Nancy Pelosi, Continued

You might think that, after devoting the entire contents of my blog for the month of June to lecturing Nancy Pelosi on the subject of impeaching D***** T****, I was entirely done with the subject of Madame Speaker.

But you would be wrong.

At the end of June, after pressure from an outraged public that had finally seen enough of the worse-than-deplorable conditions in the concentration camps T**** has built at the border for Central America refugees, Congress passed a bill that provided additional money to alleviate, if not exactly improve, those conditions.

But the bill that was passed was passed was a bill that was forced on Pelosi by--you guessed it--the Senate's majority leader, Mitch McCONnell, who insisted that the legislation not include any restrictions that would restrict the use of the money for so-called "enforcement"--translation:  "torture"--purposes.

In my "open letter" to the Speaker, I had pointed out that, on the subject of impeachment, McCONnell was manipulating her and the members of the majority caucus into refraining from using a power that not only is manifestly theirs, but for which popular support was far greater than they were allowing themselves to believe.  In conjunction with that, I expressed concern that Pelosi's supposed "prudence" on the subject of impeachment was in fact telegraphing weakness to her opponents--a weakness that could end up limiting what House Democrats can do with regard to other issues.

That's why I'm writing about this now.  It was in the back of my mind when I was writing my "open letter." because the kerfuffle over the bill took place just a few days prior to my doing so.  But I needed space to catch up on and address other aspects of the failure-to-impeach crisis, and so I'm keeping a promise to myself that I would come back this month and address the migrant funding legislation.

And, as the fallout from the passage of the bill has shown, there's no reason to not do now, and expand on the points I made previously.

All the more so because, in addition to illustrating how T**** and McCONnell are exploiting the vacuum Pelosi has created by not leading on the impeachment process, it also illustrates how they are using that exploitation to weaken, and potentially destroy, the fragile unity that Pelosi has (to her credit) thus far has created and maintained between progressive and moderate Democrats.  For, in the final House vote on the bill, while three-fourths of all members voted for it, it was passed with far more Republican votes than Democratic ones.

Who were the Democrats who voted against it?  The progressives, who saw through McCONnell's bluff about the absence of restrictions on the use of the money.  They felt that the facts, combined with the Administration's well-earned lack of support, justified their inclusion.  Moderates, on the other hand, worried about the prospect of holding children hostage for the sake of what they felt their constituents would perceive to be little more than a political food fight.

In doing so, however, the moderates failed to take into account the fact that McCONnell had, in effect, already taken the children hostage, and was merely including the lack of restrictions at the behest of T****, for whom he has become little more than a legislative ribbon-clerk.  This should have been a fight worth having, and one that could easily have been explained to most if not all Americans.  But, for reasons that continue to elude many people, including me, moderate House Democrats are afraid to do that.

Is their fear of T**** that great?  Do they perceive has power to actually be that great?  If they're unable to go to the proverbial mattresses for the sake of children whose lives are at risk, the answer to that question has to be "yes."

I don't know what can be done to get them past that fear.  Maybe nothing.  Maybe they're so afraid of T****'s "hidden power" (e.g., dark money from Russia) that they don't dare fight him and his political allies on anything.  Even something that all of us should be willing to support.  Like, for example, doing the most we can for vulnerable children at our doorstep.

I have no illusion that there's a path to getting a House of Representatives with 218+ AOC's is going to happen in the short-term.  Or even the long-term.  It would be easier to get to a Senate that has 51 members with a "D" after each of their names, and that seems impossibly hard to imagine right now.  But we, as a part and a people, have simply got to do much better than this.

And, in the short run, the responsibility falls on the shoulder of one person:  Pelosi. 

And, rather than stepping up to meet the crisis, she seems to be shrinking further and further away from it.  Or attempting to.

Take, for example, her handling--or, for the moment, her failure to handle--of the fallout of the Jeffrey Epstein child abuse scandal on T****'s Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, the former federal prosecutor who let Epstein spectacularly off the hook in an earlier child abuse case.  As ever, Pelosi quickly telegraphed her willingness to be timid in the face of a need to act.  Luckily, Acosta resigned anyway, which is a tribute either to public outcry or the potential for the Epstein case to expose even more T**** perfidy.  That sound, in any case, like a blog post--or, perhaps, a series of posts--to be made at a later date.

But, even worse, Pelosi seems to be willing to use her press contacts to go on the offense against the progressive members of her caucus.  Take, for example, this interview with Maureen Dowd, in which she dismisses four of the most progressive, and politically intriguing, members of her caucus as "four votes," with their "public whatever and their Twitter world."  With that quote, she became every bit as rhetorically hard on them as she has been on her Republican opponents.

To what end?  This is beginning to feel more than anything like Pelosi is more concerned about the generational gap within the Democratic Party than she is about advancing causes that a truly focused leader could use to bring Democrats together.  She's term-limited herself to January of 2023, by which time she hopes a Democratic President, coupled perhaps with a Democratic Senate, will allow her to finish her career with a flourish.

Is she willing to do that with what amounts to a coalition of moderates in her party and Republicans, as she did with the migrant relief bill?  Is she so focused on the short-term finish of her career that she is willing to sell out not only the future of her party, but also the most sensitive needs of those with the most to lose?

I'm afraid that Madame Speaker may very well find that, if she continues to run from the clear and present danger that T****, McCONnell, and their cronies pose, she may never get to that future glorious send-off she imagines.  If she continues to act more like a Republican leader than a Democratic one, the power she's trying to protect may evaporate right in front of her eyes--and, with it, the shared hopes of most Americans of different ideological stripes.

For G-d's sake, Nancy, fight!  Find some of your father's guts, and use them. Otherwise, the future that you want, and the future that all members of your party want, may never arrive.