Democrats/progressives – July 2025

5 things Jeffries said in his record-breaking House floor speech

‘Project 2026’
Jeffries ended his speech with a look ahead at the midterm elections next year and a note of optimism for Democrats, who have vowed to use the unpopular cuts in the GOP’s tax and immigration bill as a way to win back the House majority.
First, though, Jeffries urged people to read the Declaration of Independence, part of which “reads like an indictment against an out-of-control king.” He joked that the framers of the Constitution had been fed up with “Project 1775” and so they implemented “Project 1776.”
“I know that there are people concerned with what’s happening in America,” Jeffries said. “But understand what our journey teaches us is that after Project 2025 comes Project 2026. And you will have an opportunity to end this national nightmare.” – 3 July 2025

10 July
New Democratic Group Says Answer to the Party’s Woes Lies With the States
The founders of the initiative, the States Forum, say they hope to extend successful Democratic policies across states and even to the national level.
Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania arrived Tuesday at an intimate dinner for Democrats thinking about state politics to deliver an urgent message.
They had real power, he said. Use it.
“The states are no longer just our laboratories” for testing policies, Mr. Shapiro told the group of Democratic donors, strategists and state legislators…“Now, they are the bulwarks of democracy.”
The states, he added, are “the most important, consequential counterbalance to Donald Trump’s lawlessness and Donald Trump’s overreach.”
The governor’s remarks were delivered at the kickoff for the States Forum, a new initiative designed to help expand and entrench Democratic state legislative successes across the country at a time when the national party, locked out of power in Washington, remains adrift..”
These Younger Democrats Are Sick of Their Party’s Status Quo
Majority Democrats, a new group of elected officials from all levels of government, has outsized ambitions to challenge political orthodoxies and remake the party.
“We’ve got to lay out the case for what we’re for as a party,” said Representative Angie Craig, a Democrat from Minnesota and a leader of the initiative.
(NYT) A number of prominent younger Democrats with records of winning tough races are forming a new group with big ambitions to remake their party’s image, recruit a new wave of candidates and challenge political orthodoxies they say are holding the party back.
Members of the initiative, Majority Democrats, have different theories about how the national party has blundered. Some believe a heavy reliance on abortion-rights messaging or anti-Trump sentiment has come at the expense of a stronger economic focus. Others say party leaders underestimate how much pandemic-era school closures or reflexive defenses of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s re-election bid have eroded voters’ trust in Democrats.
But the roughly 30 elected officials at the federal, state and local levels who have so far signed on to the group broadly agree that the Democratic Party must better address the issues that feel most urgent in voters’ lives — the affordability crisis, for example — and that it must shed its image as the party of the status quo. Many of the group’s members have, at times, challenged the party’s establishment, something the organization embraces.

6 July
Democrats Need to Understand That Opinions on Israel Are Changing Fast
(NYT) … Mr. Mamdani’s victory illustrates the huge gulf between many ordinary Democrats and the Democratic establishment on one subject in particular: Israel.
… The shift has been national. In 2013, according to Gallup, Democrats sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 36 percentage points. Those numbers have now flipped, after more than a decade of nearly uninterrupted right-wing rule by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the rise to power of crude bigots like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and Israel’s mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip: This February, Gallup found that Democrats sympathize with Palestinians over Israel by a margin of 38 percentage points. …

3 July
In Trump’s Bill, Democrats See a Path to Win Back Voters
Top party officials consider the president’s sweeping domestic policy bill to be cruel and fiscally ruinous — and they’re betting the American public will, too.
Hakeem Jeffries took his ‘sweet time’ holding the floor to delay Trump’s tax bill
(AP) — There’s no filibuster in the House, but Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries essentially conducted one anyway.
Jeffries held the House floor for more than eight hours Thursday, taking his “sweet time” with a marathon floor speech that delayed passage of Republicans’ massive tax and spending cuts legislation and gave his minority party a lengthy spotlight to excoriate what he called an “immoral” bill.
As Democratic leader, Jeffries can speak for as long as he wants during debate on legislation — hence its nickname on Capitol Hill, the “magic minute,” that lasts as long as leaders are speaking.

2 July
David Frum: Trump’s Betrayal of Ukraine
Bridget Brink, the former ambassador to Ukraine, on that country’s war with Russia, America’s betrayal of Ukraine, and why she resigned.
Interview with the former ambassador to Ukraine who is now running for Congress for the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s Seventh District.