Today, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on MS NOW’s All In With Chris Hayes, where he emphasized that Democrats will continue to push back on Donald Trump’s reckless war of choice in the Middle East and the administration’s requests to continue spending taxpayer dollars in ways that do not make life better or more affordable for the American people.

CHRIS HAYES: Congressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York is the House Democratic Leader and he joins me now. Do you feel that you have a strong understanding of even what the U.S. objectives are? I mean, Tulsi Gabbard said today that the President has been clear about what the objectives are. They differ from what Israel’s are. And she sort of sputtered a little bit in trying to describe that tension. But are you even clear what our objectives are?

LEADER JEFFRIES: It’s a great question, Chris, and the administration has articulated shifting objectives. One day it’s regime change. The next day it’s about stopping Iran’s nuclear aspirations, even though the President claimed several months ago that Iran’s nuclear program had been completely and totally obliterated. Day after that, it was about stepping in to protect Iranian civilians, to try to push back against the Iranian regime. Then the day after that they’ll say it’s about intercontinental ballistic missiles, where there’s no evidence that Iran actually has missiles that could strike the United States. Then they have a broad claim saying that it was about an imminent threat to the United State of America, and their own former national security professionals acknowledge that there was no imminent threat to America. This is the reason why, Chris, amongst many others, that the war is so deeply unpopular because the American people understand there’s no justification for it. It’s a reckless war of choice. And billions of dollars are being spent to drop bombs in the Middle East while this administration can’t find a dime to actually make healthcare more affordable for the American people.

CHRIS HAYES: Speaking of those billion dollars. Today we got this headline. The Pentagon is going to try to get $200 billion dollars in a budget request for the Iran war. CNN reporting there’s some cracks emerging in the GOP over the Iran war cost. Some, a little bit of dissent from some Members in Congress about that price tag. I’m imagining you’re a no on this. But the question is, are you confident you can hold an entire Democratic Caucus together in the House and get full unanimity in a no for that $200 billion supplemental?

LEADER JEFFRIES: Yeah, we’ll have to have that conversation, but as your suspicions suggest, Chris, it would be my expectation that there is strong Democratic opposition against the notion of continuing to pour billions of dollars of additional money into a war with no justification, no plan, no strategy and no clear indication as to how to get out of it where there was no rationale to get into it in the first place. And, in fact, Donald Trump said as Candidate Trump that he was not going to get us into a reckless war of choice in the Middle East and then President Trump got us into a wreckless war of choice in the Middle East wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money. And the notion of them coming to Congress asking for $200 billion more is so beyond the pale that I’ve got to hope that these reports are inaccurate.

CHRIS HAYES: There was a War Powers vote, I think, a few weeks ago, in which Democrats, all but I think five, I want to say, on the Whip count, voted to force basically a restraint, a resolution, right? They would have forced a vote where Congress would have had to okay the action. My understanding of the reporting was that leadership whipped that vote. You whipped that vote, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, others, right. This was an important vote. Are you committed to whipping a vote on the supplemental if, in fact, they come to you for $200 billion, and really making this a priority for leadership?

LEADER JEFFRIES: Well, I don’t want to get out ahead of Whip Katherine Clark, because those are conversations that we have. But needless to say, clearly, there’s deep skepticism that I’ve publicly articulated, and other members of leadership have publicly articulated, including the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, Rosa DeLauro. But we’ll have that conversation when we need to have that conversation. What I can say is that it’s my expectation that we will have another War Powers Resolution vote sooner rather than later, potentially as early as next week, and we’re going to try to get to uniform Democratic support and get a handful of Republicans to join us so we can stop this reckless war of choice so that we don’t even have to deal with the possibility of considering some kind of request for $200 billion in additional taxpayer money who, as Bernie Sanders said, so much can be done with that to actually make life better for the American people in healthcare, in nutritional assistance, in housing and in other areas.

CHRIS HAYES: Well, I have to say, you know, everyone’s forgotten about the weird DOGE months in Washington when the President came in and Elon Musk set loose a bunch of twenty-somethings with AI to go fire a bunch of folks. But I, like, talked to, like, a park ranger that made $48,000 a year that lost their job. There are people that worked with veterans who lost their jobs. There are people that work in food safety that lost their job. We cut off emergency nutrition to some of the poorest, most starving people in the world. I mean, what does it say to you to say they’re going to spend $200 billion after going through all that?

LEADER JEFFRIES: I mean, it’s such an extraordinarily out-of-pocket request, out of bounds, out of control. I mean, the extremists just continue to show the American people who they are: the same group of people who enacted the largest cuts of Medicaid in American history, literally ripped healthcare away from 14 million Americans and, in that same One Big Ugly Bill, enacted the largest cut to nutritional assistance. They took $186 billion away from hungry children, veterans and seniors in America to give ICE a $75 billion slush fund to brutalize and kill American citizens, to give their billionaire donors a massive tax break and now they want to come back to the taxpayers for an additional $200 billion for a reckless war of choice. The whole thing is so extreme, so extraordinary in its request that you would think it was being written by a Hollywood screenwriter, this is not reality. But unfortunately, this is the national nightmare that we’re living through right now in Trump’s America, and we’re going to do everything we need to do to get through it, starting by winning the midterm elections in November.

Full interview can be watched here.

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