Hakeem Jeffries taunts GOP, says Dems 'have been governing as if we were in the majority'

House Democrat Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said in an interview on Sunday that even with the slim majority in the House, the Democrats control the chamber.  During the interview with Norah O’Donnell of CBS News on 60 Minutes, Jeffries said that it was the Dems that “get things done.” 

“Even though we’re in the minority, we effectively have been governing as if we were in the majority because we continue to provide a majority of the votes necessary to get things done,” he stated. “Those are just the facts.” 

Jeffries went onto claim that some Republicans in the House are just interested in creating a "dysfunctional" chamber and are interested in “extremism."

“While it is utter nonsense that Jeffries runs the House—as evidenced by the work of our committees and the many radical policies they would advance were it so," Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) told The Post Millennial, "it is not lost on those of us counting that virtually every major bill passed since Thanksgiving has passed with many more Democrat votes than Republican, and at least three significant measures have been advanced without even a majority of Republicans."

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) also offered his thoughts in a statement to TPM, “Well, I’m not going to lie, he essentially is [running the House]. I like Speaker Johnson but he has got to get a backbone. He’s letting them walk all over us. But I disagree—it’s not a dysfunctional GOP majority. We just have different opinions, that doesn’t mean it’s dysfunctional."

Jeffries went on to talk about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene proposing a motion to vacate Republican Speaker Mike Johnson and talked about how he would vote against it. Democrats joined the few upstart Republicans in 2023 to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy, now, they would vote against those same upstarts.

“Our view would traditionally be, ‘Let the other side work its own mess out,’” he said. “But when that mess starts to impact the ability to do the job on behalf of the American people, then the responsible thing at that moment might be for us to make clear that we will not allow the extremists to throw the Congress and the country into chaos.” The rule of a single-member vacate motion would also possibly be in play if Jeffries became speaker.

Greene filed the motion to vacate in March in protest to a $1.2 trillion spending package for the rest of fiscal year 2024. It passed with a 286 to 134 vote and had billions in set-asides to fund the war in Ukraine, aid for Israel and Taiwan. 

The package then went to the Senate where it passed with earmarks that included $368,000 for a podcast requested by Senator John Fetterman, $146,000 to a health center that offers cross-sex hormones, and another that gave $400,000 to an organization that helps minors get fake breasts and chest binders.