A dose of online brotherly love humanized a chaotic speaker vote

Growing up, my older sister was the faster runner, the cute one (at least until I grew into my teeth), and definitely the person you wanted on your side when you had a beef with someone.

I could talk a big game — but once she took off her earrings, no adversary stood a chance.

So I know a little something about the special brand of bragging and banter necessary to maintain the delicate balance of sibling synergy — and my sister didn’t even grow up to be the House minority leader.

Like many people last week, I was glued — mostly on Twitter — to the chaotic speaker vote where GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy was repeatedly rejected for House speaker while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries secured 212 votes — the first time since 2007 that a Democratic leader has won support from every member of their caucus. (McCarthy finally won after 15 votes and who-knows-how-many concessions.)

But Rep. Jeffries, 52, who made history as the first Black lawmaker to lead a major party in Congress, wasn’t the only Jeffries getting noticed.

Jeffries’ younger brother, Hasan Kwame Jeffries — @ProfJeffries on Twitter — took to the site to offer the kind of playful ribbing only a sibling could get away with, gaining upwards of 10,000 new Twitter followers in the process.

The younger Jeffries — “by two years and five months” — is impressive in his own right: a historian, author, and professor at Ohio State University, he regularly lectures on civil rights, African American history, and contemporary Black politics.

He happened to speak with me last month for a column about how we talk about problematic U.S. history, but I wasn’t aware he was half of the Jeffries sib-dynasty until he took to Twitter to offer the kind of bouncy commentary many of us needed.

“Finding you was the best part of the Speaker fight,” said one Twitter user.

When another Twitter user commented that “Kevin McCarthy has broken the record for the number of times one person has lost to Hakeem Jeffries,” the younger Jeffries was quick to correct the record:

“Oh, how I wish this was true!” he tweeted, before going on to acknowledge years of defeats at the hands of his older brother in backyard basketball games in the ‘80s “before my growth spurt,” and the ‘90s “after my growth spurt,” and “a mini streak at the Ohio State Rec Center in 2010.”

“Kev has absolutely nothing to worry about — the record is safe,” Jeffries tweeted.

In another post, with a photo of Tuesday’s ballot that showed his brother with a consistent 212 votes, Jeffries wrote: “The #GOP needs to get its act together because I already see where this is going.”

Oh, anyone with brothers or sisters saw that: Watching your sibling rivalry nightmare become a reality as the spotlight shines on the new favorite.

Not that it was all jokes. In one especially sweet tweet, the professor posted a photo of his three daughters — ages 12, 10, and 7 — watching the vote on MSNBC.

“I think they’ll remember today,” he wrote.

For sure, many of the elder Jeffries’ supporters won’t soon forget his first official speech as House minority leader that included an alphabetized rundown of his party’s priorities.

“House Democrats,” he said, “will always put American values over autocracy, benevolence over bigotry, the Constitution over the cult, democracy over demagogues, economic opportunity over extremism, freedom over fascism …”

If you missed it, watch the whole thing and check out the epic version posted to Twitter and spectacularly set to an instrumental version of Nas’ “Ether.”

I reached out to the younger Jeffries to talk about his tweets and his relationship with his brother, but he did the solid protective brotherly thing and said it was probably best to let his tweets speak for themselves.

“Politics is a bloodsport, and this just makes Sunday dinners a whole lot easier,” Jeffries said in a direct message on Twitter. He said that his silly, self-deprecating tweets were just his way of “spreading love the brotherly way — with a little good-natured ribbing from a little brother unbelievably proud of his big brother!”

I get it. All these years later, I like to say I didn’t need my sister’s brawn because I had the gift of banter, but that’s just big talk from a little sister who knows it was the spirited back and forth with her older sibling that allowed me to refine the verbal jabs that would later come to serve me in my profession.

But there’s a little more here. Besides being a stark contrast to those royal siblings across the pond, the obvious respect and affection between the Jeffries brothers have served to humanize politics in a way that’s been sorely lacking in recent years.

“I found and followed you first, which led me to Hakeem,” one Twitter user wrote. “It opened my eyes to your brother’s leadership in a way it hadn’t before. I hope you get extra hugs for that.”

Let’s hope those extra hugs don’t end anytime soon because we are in desperate need of this kind of brotherly love.