How Will Hakeem Jeffries Deal With Moderate House Turncoats?

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was sent scrambling to get his party members in line on Tuesday after two Democrats voted to advance the Republican legislative agenda.

Jeffries, joined by Democratic Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, announced a probe into Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Jared Golden of Maine who rescued a procedural rule vote Republicans were set to lose.

“The decision by two of our colleagues to blindside the entire House Democratic Caucus and join with the Republican majority to pass a procedural rule on the brink of failing represents a significant breach of trust,” the statement said. “It is an action that necessitates a serious response, and we have asked the Committee on Caucus Rules to take this up in short order.”

The procedural rule would allow a vote on a number of measures, including a resolution to denounce socialism and praise the Save Act, Donald Trump’s disastrous voter repression measure, as well as a measure to bar federally funded universities from boycotting Israel.

Golden advanced the rule in order to pass a bill protecting Maine lobstermen from new regulations involving the North Atlantic right whale.

Gluesenkamp Perez’s reasoning was much more opaque. “Working America is hanging on by a thread, trying to feed our families without being beholden to big government or big business. Standing around pointing fingers, debating -isms and making people photocopy their birth certificate every time they cast a ballot is not the job,” she wrote on X following the vote.

Of course, this vote had absolutely nothing to do with passing a continuing resolution.

The apparent defections are a humiliating blow for Jeffries, and his public response indicates a heightened level of effort in the struggle to maintain party discipline.

Health care has emerged as the chief priority for Democrats should the party wrest control of the House and Senate this November.

In an interview with NBC News published Wednesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries outlined four policy goals that he believed would attract “uniform Democratic support.”

“We have to reverse the Medicaid cuts. We should extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits,” Jeffries said. “We should restore congressional authority as it relates to tariffs, because the Trump tariffs are making life more expensive for the American people. And we should end, decisively, if it’s still going on, Donald Trump’s reckless and costly war of choice in the Middle East.”

But there’s still a long road ahead. Virginia Representative Don Beyer told the network that while there’s consensus that the party’s first post-election bill should focus on affordability, there’s little agreement on exactly what that should look like.

“In the affordability debate, nothing’s more central to it than health care,” Beyer told NBC News. “My expectation is that it’ll very much be about affordability one way or the other.”

Yet a growing contingent of Democrats—including the party’s emerging cohort of democratic socialists—want the party to aim higher on health care than the low-hanging fruit of reversing Trump’s unpopular cuts.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—a rumored 2028 presidential candidate—said it would “absolutely not” be enough to restore Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

“Of course, we need to take immediate action on those ACA subsidies and making sure that we lower those prices immediately,” Ocasio-Cortez told NBC News. “But it doesn’t fix the deeper systemic issue that has led health care to be one of the primary drivers of inflationary costs over the last decade, frankly.”

“We need to be doing a lot more to take on corporate power, to break up a lot of these monopolies that are rolling up—Big Pharma, insurance, private equity entering the space of health care unchecked,” she continued. “I think there’s a lot here for us to really dig in on, to work on.”

Successfully enacting the agenda (and unravelling Trump’s Project 2025 victories) will be dependent on the size of the party’s Election Day wins. If Democrats fail to win a significant number of seats in either chamber or are forced to contend with a thin majority, they’ll face seismic challenges in passing any sort of anti-Trump legislation.

President Donald Trump is clueless as to why the Iranian people won’t rise up against their government, oblivious to the fact that his bombing campaign isn’t exactly inspiring.

“I’m not trying to force Iran to the bargaining table, as ABC Fake News reported. I couldn’t care less if they sign a worthless, to them, agreement. I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing,” the president posted on Truth Social Tuesday night. “They are just playing out the inevitable. When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight? President DJT.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. bombed the Iranian city of Kuhestak in Sirik County near the Strait of Hormuz overnight Tuesday, hitting a wedding ceremony in one of the strikes and killing at least five civilians, most of them women and children, according to the Iranian government. A nearby communications tower is believed to have been the target. In response, Iran fired missiles at U.S. bases around the Middle East.

“The United States’ catalogue of atrocities against the nation of Iran is now complete: a residential home in Kuhestak, #Sirik, was brutally attacked tonight while families were celebrating a wedding. More than 50 innocent men, women and children were martyred or wounded,” Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote on X. “This cruelty cannot be separated from the chain of atrocities that preceded it in #Minab, #Lamerd, Qeshm and elsewhere nor from the strikes on military targets that were dressed in deceptive justifications.”

To the Iranian public (and elsewhere), pictures and videos of such attacks are likely to help the Iranian government’s cause much more than Trump’s. For all Trump’s talk of wishing to help the Iranian public against their government, the death of innocent civilians sends an entirely different message.

Iranians haven’t forgotten the bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab at the start of the war in February that killed 200 people, mostly schoolchildren. They aren’t going to forget that a wedding was bombed, something that seems to be a recurring theme of American military misadventures. Trump is delusional if he thinks that this will win over the Iranian people.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is sacrificing military readiness for his conservative culture war—and he’s getting away with it.

In his resignation, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll laid out his concerns that Hegseth was blocking efforts to modernize the military by removing the generals spearheading those efforts, a source told CNN Wednesday. One person familiar with the matter told Politico that Hegseth thwarted Driscoll’s efforts “at every turn.”

Multiple sources told CNN that they agreed that Hegseth was firing the leaders behind modernization efforts, and instead focusing on culture war issues.

“It’s conflicting because yeah he put out a memo saying this is important, but … he’s talking about muscles, dudes in dresses, testosterone,” a defense official in Europe told CNN. “We don’t see a change at that level.”

Unlike Driscoll and his deputy Army undersecretary Dave Fitzgerald, who also resigned, Hegseth was more focused on the way things look, not with long-term strategic priorities, one source familiar with their relationship told CNN. “Driscoll and Fitzgerald were focused on the modernization issues and less the social,” the source said.

Sources also pointed to the removal of three other army officials focused on the future: Army chief of staff Randy George; General Chris Donahue, the former head of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, who was working to learn drone warfare from the Ukrainians; and General David Hodne, former commander of the U.S. Army Transformation and Training Command.

“It’s critical that you have key leaders that understand technology and have the temperament to deal with industry and turn that into the formation,” a former senior Army official said. “When you fire these guys for arbitrary reasons, it creates confusion and a void … the Army is enduring turbulence right now.”

Meanwhile, Hegseth positioned his senior military assistant General Christopher LaNeve into position to serve as acting chief of staff after George’s removal. One defense official told CNN that LaNeve’s “whole schtick is that he’s a ‘back to basics’ guy.”

Since his appointment, Hegseth has been consumed with the project of remaking the U.S. military in his own image. The secretary was quick to install new rules for how soldiers should look—no beards or bellies—and recently introduced mandatory testosterone screenings. He’s repeatedly thwarted the advancements of Black and female DOD personnel, and overseen a ban on new transgender and nonbinary soldiers.

Georgia Republicans are snubbing Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. Senate.

A cadre of conservative mayors in the Peach State have opted to publicly back Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff rather than get behind Trump-endorsed Representative Mike Collins.

Those mayors include Gail Fry of Toccoa, James Matheson of Valdosta, and Julie Smith of Tifton. The key to their successful bipartisan relationship with Ossoff rests in the senator’s attentiveness to Georgia’s myriad communities.

In an interview with The Daily Beast published Wednesday, Fry explained that—despite voting against Ossoff six years ago—she’s come to appreciate his responsiveness.

“We have gotten more support from Senator Ossoff than any other office that we’ve contacted,” Fry said, citing a multimillion-dollar federal grant that Ossoff secured for natural gas infrastructure in her city. “He calls us and says, ‘What do you need?’”

The others listed similar experiences with the liberal lawmaker.

“I don’t have to track him down. He tracks me down,” Smith told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month. “He’s been very good to South Georgia, and in my nonpartisan role as mayor, I have to look to someone who takes care of their constituents. I’m a Republican, but there are times when a person exceeds the party. They go above and beyond.”

Matheson—who described himself as a “hard-core conservative”—told the Journal-Constitution that he expects to “take heat” for endorsing Ossoff, but “it doesn’t matter.”

“There’s no way I can turn my back on this relationship,” Matheson explained. “The voters put me in here to do a job, and that man has been absolutely incredible.”

Trump, meanwhile, has spent inordinate amounts of time online, dividing the American public with his polarizing opinions rather than trying to build similar relationships across the country. The president has practically thrown his entire election cycle playbook at Ossoff, using his enormous platform to lob personal attacks against the 39-year-old. On Truth Social, the president has taken to mocking Ossoff’s looks and name, referring to him as “Os(jerk!)off” and comparing Ossoff to comedian Pee-Wee Herman and Alfred E. Neuman, the fictitious mascot of Mad Magazine.