On the eve of the midterm election, Gov. Kathy Hochul told a Brooklyn crowd how she planned to use New York’s new clout.
“I cannot wait when I call up Hakeem Jeffries and say, ‘Mr. Speaker, I kind of need a few more billions of dollars for New York,’” she said at a rally in Williamsburg, according to THE CITY. “Then I call Chuck Schumer: ‘Mr. Majority Leader, I need a few more billions of dollars for New York State.’ Get used to it, America. Because we’re in charge.”
Less than 24 hours later, Democrats won both chambers of Congress, and if Jeffries and Schumer win their leadership votes come January, two Brooklynites will lead Congress opposite a Queens-born president. For the first time in U.S. history, sons of New York are poised to run both chambers of Congress and the White House.
Hochul, again, come Tuesday night: “Can you imagine New York state having both leaders of both bodies in Congress? Everybody’s going to want to move to New York because we’re the political club of the nation,” per Crain’s reporter Jack Grieve. “Imagine a world where I actually have a Congress, a House and a Senate, that are not fighting me, but working as partners to deliver even more for New York.”
The three men grew up within about 11 miles of one another: President Donald Trump in Jamaica Estates, Queens, and Schumer and Jeffries just a few miles apart in Brooklyn, in Midwood and Crown Heights.
The last time the House and Senate were led by people from the same state was when Texans Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson held the top jobs, respectively, an overlap that ended in 1961. Jeffries would also be the first House speaker from New York state in nearly 160 years, in addition to being the first from New York City and the first Black speaker.
New York came close once. In 2018, after Schumer became the Senate minority leader, Queens Democrat Joe Crowley was the House’s fourth-ranking Democrat and a likely successor to Nancy Pelosi. He also chaired what City & State called arguably the most powerful county committee in the state. Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat him in a primary and Jeffries succeeded Crowley as chair of the House Democratic Caucus, the post that set him on the path to the speakership today.
New York’s reach in Washington extends beyond just Congress. Two of the nine Supreme Court justices were born in New York City: Sonia Sotomayor in the Bronx and Elena Kagan in Manhattan. Outside of Gotham, Chief Justice John Roberts was born in Buffalo and Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh, who took over the central bank in May, was born in Albany.
So the question now is what can the Big Apple and Empire State reap from the outer-borough love? Is it going to be like how Brooklyn’s own Biggie said in his 1994 instant bop “Juicy,” that the two chambers of Congress will get to “Spread love, it’s the Brooklyn way”?
Or as the Queens-bred 50 Cent said, will the president tell them that he (and potential but improbable White House spox Nicki Minaj) is “from Queens where we are taught to handle beef on our own”?
New York ‘will get its fair share’
Politics aside, it’s all about infrastructure for Gotham City.
At the top of the list of wishes is Gateway, the $16 billion rail tunnel under the Hudson River. The idea dates to 2004 and survived New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s cancellation of an earlier version in 2010.
Just last fall, during the government shutdown, Trump froze its funding. “It’s billions and billions of dollars that Schumer has worked 20 years to get—it’s terminated,” he wrote on Truth Social—and then he later suggested he’d restore the money if Penn Station and Dulles International Airport were renamed for him. This past July, a federal judge permanently blocked the freeze.
There’s also Sunnyside Yard, a plan to build 12,000 homes over a Queens rail yard that the mayor’s office says would need more than $21 billion in federal grants. When Trump visited Gracie Mansion in September, the first visit by a sitting president in decades, he and fellow-Queens-rep Mayor Zohran Mamdani discussed the project.
Trump said he’d been watching the site for 35 years. In the 1980s, he floated an arena there for his New Jersey Generals football team. “You’re going to need a lot of federal approvals and probably some federal money to do it,” he told Mamdani in front of reporters, before insinuating that he would be open to giving the city the funds to do it.
New Yorkers also want money for the Second Avenue subway extension, plus relief for the more than 20,000 affected by changes to SNAP and the more than 400,000 facing Medicaid changes. Following Tuesday’s wave, Rep. Gregory Meeks of Queens predicted New York “will get its fair share,” per NY1. Even Mamdani, who seems to have gain favor with the president, said following the midterms that having leaders “from our city and of our city” is “of incredible importance.”
Far cry from ‘Drop Dead’
New York knows what it’s like to lose in Washington. During the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis, the New York Daily News summed up the federal response in a famous headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
After Hurricane Sandy, the state’s congressional delegation sought about $60 billion in federal aid, and after a very public debate between Ted Cruz and Schumer, was offered just a little more than $27 billion. (Schumer, for his part, following the devastation of Hurricane Harvey in Texas, gave Cruz the funds he requested years later.)
“It definitely would have been different if New Yorkers had been in charge,” Pete King, then a Republican congressman from Long Island, told the New York Times. “If you have to have Democrats in charge, as a New Yorker it’s better to have Schumer and Jeffries.”
Who knows what happens next. In addition Trump, Schumer, and Jeffries, New York has even more muscle to flex: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin is a former Long Island congressman; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is in charge of the Democratic Party’s Senate campaign arm, and Bronx-and Queens Rep. AOC is weighing a 2028 presidential run or a Senate bid.
Maybe they all do what Ja Rule suggested in his 2004 song and tell the rest of the country: “We from New York.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com