Power For Power's Sake
Nancy Pelosi has had enough of the repeated assaults on political norms and decency. She has tried to work with her opposition, to find common ground in order to get our country back on track. Her efforts have been for naught, however, as her opponents simply refuse to budge. So yesterday, Pelosi took action against her adversaries.
Pelosi’s job as a leader – nay, a hero – is to hold people politically accountable for their actions, to defend the defenseless, to protect the marginalized from bullies and despots-in-waiting. And there is nobody more willing to shoulder that burden than Nancy Pelosi. Sure, it took a little longer than some of us might have liked for her to act, but better late than never. The important thing is that Nancy Pelosi, a modern-day Joan of Arc, finally unsheathed her sword of justice, and her foes will receive their long-overdue comeuppance. Her target: President Donald J. Tru-- wait, nope, that’s not it, sorry.
Her target: Progressive members of her own party.
POLITICO reported yesterday that in a closed-door meeting Wednesday morning, Pelosi scolded progressive Democrats for criticizing moderate and centrist Democrats on Twitter. According to a “source in the room” (probably Pelosi herself, considering how quickly this leaked and also because I’m sure she thinks this makes her look good), Pelosi laid down the law, telling the assembled representatives “[Y]ou got a complaint? You come and talk to me about it. But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just ok.”
Pelosi’s admonishment came just three days after her interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, during which she publicly aired her grievances about Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. In the Times interview, Pelosi made clear her disdain for the four progressive women of color who have loudly criticized America’s policy of detaining immigrants and, by extension, the centrists whose hard-on for bipartisanship helped precipitate these conditions:
“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got. […] If the left doesn’t think I’m left enough, so be it. As I say to these people, come to my basement. I have these signs about single-payer from 30 years ago.”
In yesterday’s meeting, Pelosi told the progressive caucus that she’s “here to help the children when it’s easy and when it’s hard. Some of you are here to make a beautiful pâté but we’re making sausage most of the time.” And this, I believe, tells you everything you need to know about Nancy Pelosi and her ilk.
The signs in Nancy’s basement represent thirty years’ worth of failure to deliver what people desperately need. Thirty years of allowing pieces of what ought to be a basic human right to be chipped away bit by bit by bad-faith political opposition and moneyed special interests. Thirty years of concessions, one after the other, until what remains is a piecemeal solution that does little to address the underlying problem, and even less to satisfy critics or advocates. Those signs should be a source of shame; Pelosi believes she deserves credit for not throwing them away.
And then there’s the wildly tone-deaf “pâté/sausage” analogy (nothing says I’m not a coastal elite like fucking goose liver), which speaks to Pelosi’s view of the political process. For politicians like Pelosi or Joe Biden or any other centrist fossil still haunting the halls of American democracy, progress comes at a price, usually in the pounds of flesh extracted by this senator, that representative, this lobbyist. The process must not be interfered with. To some extent, they’re right: “because people need it” is somehow not a good enough reason for politicians to take action anymore. But in her contemptuous dismissal of Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley and Tlaib, Pelosi fails to recognize the fact that those four – and many others, including to some degree our president – won their elections by tapping into voters’ distaste for this inch-by-inch style of governance.
A bill that everyone on both sides of the aisle can agree on is functionally useless. If the House introduced a bill tomorrow that reaffirmed water as useful, some dipshit with a name like Dewey Chudston (R-Ky.) would vote “Nay” because Americans should have the freedom to decide for themselves about water, this is a Soros-funded plot to take down Coca-Cola! Pelosi thinks it’s harmful that progressives are agitating for actually progressive policies because she has already determined that such legislation won’t pass, and if it doesn’t pass, then Democrats “lose” that battle. The solution, therefore, is to focus on appearing to want those things.
Why? Because for politicians like Pelosi, what you do in office is a secondary concern – the real goal is to hang onto your office for as long as possible. Voters will support a politician who doesn’t get anything done, as long as they believe that politician is on their side. In fact, actually getting things done can make a politician’s job less stable – when their legislation passes, they own it, for better or worse. If it helps people, the politician gets the credit; if it doesn’t, they get the blame. Bipartisanship isn’t some lofty ideal, it’s just a way to spread the blame if it all goes sideways.
Pelosi has cultivated a reputation as someone who can get things done. Such a reputation would normally suggest that her career has been spent fighting for progress, which is why so many Pundit-Brained liberals are throwing their support behind the lady who…wants to do nothing (but wears cool shoes!). But Pelosi’s accomplishments aren’t evidence of a fighting spirit; if anything, they’re a testament to her habit of avoiding fights she’s not completely certain she’ll win.
The original Affordable Care Act included a public option; that is, a government-run insurance plan that could negotiate rates with doctors and hospitals, much as private insurers do now. The key difference – one that, in Pelosi’s own words, would save more money for consumers and the government and was “essential” to the success of the ACA – is that the public option would be tied to the rates set by the government; that is, Medicare rates, which one study estimates are almost 40% lower than rates established by private insurers. But at the first sign of pushback, Pelosi bent, allowing the government-run plan to be tied to rates set by private insurers instead of the government. This, of course, would give the public option a much higher starting point for negotiation, which makes the whole thing less cost-effective – consumers aren’t going to go through the hassle of switching over their insurance plan to save 5% – and effectively defeats the purpose of the public option in the first place.
When House Republicans still weren’t satisfied (because they never will be until all the poor people who need help are dead), Pelosi abandoned the fight for a public option entirely, along with key provisions that would have allowed states to experiment with single-payer models and see if Medicare For All worked for their populations. In the long run, Pelosi’s capitulation put a ceiling on the benefits of the ACA, which in turn gave the GOP ammunition to say that the ACA doesn’t work and should be dismantled.
Admittedly, that was a tough time, and Pelosi sacrificed the nice-to-haves to ensure the success of the must-haves. Plus, now that the push for a true federal single-payer system is gaining steam and the majority of the population supports Medicare For All, she can finally go back and finish what she started, right? Sure…except in April, Pelosi told the Washington Post that she’s “agnostic” on Medicare For All, doesn’t really think it can be done and, therefore, has no plans to try and push for it. But hey: she’s still got the signs in her basement.
To be fair, Pelosi is right that there’s value in presenting a united front. The problem is, the message behind which Pelosi wants Democrats to unify is Sorry folks, it’s just real tough here in Washington what with all the political gridlock – we’ll get ‘em next time. She sees doing nothing as a viable political strategy because for decades, it was. The progressives that Pelosi regards with such scorn are agitating on behalf of everyone who has to live with the consequences of her inaction. She is contemptuous of them because they are a disruption to the established order of things and, by extension, a bellwether of her impending irrelevance.
Beneath the myth of “Nancy Pelosi: Badass Kween” is the real Nancy Pelosi who, like most old politicians who talk about our children’s children and future generations to come, doesn’t actually give a shit about the future – as far as she’s concerned, the world will end when she dies. So instead of leveraging her 30-plus years of “bipartisan cooperation” to actually fight for something worthwhile, she’s in legacy-preserving mode. She’d rather spend her remaining years in office burnishing her reputation with a few more piddly-shit victories than pursue something worthwhile.
Amassing political capital is great, but at some point it needs to be spent. Nancy Pelosi just wants to hoard hers because when it comes down to it, she’s in this for herself.
No wonder progressives bother her so much.