By Florence Mafomemeh                    

Brooklyn is in the House and Senate. Senator Chuck Schumer and Rep Hakeem Jeffries are making Brooklyn and New York proud by becoming the two most powerful lawmakers in Congress. Jeffries, who took over from Nancy Pelosi as Democratic leader in the House after her twenty-year tenure made history by becoming the first black leader in Congress while Schumer  returned as leader of the Senate after Democrats maintained control with a plus one majority, which is now 50-50 due to Kyrsten Sinema’s switch to Independent. 

The two sons of Crown Heights who have known each other for a long time, have a lot in common, the most important being their shared leadership style: they move easily among progressives and centrists alike.

Also, they are pretty close neighbors. Schumer’s current home is just about 10 blocks outside the district lines for Jeffries, according to aides. Schumer spent 18 years in the House, representing some of the same neighborhoods currently represented by the incoming minority leader.

Schumer agreed that his and Jeffries’ mutual hometown gives them an understanding of one another. “First, getting along with all different kinds of people. Second: persistence. Don’t let barriers get into your way,” he said. “The ‘persist’ part is Brooklyn, all the way.” 

The two New Yorkers have already had plenty of experience working together in the policy realm. They’ve teamed up on issues like legislation on decriminalizing marijuana, public housing and handicap accessibility for the Broadway Junction station in their shared borough.

Schumer and Jeffries, 20 years apart in age, share a few other similarities. Both served in the New York Assembly: Schumer from 1975 to 1980, and Jeffries from 2007 to 2012.

Jeffries, 52, and Schumer, 72, both attended Brooklyn’s Midwood High School and Madison High School respectively, hail from different Brooklyn eras and lives, and have made history, Jeffries, as the first Black leader of a congressional caucus, a few years after Schumer made history as the first Jewish leader of a congressional caucus.

Also, they both plot their rise to power from that same borough, learning how to scrape their way through what would be the nation’s fourth-largest city if Brooklyn were on its own.

“I was born at Brooklyn Hospital, raised in Crown Heights by my two parents, who were public employees, a case worker and a social worker,” Jeffries told reporters at a news conference after his unanimous vote to take the reins, almost growing a bit emotional. “In a middle-class, working-class neighborhood in the midst of the crack cocaine epidemic in the ’80s and into the early ’90s.”

In a brief interview Tuesday, Schumer said: “It’s a very crowded place, so to get somewhere you really got to fight and work hard. Second, it’s a very diverse place, so you’ve got to work with all kinds of different people, and the message of Brooklyn is: Never give up.”

Only twice before has the same state produced leaders of House and Senate caucuses from the same party, at the same time, according to Donald Ritchie, an emeritus historian of the Senate. Most recently, in the 1950s, Texas produced a House speaker, Sam Rayburn, and a Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, but the Democrats’ hometowns sat more than 300 miles apart. In the early 1920s, Massachusetts had the same two titles in its fold, with the GOP Senate majority leader, Henry Cabot Lodge, hailing from Boston and the Republican House speaker, Frederick Gillett, from nearly 100 miles away in Springfield.