Following an almost farcical episode in the House of Representatives, it seems it’s been opened up to the fact that pulling a fire alarm — an act that could potentially endanger lives — seems to be treated as a joke for some members of the Democratic Party. When Squad’s very own Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York pulled a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C., to purportedly delay a floor vote, the House voted to censure this astonishingly dangerous stunt.
In a censure vote that was carried out along party lines to a vote of 214-191, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was quite defiant in his response. Despite the dangerous and potentially life-threatening nature of the incident, Jeffries dared Republicans to do something about it, effectively saying “Try me.”
It’s understandable that the Republican side took issue with the episode, given Republican Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan also introduced the resolution to censure Rep. Bowman. Moreover, the episode was captured on surveillance footage, showing that Bowman’s claim that he was trying to open a door that usually is open was simply false. The video shows Bowman pulling down warning signs of alarm and emergency exits and then pulling the fire alarm.
The extraordinary part of this rather extraordinary tale, however, is not just Bowman’s actions and Democrats’ defenses of those actions, but Jeffries’ response. In response to the censure vote, Jeffries actually dared Republicans to censure him next. “Censure me next. That’s how worthless your effort is,” he said during the floor debate. “It has no credibility. No integrity. No legitimacy. Censure me next, and I’ll wear it like a badge of honor.”
It raises quite a few pertinent questions. Did Jeffries also pull a fire alarm in a similarly illegal manner and then serve a punishment for it? It seems like quite the challenge to issue, and it’s unclear what the minority leader was aiming for with the stunt. Did he simply run out of defenses for the indefensible actions of Bowman, or was he issuing a sort of implicit dare concerning the Republican Party’s willingness to discipline black lawmakers?
Jeffries has shown quite a bit of sympathy toward anti-Semites in the past, as the Western Journal notes. In a rather telling piece written in 1992 when he was an undergraduate at Binghamton University in upstate New York, Jeffries defended two notorious anti-Semites, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and his uncle Leonard Jeffries, who had been fired for anti-Jewish remarks. Jeffries blamed the “white media” and blamed his uncle’s fire from his position on the “white power structure.”
Despite how long ago the piece was written, it shows a pattern that has cropped up time and time again: the censuring of Republicans for comparatively minor actions and the indifference or worse when Democrats engage in behavior that’s of significantly higher gravity. In Jeffries’ case, it’s a particularly galling example, especially given that the behavior in question makes the GOP’s efforts censuring former President Donald Trump for destructive behavior that was officially handled by the censuring process seem comparatively minor.
It seems that there might be a newfound interest in doling out discipline for fire alarm-pulling. If we’re on that road, and if we’re using racial dog whistles like some have insinuated, then Jeffries might be next in line for a significant reprimand. It’s definitely worth looking into.
