Don’t Fall for the Trickle-down Opposition to Nancy Pelosi
It boils down to one question: Why give conservative Democrats the Speaker of the House that they want?
There’s a reason only one Speaker of the House has ever become President of the United States: you don’t always make decisions that your constituents or your party appreciates. In fact, Speaker of the House is a thankless job. You are a leader of your party, but behind the scenes you’re consistently making compromises — both outside and within your own party. A political party should never place its rising stars or presidential prospects in the job, because Speakers instantly becoming polarizing figures.
The last two Speakers have been abysmal failures. John Boehner failed to stop the Tea Party insurgency that ultimately led to the Republican Party’s descent into rabid Trumpism, and as soon as he realized the magnitude of his failure, he bailed out. Paul Ryan didn’t even attempt to harness President Trump’s worst instincts, and he quit rather than risk disgracefully losing his seat in the blue wave that he could see coming from two years away.
This poisoned-chalice aspect of the job might be why the 16 House Democrats who signed a letter protesting Representative Nancy Pelosi’s bid to become the next Speaker of the House yesterday conspicuously didn’t nominate anyone to oppose her. They simply asked for “new leadership.”
My Twitter feed is full of progressives who want to give Pelosi the boot. Several have argued that she doesn’t deserve the title because she failed to pass a decent Obamacare plan the last time she was speaker. That’s just plain wrong; the Obamacare bill that Pelosi passed in the House included a government-run health provider option that later got axed in the Senate thanks to Senator Joe Lieberman.
I’m bothered that the Congressional protesters haven’t offered an alternative to Pelosi. But even more worrying is the fact that I’m not sure what the motivations of the signers are. The opposition to Pelosi includes some of the most conservative members of the Democratic Party, and these are people I don’t trust to select a speaker more in line with the party’s values.
Oregon Representative Kurt Schrader is one of Pelosi’s loudest critics. Aside from his obviously cool name, Schrader has a lot of problems. He’s a self-described centrist Democrat who very vocally stands against Medicare-for-all and he’s a proud supporter of the trickle-down fallacy that business owners, not consumers, are “actually the real job-creators.”
There are other conservative Democrats on the letter, but perhaps worst of all is incoming New Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew, who US News & World Report says as a state representative “opposed making New Jersey a sanctuary state protecting residents in the country illegally and fought against a minimum wage hike to $15.” That’s significantly to the right of Pelosi, who argued that compromising with conservatives on their regressive immigration policy would be akin to “a deal with the devil” and who vowed to fight for a national $15 minimum wage as Speaker.
Am I arguing that the Democratic Party needs an ideological test for all incoming Congresspeople? Absolutely not. To represent all Americans, we need an array of perspectives and beliefs on our team. But I am arguing that the party shouldn’t allow its most conservative members to select its incoming leader. To do that would give up the whole fight before it even starts.
Now, some of the 16 Congresspeople who signed that letter are fine politicians and good progressives. But I remain skeptical that this coalition of right-leaning and left-leaning Democrats is going to agree on a single candidate to oppose Pelosi. Usually, a leader is required to forge cooperation between the two disparate sides of the party, not the other way around.
Of course, Democrats are right to have some concerns. In 2008, President Obama and Speaker Pelosi failed to elevate enough young Democrats to leadership positions, thereby creating a vacuum of power when the party was wiped out in the 2010 midterms. But Pelosi has confirmed to rock-star Seattle Representative Pramila Jayapal that she’s learned from that mistake and the younger, progressive faces of this year’s blue wave will be better represented in House leadership this January.
And of course progressives will still have to agitate for the causes that we believe in, no matter who’s in charge. Americans should never relax and stop engaging with their elected officials. In efforts to find compromises with conservative, corporatist Democrats like Schrader and Van Drew, House leadership will invariably make some mistakes. (The tax policies that Nick Hanauer wrote about earlier this week are a fine example of a bad deal for Democrats.) It’s our job as Americans to remind them that we’re watching, and that there are some compromises we will not stomach.
The hardest truth for people to understand is that if a Speaker of the House does her job right, you don’t hear about half of what she does. In fact, if a Speaker does her job right you’re more likely to only hear about the outcomes you disagree with. You have to measure them by their track record. In her time as Speaker, Pelosi accomplished far more for the American people than both Speaker Ryan and Speaker Boehner combined, and she’s proven that she knows how to lead a party of progressive and conservative Democrats.
It all boils down to this: I don’t see anyone in the incoming Democratic House who could be a more effective leader than Nancy Pelosi. To my mind, nobody even comes close.
