Source: United States House of Representatives – Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (8th District of New York)
Today, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on WBLS Open Line, where he emphasized that Democrats will vote to advance a War Powers Resolution to rein in Donald Trump’s unconstitutional military action in Iran and prevent a failed forever foreign war while continuing to hold this administration accountable for their failure to make life better for everyday Americans.
FATIYN MUHAMMAD: We have a special guest joining us on the live line, and I’ll bring him on in just a moment. When we first booked this conversation, it was to discuss President Trump’s State of the Union address, the recent press conference from the Congressional Black Caucus and an update on the partial government shutdown. But family, everything shifted. We woke up yesterday to breaking news that the United States, under President Trump, in coordination with Israel, launched strikes on Iran. In those strikes, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed along with other top leadership figures. This has now escalated into a major global crisis with retaliation, rising tensions and serious questions about what comes next. So let’s go straight to our guest. Joining us now is the Democratic House Leader representing New York’s Eighth Congressional District, my friend, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries. Good morning, Congressman.
LEADER JEFFRIES: Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Great to be with the three of you. Thank you for having me back.
FATIYN MUHAMMAD: Appreciate having you back. In this brief time, we’re talking about these specific things here. We wanted to hit the State of the Union, the partial government shutdown, also the Congressional Black Caucus. But, of course, we saw what happened and see what’s unfolded yesterday. So let’s jump right on in here. Congressman Jeffries, with the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader and escalating tensions, what is Congress’ role right now in authorizing or checking military action and has that process been followed?
LEADER JEFFRIES: Thank you so much. I think my view is that what Congress needs to do as soon as we return is to take up the Khanna- Massie resolution, a War Powers Resolution, that would require that the President and his administration terminate the use of armed forces from any hostilities right now moving forward in the absence of congressional authorization, because the Constitution is really clear. Only Congress has the power to declare war. There’s supposed to be a debate. The President needs to make his case to the American people, which he has failed to do, to justify getting us into another failed forever foreign war. And the first step in that process will be trying to move this resolution, which is going to have strong Democratic support. And the only real question is can we convince a handful of Republicans to do the right thing on behalf of the American people and uphold their constitutional responsibility?
FATIYN MUHAMMAD: Can you explain, because a lot of folks are saying that President Trump is moving illegally. Does he have the power? How is he moving like this, in the sense of, he moved on Venezuela, now he’s moved on Iran. How is he allowed to do this, and what checks and balances can be put in place, as you said, when the Congress comes back?
LEADER JEFFRIES: What we’ve seen over time, now this has gone on for decades, is that Presidents, sometimes of both parties, have taken it upon themselves to use military force in the absence of explicit congressional approval when they claim there’s a threat to the safety and security of the American people that is imminent, that needs to be acted upon, sometimes preemptively, in order to stop the loss of U.S. life. And that’s an exception that has been built into the Constitution that courts have allowed. The problem that many of us have, particularly in an instance like this, is this seems to be a decision of choice. And we’ve gotten no evidence to date, which we’re demanding, and there will be briefings for Congress so that we can communicate to the American people about what has gone on here. But there’s no evidence that has been presented that I’ve seen to justify this type of preemptive military strikes that risk escalation, getting us involved in an endless war, by the way, which Donald Trump explicitly said he would not do. But this is consistent with him continuing to break his promises. This is the same guy that promised to lower your costs on day one. Costs haven’t gone down in America, they’ve gone up. The guy pays no attention, thinks the affordability crisis is a hoax. So he lied about domestic policy. And now the guy, of course, is lying about his views related to foreign policy as well.
FATIYN MUHAMMAD: Let me get my team in here. Jennifer?
JENNIFER JONES AUSTIN: It’s good to be with you, always good to have you with us, Representative Jeffries, Minority Leader Jeffries. Always good to have you with us. So, you know, as I reflect upon all that has happened in the last, I guess, now nearing 30 plus hours or so, I just can’t help but thinking, maybe I’m just a cynic, but I just keep on thinking, is this like a distraction of epic proportions? You don’t really outline the imminent threat. I’m talking about the President. The issues that have been in Iran have been building for years now in the Middle East, but you don’t outline a clear imminent threat. You don’t seek approval from Congress. You call it, you know, Operation, what is it, like Operation Fury or something like that. So you make it a military action that looks like you don’t have to get congressional approval. And what we know is that through history, you’ll see Presidents sometimes act when, you know, they’re trying to get the people, American people, on their side. They’ll do extreme things. This just feels like a President who’s got very low approval ratings. You know, he’s trying to keep everybody’s attention from his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. And I can’t help but think, and maybe I’m just overreacting, but maybe I just can’t help but think, is it possible that you put us now in this very dangerous situation because your ratings are so low, you don’t want attention on the things you should be doing in the United States for the United States people, so now you’ve got to act without any congressional authority. Is that being just like overreacting or thinking that he’s overreacting? I don’t know. Help me.
LEADER JEFFRIES: Well, it’s great to be with you, Jennifer, as always. You can’t put anything past this guy. What we’ve seen from the beginning of his presidency, he’s unleashing extraordinary extremism, doing active harm with his toxic policies to the American people. And it’s so clear that he’s failed on the economy, he’s failed on healthcare, he’s failed on immigration reform. Taxpayer dollars should be used to make life better for the American people, not brutalize or kill them, which we’ve seen in Minneapolis, and or violently target law-abiding immigrant families, which is what this guy is doing, breaking his promise to actually go after, in terms of immigration enforcement, violent criminals who are here unlawfully. That’s not what’s going on. The American people know it and they reject it. So, the presidency has been a complete and total failure. And, you know, and the absence of him actually providing a legitimate reason for going down this military route should rightfully raise concern and skepticism amongst the American people. Remember, he struck Iran last year and said that their nuclear program, this is his words, not mine, was completely and totally obliterated. Okay, if that in fact was the case, then there should be no preemptive need to go after Iran right now related to their nuclear program if you just said to the American people a few months ago that it’s gone. So you either lied then or you’re lying now. And, by the way, this whole notion of regime change—nobody’s feeling that. Now, the Ayatollah was a bad actor. We get that. But we can’t start wars all across the world because we disagree with the people who are in leadership, however bad they may be. That’s the point of strong diplomacy. That’s point of applying economic pressure. That’s a point of building a coalition of allies who Donald Trump has abandoned throughout the world. He’s isolating our friends and getting closer to our enemies. So none of it makes sense right now, to your point, Jennifer. And we’re gonna certainly demand answers on behalf of the American people when we return to Congress early next week.
FATIYN MUHAMMAD: This is very, very dangerous. You start putting bullseyes on what is called our enemies, then our enemies put bullseyes on our leadership as well. Let me turn to Professor Ron Daniels.
DR. RON DANIELS: It’s interesting how Jennifer and I are often so much in sync, I can just say amen. I did a little, penned a piece—first of all, let me just say that let us recall what President Trump said when the Supreme Court overruled his terrible tariffs. He said I’m moving forward because, and he said, ‘I don’t need Congress,’ because he is testing the limits of executive power as he moves towards authoritarianism. Let’s be clear about that. I penned a piece this morning, and the caption is entitled Attack Against Iran: The Big Distraction. Let us not forget that just before this attack, there were reports that were coming out from several news outlets that there were additional files that seemed to indicate that President Trump had some involvement with a 14-year-old girl. Now, I know everyone is innocent until proven guilty. That is not necessarily an indication of guilt, but it seemed to be highly inflammatory. Let us not forget that the Ambassador, it may have been the Foreign Minister from Oman, was in town and talked about the promising prospects that seem to be taking place through the negotiated route that our esteemed Minority Leader is referring to. Then all of a sudden this all gets ignored and boom, you have these attacks going out, assault going out against Iran. Now, what we do know is all of a sudden what is not in the news is the Epstein Files. I think this is absolutely a distraction and it is by a morally demented and dangerous human being because, Fatiyn, you just hit it on the head. If you target them, what about the sleeper cells in this country? It’s just interesting. I heard this news walking through the airport getting ready to go get a Uber to come home, looked over to a corner and saw a bag and a suitcase that was sitting there. Then all of a sudden it popped in my mind, I said, ‘What?’ They say, whatever you say, if you see it, name it or whatever that word is, whatever you see. And I said to myself, ‘Damn, why is that sitting there like that?’ And then there was some person came over and they grabbed their stuff. They had left it there, but in my mind I’m saying, with what just going on, what just happened and we all got to be on alert now because we’re all being put at danger. The whole world is being put at danger because we have this madman in the White House.
LEADER JEFFRIES: I think that point is so incredibly important, Professor Daniels, in that Presidents are supposed to act to increase the safety of the American people and improve national security. And what Donald Trump has done is put us in greater danger. In fact, we know he’s risking the lives of American servicewomen and servicemen, but he’s putting the homeland at risk in this kind of fashion. And many national security experts have made that clear. He certainly has been on the run on all the issues. He’s falling apart. His approval rating is as low as any President has ever confronted at a moment like this, and we know that this is the most corrupt administration in American history. He also, of course, is on the run as it relates to the Epstein files, and we will continue to press the case as it relates to getting the type of transparency and accountability no matter where it leads for every single person involved, consistent with what the brave, courageous survivors have been pressing for in the Congress, but here’s the thing, we’re not going to let him get away with distracting the American people. He’s been unable to do that in any sustained way up until this point, which is part of the reason why Republicans, electorally, had been on the run. And we’ve got to finish the job in terms of making sure we hold these people accountable while we’re governing and then go out there and take back control of the House of Representatives in November so we can begin the process of ending this national nightmare that all of us are suffering through.
FATIYN MUHAMMAD: I know our time is pressed, but we didn’t expect to wake up yesterday—Congressman Jeffries and President Trump’s State of the Union lie-dress, I mean State of the Union address, he outlined his vision for the country. How does this align or conflict with what you’re seeing on the ground, especially as we’re now dealing with a partial government shutdown?
LEADER JEFFRIES: Well, there’s an affordability crisis in America that no matter how much he tries to avoid confronting it, the American people know what their day-to-day experiences are, and it’s made life more expensive because of their toxic policies. This is the same group of people, these Republicans, who enacted the largest cut to Medicaid in American history. They literally are ripping healthcare away from more than 14 million Americans, disproportionately, by the way, impacting our community and low-income communities, particularly communities of color, across the country. At the same period of time, in that One Big Ugly Bill, they enacted a $186 billion cut to SNAP. That’s the longest cut to nutritional assistance ever. And they ripped food from the mouths of hungry children, seniors and veterans in order to give massive tax breaks to their billionaire donors and then give the Department Homeland Security a $191 billion slush fund, $75 billion of which went to ICE, so they can unleash poorly trained masked agents to brutalize and kill the American people. The whole thing is crazy, and that’s what we confront right now. They’ve done policy violence to the American people, and that’s the reason why the American people, in our view, are rising up. We’ve got to continue to press their case as we move forward, aggressively confront the extremism that’s being unleashed and then articulate a vision for doing things differently. In our view, we want to drive down the high cost of living. We’ve got to focus on that. We’ve got to fix our broken healthcare system. We’ve got to clean up corruption wherever it’s found, in the Congress, in the Supreme Court and certainly with the Trump cartel. And we’ve got to make sure that in this country, when you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to live an affordable life, a comfortable life, the good life—which I define as good-paying job, good housing, good healthcare, good education for your children and when it’s all said and done, a good retirement.
FATIYN MUHAMMAD: Jennifer, I know our time is short. I’ll leave you with the last question for the Congressman.
JENNIFER JONES AUSTIN: I just want to commend, I really want to commend our Minority Leader because during the State of the Union, on several occasions, the cameras pivoted to you and you remained composed and dignified. You know, while probably many—you probably wanted to jump up many-a-times but you remained so composed and dignified. I kept thinking to myself, this man has come into the chamber and is essentially doing his own kind of filibuster. It was a prolonged speech, you know, with nothing, saying nothing of material substance that would benefit Americans, the country over. And help me, like I’ve never seen before, so many President’s medals awarded at the State of the Union. It just felt like he was trying to fill the time because he had nothing to say. Am I wrong about that?
LEADER JEFFRIES: No, I think you’re exactly right. It was like the Trump award show. The thing is crazy when you think about it. I think his goal was to break the record—because that’s just the type of small, petty individual he is—to break the record for the longest speech given ever in American history, but he had nothing substantive to say. So the only way for him to achieve it was to behave in the way that he behaved. He spoke for almost two hours. He spent less than three minutes on the affordability crisis, which tells you everything you need to know.
FATIYN MUHAMMAD: Congressman, I’ll leave you with final words here, but if you could also just include—because a lot of times we here, our audience on Open Line, we question the Congressional Black Caucus and also Black leadership. And I thought a couple of weeks ago, it was impressive, it felt good to see the Congressional Black Caucus standing up there with other Black leadership across the country in a press conference talking about core agenda items that affect our community. Can you at least talk briefly about those core agenda items as we also give you final words in our time remaining?
LEADER JEFFRIES: Yeah, thanks so much again for this opportunity. And you’re correct, under the leadership of Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, current Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, she convened, initially, a roundtable discussion of leaders, representatives throughout Black America. And so, of course, those are faith leaders and civil rights leaders, high-level Black leaders within organized labor, the political leadership in terms of the Congress to begin to forcefully lay out a vision for better America and lifting Black folks up, when we’ve seen an all-out assault beginning with the ridiculous attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion to undermine Black progress in the United States of America. And so, it’s an agenda that’s anchored around economic justice, of course, as well as racial justice and protecting the gains that have been made on civil rights on voting rights and in the area of human rights, all things that the Trump administration are systematically going after. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. I think the Congressional Black Caucus recognizes it and we are in a more-is-more environment, which means we just have to continue to do more every day, every week, every month, year after year until we can get through this process, this mess, toxic mess that Donald Trump has created and continue our country’s march toward a more perfect union and lean into, you know, the spirit of Harriet Tubman, you know, the spirit of Rosa Parks, the spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer, the spirit of Shirley Chisholm, as we lift up Black women during Women’s History Month, coming in the immediate aftermath of Black History Month. Their character, their courage and their conviction, that’s the kind of strength that’s going to get us through this moment.
FATIYN MUHAMMAD: Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, we want to thank you and definitely want to have you back. Every time I run into you, you said you got to come here on Open Line and you got to have me back and we got to talk, you know, because there’s some, you know, tough conversations that—and concerns that our community have with some of our leadership in Congress. And we have to have that dialogue because we have to be on the same page. We can agree to disagree. But we have to have these conversations out there of the concerns of the people. But we thank you for taking the time, especially with what’s going on in Iran on a busy weekend morning here. Thank you, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who represents New York’s Eighth Congressional District. Thank you again, Congressman, for joining us this morning here on Open Line.
JENNIFER JONES AUSTIN: Thank you, sir. Thank you.
LEADER JEFFRIES: Thank you all. Look forward to being back.
Full interview can be listened to here.
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