Dem Knives Are Out For Hakeem Jeffries After Secret Jared Kushner Meeting

Hakeem Jeffries sits down with Jared Kushner to talk about actual areas of overlap, and suddenly he's the villain in his own party. Not because he cut a bad deal. Not because anything came of it that anyone's described as harmful. Just because he was in a room with someone Democrats have decided should only ever be a subpoena target, never a person you negotiate with.

That tells you something about where the Democratic base has landed. Tommy Vietor's complaint wasn't about substance. It was about optics, about the sin of treating a Trump-world figure as someone worth talking to instead of someone to be permanently under investigation. If that's the standard, there's no room left for actually governing. Every conversation becomes a loyalty test, and every deal becomes evidence of betrayal.

We've said for years that Washington's dysfunction isn't really about policy disagreements anymore. It's about a political culture where talking to the other side is treated as the scandal. Jeffries didn't sign anything away. He had a meeting. If Democrats can't tolerate even that much contact with the current administration without an internal revolt, they're not signaling strength. They're signaling that cooperation itself is the enemy, which is a strange place for a party that claims to want government to actually function.

There's something almost funny about watching Jeffries get treated like he crossed a picket line. If this is what happens when leadership tries to find common ground, don't be surprised when nothing gets done and everyone blames the other guy for it.