Democrat Bigshot Evokes Jackie Robinson To Stop Re-Districting. Finds Out Jackie Was Republican

“You know, this is a Muhammad Ali moment. This is a Bill Russell moment. It’s a Jackie Robinson moment.”— U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on SCOTUS removing gerrymandering.

Sports and politics go together like a fish and a bicycle. But that doesn’t stop those in public office from trying to bend sports to their bidding. The popularity of sports in America makes it a lucrative target for radicals who want change “by any means necessary.”

The latest attempt at using athletes to influence public policy comes from the house leader of the Democrats in Congress, Hakeem Jeffries. You’d think he’d be happy as polls show his party aimed at winning back the house of Representatives in the midterm elections this November. And maybe even the Senate.

But now redistricting in a number of states has thrown a curve at Jeffries & Co. The Republicans stand to win as many as 15 districts that once had gerrymandered borders in Texas, Florida, Georgia and Missouri to allow for “black” sure things. Democrats stand to win 6-8 seats from redistricting in their blue states like California and Virginia. In a House with a slim five-seat GOP margin this is significant.

For Democrats who obsess about politics 24/7/365, getting tripped up by Republican pushback would be doubly galling. Because GOP don’t live and breath politics arcane electoral processes have favoured the Dems for decades. Racial discrimination was tolerated in the name of diversity or equity. 

But then came the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health in which SCOTUS returned abortion decisions to the states. And now Louisiana v. Callais has ruled against racial quotas in drawing up districts. Sure things are anything but for radical feminists and racial-grievance scolds like Jeffries.

Oh, did we mention that almost 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court found that racial quotas in university admissions violated the 14th Amendment? “The court later declared all racial preferences to be unconstitutional.,”says legal scholar Jonathan Turley. “Yet, for decades, a form of political affirmative action has persisted under the Voting Rights Act, where federal courts required racial gerrymandering to guarantee the election of minority members to Congress.”

As a result of unlimited immigration being shut down, the Democrats are vowing to use other methods— stacking the Supreme Court and granting statehood to Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia— to find votes. In that vein Jeffries is now demanding that black athletes boycott playing for SEC schools in states that support Louisiana v. Callais .

If ever followed this boycott would send black athletes north of the Mason Dixon Line to play for schools in blue states. The SEC could turn into a white-dominated conference across all its sports.Jeffries acknowledged that such moves will “require a level of courage and character and conviction,” but he added that it would be worth it. Because he’s a millionaire with a public profile. The tipoff is that all this heat was delivered on ultra liberal Chris Hayes show on MSNOW

Don’t laugh. Using sports as a whipping stick has worked in the past. For example, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred made the decision to move the 2021 All-Star events and the amateur draft from Atlanta when progressive critics complained in 2021 that voting-rights changes in Georgia were too restrictive. (MLB later returned the ASG to Atlanta in 2026, because something, something, something. 

Then, in 2016-17, the NCAA stripped North Carolina of seven championship events to protest the law, which required transgender people use bathrooms matching the sex on their birth certificate rather than their gender identity. The ban has since been reversed, but not before hot national gender debate on the topic. 

Jeffries’ firebrand rhetoric is apparently a family thing. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an Ohio State University professor, is the brother of Hakeem Jeffries. He has joined the mantra on the left for citizens to rise up and fight the system “by any means necessary.” He menacingly called for others to emulate John Brown.

Brown is best known from the song about his “body lying a-moldering in a grave" after being hanged in Virginia in 1859 for the murders of pro-slave owners and sympathizers. Since that time his bloody reputation has been excused with racial-justice initiatives.  Still, Hasan Jeffries riling up the loners with guns in America is a scary proposition, as seen all too often of late.

A final irony in the invocation of Jackie Robinson, a college graduate from UCLA, being used to ask blacks to sacrifice their futures?  Robinson was a Republican in a time when the GOP introduced Brown v. Topeka to end segregation in schools. And the DEMs were the Dixiecrat party of the KKK, Jim Crow and coloured restaurants, washrooms and water fountains.

As Chekov said, "You will not become a saint through other people's sins." But Hakeem Jeffries is willing to give it one more try. 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his 2023 book Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, was voted a Top 20 greatest professional hockey books of all time by bookauthority.org . https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1770415300?linkCode=gs2&tag=uuid0a1-20 His previous book with his son Evan, Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books at https://www.amazon.ca/dp/106980270