Moe Lane

Check out the House Minority Leader’s reaction to being told that Barbara Boxer was retiring.  Dear Lord, but this is almost making me feel embarrassed on Nancy Pelosi’s behalf. (more…)

Just what the partisan hack ordered, in fact.

Behind [House Minority Leader Nancy] Pelosi [75 years old] are Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), who is 75, and Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), who at 74 has joked that he is the “baby” in the leadership team. This trio have held the top three spots in leadership for nine years, with Pelosi and Hoyer in the top spots for a dozen years.

It’s not that they’re old; it’s that they’ve all grown barnacles by now.  And the best part? They think that they’re doing something right.

It says something about the general, blessed uselessness of the Democratic caucus right now that this paragraph os what leaped out at me:

…what was probably the most dramatic leadership vote in the Democratic caucus, the contest for majority leader in 1976, 38 years ago. The winner was Texas’ Jim Wright, who would go on to become speaker after Tip O’Neill retired 10 years later. The loser was California’s Phil Burton. The vote was 148-147. Burton spent the rest of his life — he died suddenly in 1983, at 56 — trying to track down those who had committed to him but cast their secret ballot for Wright.

That sounds like the backstory for a pretty good political thriller. Or maybe a television episode.  God knows that nothing that House Democrats are doing right now qualifies…

Moe Lane

PS: Did they ever find out who did wrong by Burton?

Dana Milbank begins the Long Slog:

There are five 2014 House races still to be decided before we can answer a question of historical interest:

Was this the worst election for House Democrats since 1928? Or was it merely their worst since 1946?

Either way, the results do not reflect well on the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi — a conclusion that seems to have escaped Nancy Pelosi.

(more…)

Chris Cillizza is not quite gobsmacked:

Nine days ago, Democrats lost (at least) eight of their seats and their majority in the Senate.  On the House side, the party dipped to at their lowest level — in terms of raw number of seats held — since World War II. How did the party react to this rejection from the American public? By preparing to re-elect every single one of their top Congressional leaders, of course!

…but he can see gobsmacked from where he currently sits.  Basically, the Democrats are not going to change their leadership cadre.  This despite the utter disaster that befell the legislative branch of their party last week, mind you; and it’s not just that the Democrats lost the Senate and got rocked back on their heels in the House. It’s that Democrats in the state legislatures likewise got hammered.  I don’t believe in permanent Republican majorities than I believed in permanent Democratic ones, but one of the major things standing in the way of a new Democratic majority is their leadership cadre.  Robert Tracinski over at the Federalist noted that the Democratic party’s recruitment successes collapsed when it became clear that all those new, shiny Red State Democrats were there to rubber stamp urban liberal Democratic agendas. As long as the people who support that agenda still run the Democratic party, moving the needle again is going to be hard for the Democratic rank-and-file. (more…)

Oopsie:

I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis of what the comparison is to the status quo versus what will happen in our bill for those who seek insurance within the exchange.

When will these people learn that everyone is recording them, all the time, forever?

Moe Lane

PS: Background:

Pelosi on Gruber: "I don't know who he is. He didn't help write our bill."

— Sean Sullivan (@WaPoSean) November 13, 2014

PPS: Nancy Pelosi is everything that I could possibly want in a Democratic House Minority Leader.

It really is only about the money, at this point.  That’s Nancy Pelosi’s entire argument.

In a private call with her restive — and shrinking — flock — Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi pointed to her fundraising prowess as a reason to keep her post — while some of her top allies blamed President Barack Obama for the party’s woes.

Pelosi hopes to continue leading the caucus although many members are privately discussing when there will be a change in senior leadership ranks.

“I know where the money is,” the California Democrat said, according to sources on the call. “I know where to get it.”

That’s not something that you say when you’re serious about getting the majority back.  That’s what you say when you’re comfortable with the idea of being in a permanent minority for a while, because your districts are safe and will stay that way with a little cash.  Whether her fellow Democratic Members of Congress (who are, indeed, largely safe) agree will be… interesting.  Probably they will, though.  After all, they’re doing all right.  Only the weak lost their seats.

For a given value of ‘weak.’

Via @cayankee.

Moe Lane

And you will never, ever escape.

The last Democrat to challenge Nancy Pelosi for the party’s top House leadership spot—after a devastating loss of majority control in the tea-party wave of 2010—finds himself now completely out of Congress.

Former Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina can be seen on TV today as a side character in a Dish Network commercial featuring fellow former collegiate football greats. Gone from Congress, too, are many of Shuler’s former moderate “Blue Dog” colleagues in the House.

Now, four years later, Pelosi is not even waiting a few days to mull whether she should stay on as her party’s leader after yet another drubbing Tuesday at the polls. Rather, she sent out a “Dear colleague” letter on Wednesday to returning and newly elected House Democrats declaring that she is running again to be their caucus leader.

(more…)

I read stories like this, and the title is my reaction. Where was the money that Nancy Pelosi was given already?

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told colleagues on Tuesday that Democrats have an “urgent need” to give money to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the final days before the midterm election.

On a caucus-wide, members-only conference call, Pelosi and DCCC Chairman Steve Israel, of New York, stressed that members needed to quickly pay their party dues so Democrats would have cash to run last-minute ads and maintain get-out-the-vote programs, a Democratic aide said.

I kept getting told that the Democrats were raking in the cash, hand over fist. So where’s the money, Nancy? What did it get spent on? Why is the DCCC so out of cash that it’s hitting up its members for back dues?

Marvel at the wisdom of the woman who the Democratic party is officially committed to making Speaker of the House again:

An American family can’t just change their address to avoid paying taxes. @HouseGOP, why can corporations? Let’s put the #MiddleClassFirst!

— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) September 12, 2014

…Having worked in New York while living in New Jersey, I can say with some authority: madam, you are smoking the crack. Relative tax burdens are in fact a factor that goes into deciding where to live. It’s why people move to the suburbs. It’s why people find a job in a place where property taxes are lower. It’s why some people commute for two hours just to get to work.  Then again, considering just how massive a beneficiary of privilege Nancy Pelosi is – it’s amazing what being the child of a Maryland political family can do for your public policy career, yes? – we should just be grateful that she didn’t call us ‘peasants.’

Betcha she thought it, though.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

As they say: it’s not what’s illegal, it’s what’s legal.  This probably was legal:

The top Democrat in the House of Representatives steered more than a billion dollars in subsidies to a light rail project that benefitted a company run by a high-dollar Democratic donor and in which her husband is a major investor.

When cloud computing giant Salesforce sold a large plot of land to the Golden State Warriors in April, it had House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) to thank for helping to swell real estate prices in the area.

Pelosi has worked for more than a decade to steer taxpayer funds to a light rail project in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, where Salesforce had planned a new campus. Experts say the project boosted the value of Mission Bay real estate.

…and while I could even be persuaded that it wasn’t the most awful thing in the world (real estate deals involving new roads and railroads have not always stood up under scrutiny, to put it so mildly I don’t even know that there’s actually any ‘it’ there to put), I will be damned if I will simply accept Nancy Pelosi doing this, and then lecturing me on… well, OK, everything.  But good governance in particular.  Of course, I originally wrote ‘tolerate:’ but unfortunately I kind of have to, at least until the woman retires…

Excerpting this stream-of-consciousness ramble of hers on how the Democrats could pick up 25 seats in a midterm would not do it justice.  Simply read it – and here’s the comment: I understand why I want Nancy Pelosi to run the Democratic House Caucus.  But why do Democrats?