This isn’t driving a wedge on the left because Jefferies is not on the left.

It’s entirely possible that with the GOP control of the voting and procedures, there was no way that we could get a different outcome. If the dems had their shit together and were all present, then the vote would have been delayed until the GOP were all present.

That said, Jeffries is still doing a piss poor job at the politics. He acts like he 100% has the speaker role and there is no way it is in jeopardy and he gives zero fucks what any of the voters think about it.

He could have pushed everone to do maximum effort and be available any time when a vote could potentially be called - not because it can change the outcome - but because it would signal to the voters that the house is on the job and takes the people’s concerns seriously.

He could have crafted a statement about how the GOP would only close the vote when they were ahead so this was an un-winnable fight (more tricky and messy than the 1st option but maybe chaining them all to their desks is too hard?).

He’s had a series on unforced errors like saying very directly, the day after the election, that he doesn’t support medicare for all and doesn’t think impeaching the president should be a priority. There may be valid stratigic reasons for those stances, but saying it like that is just a fuck you to at least a third of the Democratic voters (actually, probably more like 2/3 for M4A)

In short, the party is divided and he is to the right of the majority on some key issues (M4A). An effective leader for 2027 needs to be able to keep the party together, not by bullying incoming members, but by managing public opinion and delivering on the items that the voters largely support.

And yet Jeffries is minority leader Now. Today. He doesnt need to wait until Jan 3 to do his effing job in this vote, did he. And he didnt do it. The one "playing games" here is you.

Edit: this became a distracted rant somewhere along the line, so please feel free to disregard.

The GOP loves playing games, this is them playing games and you're falling for it.

The whole thing is a spectacle. One side plays the comical baddy which some people turn to in ineffectual anger, allowing this anger to be dissipated against the usual scapegoats of the state (in short, minorities of any kind), and so not allowing it to congeal into any kind of threat to power.

Meanwhile the other side plays to fear around the comical baddy (who does do real harm, using exactly the same tools that they themselves dutifully maintain, and not infrequently use); to the point of effectively platforming some of the worst of them; as they flounder around realising they can't offer anything but austerity and token gestures (most often repealing offenses against the population carried out in legal form, see slavery, segregation, gender rights, the list goes on) without stepping on the toes of power.

Realistically, the past both sides of this are yearning for is one that worked in a period of prodigious exploitation of new avenues and expansion of old ones as they related to the new (or growth, if you prefer).

This is no longer the case as the appearance of anything that has the momentum to keep the whole mass of debt moving becomes a rarer and rarer event, LLMs are/were the next big thing that was being banked on to keep it all going for the next decade or two, but even if that pays off the same crisis is looming down the road.

Neither 'side' has a satisfactory solution to this problem as their power all acts through the same levers, hence the recurring patterns absolutely everywhere. Insofar as I can see, the answer has to come from us seizing back power to dissipate its concentrations throughout us as a whole, or these things are going to keep happening.