?

If your answer is YES to both questions, what are you waiting for? If your answer is NO, what are you waiting for? More destruction of the living conditions of the American people, including loss of life to blatantly neglected natural disasters, the closure or depletion of crucial scientific alert and research programs, political brutalities, Trump’s inflation and job losses, and his “endless wars” and attacks and crazed military threats abroad? So you can cut deals with a treacherous Trump with his record of betrayals?? (See New York Times: “The Autocracy Index: The editorial board tracks 12 markers of democratic erosion” and “Trump’s Broken Promises, in 11 Charts”.)

You and your Party need to be seriously introspective about your mounting political disasters, the independent exclusion of input from progressive citizen groups and progressive labor unions that decades ago so assisted the Party’s better angels in enacting key legislation. (See When the Senate Worked for Us: The Invisible Role of Staffers in Countering Corporate Lobbies by Michael Perschuk, Vanderbilt University Press).

First introspection: Twice Democrats lost to the corrupt, chronically lying, corporatist, and failed gambling czar when you should have defeated him and his GOP handily. You and the Party stubbornly want to win, having years ago electorally abandoned almost half the country (red states), but without upsetting your paymasters. These are principally Wall Street, AIPAC and the military industry. Your corporate-conflicted consultants, to whom you have contracted out so much of the Party’s campaigns, lean strongly in that direction.

Back in 1994, I called the savvy Elizabeth Moynihan. She told me she had just fired Senator Pat Moynihan’s re-election consultants and is taking over management of his campaign. She firmly added: “These consultants are destroying the Democratic Party.”

How do you explain the Democratic Party’s failure at numerous critical junctures to stop Trump’s presidential campaigns? Trump’s energy levels to overcome impossible odds in 2016 and even more in 2024 tower above the feeble, indecisive ways of the Democratic Party. Your Party totally bungled, letting Trump continue to destroy our Democracy despite serious indictments, becoming a convicted felon, being sued, and being credibly charged with sexually abusing five dozen women. Trump is a foul-mouthed racist/bigot who constantly used defamatory language, such as against fallen GIs in World War II (a serial draft dodger, no less), and who was profiteering in suspect manners. He was low in the polls, and was widely condemned for his initiatory role inciting the January 6, 2020 insurrection in Congress, taking lives and causing injuries of many defending Capitol Police and other casualties. Still, he defeated your Party in 2024!

Who could overcome such odds and win the presidency? Someone with towering egomaniacal energy, opposed by the anemic, indentured Democratic Party that refuses to replace losers with new progressive energy. Indeed, losers get promoted, such as heading the Democratic National Committee, while presumptive presidential winners like Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 are sabotaged by Party apparatchiks and their large donors.

More basically, the Party has become about raising money in place of credibly advancing progressive policies and programs. The almighty campaign dollars leave raising the paltry federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour) to one-liners that your voting public doesn’t believe, or not taking up authentic full Medicare for allwhich you just stunningly came out against!! Throwaway one-liners, like cracking down on corporate crooks, are not believable, because of the Party’s terrible record regarding corporate crime waves and massive corporate welfare. The same is true for not challenging Trump’s enormous 2017 tax cuts for the rich and big corporations when the Democrats took the House in January 2019. House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA), astonishingly announced on opening day that he was not going to reopen these deficit-ballooning tax cuts, depriving investments in public works and services throughout communities nationwide.

Then, of course, there is the long-sustained Democratic Party of overseas Empire, of a runaway unaudited – as long required by federal law – military budget and the aiding and abetting of Netanyahu’s genocidal mass murder and starvation of infants, children, mothers and fathers in Gaza, using U.S. bombs you voted for to drop the TNT equivalent of over eight Hiroshima bombs on that tiny enclave, the geographical size of Philadelphia, crowded with defenseless families having nothing to do with October 7, 2023, and the prior bombing raids by Israeli F-16s in the previous decades. Still, you proudly remain one of the top beneficiaries of AIPAC, which is the reason you and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) didn’t endorse your newly elected Mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

More introspection may lead you to ask yourself whether you are up to leading the House Democrats in their immense and immediate tasks of policy and program restorations and adopting our Constitution’s mandated Congressional independence from the Presidency for the protection and advancement of the livelihoods, peace and freedoms of the American people. There is no indication that you are so willing and prepared. Unfortunately.

Your response is invited.

Sincerely,

Sincerely,
Ralph Nader

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