Zohran Mamdani was asked a question that had no good answer, and he gave the only one that matters. New York City’s mayor publicly backed Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker of the House this week, and a segment of the left immediately lost its collective mind.
The trigger was a New York Times report that Jeffries had sat down with Jared Kushner to discuss housing, cost of living, and immigration. Kushner, who holds no elected office and no Senate-confirmed position, reportedly told Jeffries he would carry any areas of agreement to Susie Wiles. The Times framed the meeting as the White House bracing for a midterm wipeout and opening a back channel to the man likely to hold the gavel. Rep. Byron Donalds shrugged it off as Kushner “just keeping lines of communication open.”
Mehdi Hasan called it “pathetic.” Wajahat Ali said he couldn’t understand why anyone considers Jeffries an effective leader. Cenk Uygur went further, as Cenk Uygur tends to do. The outrage was instant, loud, and almost entirely misdirected.
Here is what actually happened. A Democratic leader met with an unelected son-in-law who functions as this administration’s shadow diplomat, and the left’s response was to attack the Democrat. Not the system that normalizes Kushner’s unaccountable access. Not the structural rot that lets a private citizen with a family portfolio of Saudi-backed investments broker policy between branches of government. The Democrat.
U.S. Embassy Jerusalem (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsMamdani, who has been mayor of New York for eight months, walked into the White House last November and sat across from Trump himself. Trump came out of that meeting saying they “agree on a lot more than I would have thought.” The same voices now torching Jeffries either defended Mamdani’s meeting or went quiet. The inconsistency is not subtle.
But Mamdani understood something his critics on both flanks keep missing. Jeffries is a New York congressman. He is effectively unopposed for the Speaker’s gavel. There is no progressive challenger. There is no insurgent candidate. There is a binary choice between a Democrat who will organize the House floor and a Republican who will not. Mamdani backed the Democrat because the alternative is Matt Gaetz or whoever the Republican caucus anoints, and that person will not hold a single hearing on housing, will not advance a single bill on cost of living, and will not use the subpoena power of the House for anything that resembles accountability.
That is the word the outrage crowd keeps forgetting. Accountability. The House under Democratic control is the only lever the public has to investigate this administration’s corruption, its self-dealing, its attacks on federal workers and immigrant communities. Jeffries meeting with Kushner is not the scandal. Kushner having the power to call that meeting is the scandal. And the only way to change that power dynamic is to win the chamber, install a Speaker, and start issuing subpoenas.
Mamdani is not naive. He is a former housing counselor who built a coalition in a city of eight million by knowing which fights matter and which ones are performance art. Backing Jeffries for Speaker is not an endorsement of every meeting Jeffries has ever taken. It is a recognition that the gavel determines who controls the oversight apparatus, and that apparatus is the difference between a government that answers to its people and one that answers to Jared Kushner.
The left does not have the luxury of purity tests right now. Every minute spent attacking Jeffries for talking to Kushner is a minute not spent organizing for the majority that would make those conversations unnecessary. Win the House. Hold the gavel. Subpoena the Kushners of the world into the light. Everything else is noise.