Jeffries' reported meeting with Kushner about possible Trump cooperation draws left-wing backlash

Hakeem Jeffries sat down with Jared Kushner and now half his party wants him drawn and quartered for it. That tells you everything about where Democratic politics is right now. Not the meeting itself, which is a fairly normal thing for a minority leader to do when there's actual legislating to discuss. The reaction to it.

Kushner has spent years brokering things Democrats claim to care about, from Middle East peace deals to criminal justice reform. He's not a fringe figure showing up uninvited. If Jeffries thinks there's a path to getting something done for his constituents by talking to someone with the president's ear, that used to be called doing the job. Now it's apparently heresy, because the base has decided any contact with Trump world is contamination, full stop, no exceptions for whether something useful might come out of it.

What's actually revealing is the panic underneath the backlash. Democratic leadership knows their voters have been marinating in maximalist rhetoric for years now, the kind that leaves no room for a private meeting, let alone a deal. So even a routine conversation becomes a controversy that has to be managed and walked back. That's not a party positioned to negotiate anything. It's a party that's boxed its own leader in before he's even said what the meeting was about.

We'd rather have a Congress full of people willing to talk to each other than one where talking itself is the scandal. If Jeffries got rolled or got nothing, fine, criticize the outcome. But criticizing the mere act of sitting down is how you guarantee nothing ever gets negotiated at all.