Pelosi's Jihad Against Progressive Ideas And Progressive Leaders

I've been talking to an increasing number of progressive candidates for Congress who have told me that they have no intention of voting for Pelosi as speaker in 2021. Flagstaff progressive and AZ-01 congressional candidate Eva Putzova head it right on the head: "If we are going to address climate and healthcare crises and inequality, we need leaders who understand that yesterday's politics won't work. When elected I will support a leader who is not out of touch with working class people's struggles and who can see how visionary the Green New Deal and Medicare for All are. Speaker Pelosi who publicly campaigns for my opponent (who voted with Trump nearly 60 percent of the time in the 2017-2018 cycle) fails to see what my generation will no longer tolerate: lack of political courage."

In the past it has always been Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party who have tried to depose Pelosi. She has been protected from being ousted by progressives. Now-- with her stands against the popular progressive agenda-- she will not only not be able to count on progressives to save her, she will find many of the progressive challengers being undermined by her DCCC looking for an alternative candidate. One, for example, told me she's already talking with other Democrats about replacing Pelosi with Pramila Jayapal. "Had AOC introduced the Green New Deal resolution while Boehner or Ryan was speaker," one candidate in the middle of the Blue America vetting process told me, "they would have bottled it up in committee and let it die there. That's exactly what Pelosi has done."

Pramila Jayapal introduced Medicare-for-All last February. Pelosi has that bottled up in committee to-- in committees chaired by her corrupt conservative posse who will absolutely not allow it to pass. Jayapal now has 118 co-sponsors, the most recent being Hakeem Jeffries, who Pelosi is grooming to take over for her eventually. Many progressives fear, the Green New Deal and Medicare for All will never even get votes while Pelosi is speaker. Shan Chowdhury is running for a seat held by crooked Pelosi ally and Queens political boss Gregory Meeks. Meeks does whatever Pelosi tells him to do; Shan is a different kind of leader. "We could use a breath of fresh air," he told me. "The premise for her tenure as the speaker has come and gone. With every challenge working people are facing today, we need leaders who will align with the values that can help us move in the right direction. A leader who will set the the example by not taking any corporate money, sees the healthcare is a human right for all, and will be bold on supporting the Green New Deal." To see the growing list of progressive candidates Pelosi's DCCC is sabotaging, clock on the 2020 congressional thermometer on the right.

She did an interview with Bloomberg News yesterday and the take-away was her disdain for Medicare-for-All. As Sahil Kapur reported yesterday, there was even worse than that in the interview. She was chastising Democratic candidates for the presidency-- particularly Bernie and Elizabeth-- that "those liberal ideas that fire up the party’s base are a big loser when it comes to beating President Donald Trump." THat's what's wrong with Pelosi-- she doesn't believe in Democratic values any longer. The American people have moved in a progressive direction at the same time she was moving in a neo-liberal direction. She's now so out of touch with America that she's endangering the party itself. The only politician in America more hated than Pelosi is Moscow Mitch.

Proposals pushed by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders like Medicare for All and a wealth tax play well in liberal enclaves like her own district in San Francisco but won’t sell in the Midwestern states that sent Trump to the White House in 2016, she said.

“What works in San Francisco does not necessarily work in Michigan,” Pelosi said at a roundtable of Bloomberg News reporters and editors on Friday. “What works in Michigan works in San Francisco-- talking about workers’ rights and sharing prosperity.”

“Remember November,” she said. “You must win the Electoral College.”

Pelosi was careful not to back any one candidate in the party’s contentious presidential contest, but didn’t hold back when asked about which ideas should-- and shouldn’t-- form the party’s case to American voters. Or about her fears that candidates like Warren and Sanders are going down the wrong track by courting only fellow progressives – and not the middle-of-the-road voters Democrats need to win back from Trump.



This is familiar ground for Pelosi, who has spent the year tussling with the “Squad,” a vanguard of liberal newcomers to the House led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

“As a left-wing San Francisco liberal I can say to these people: What are you thinking?” Pelosi said. “You can ask the left-- they’re unhappy with me for not being a socialist.”

Polling has consistently shown the Medicare-for-All, the Green New Deal, and a wealth tax on multimillionaires (like Pelosi, whose net worth is over $120 million) are hugely popular across the country. And Pelosi hasn't been a "left-wing San Francisco liberal" in decades and is best described today as a middle of the road partisan hack and neo-liberal from a San Francisco that is barely recognizable to people who lived there when Pelosi was first elected to Congress in the 1980s. "Her call for caution," wrote Kapur, "is backed by the authority she carries as a giant of Democratic politics who rose from the left wing of the party to become the first female speaker of the House and has earned grudging praise from her foes for her skill as a legislator. She spoke as polls show a significant tightening of the race with Warren edging up on Joe Biden at the top of the field. A New York Times/Siena College survey of Iowa Democrats released Friday showed the top four candidates-- Warren, Sanders, Biden and Pete Buttigieg-- all bunched up in a five-point spread at the top of the field." He asserted that her line reflects that of many other geriatric leaders like Pelosi as well as the special interest donors who have funded her career and who have always and will always "believe that left-wing policies will alienate swing voters and lead to defeat."

Warren and Sanders are betting on a different theory-- that voters who float between parties are less ideological and can be inspired to vote for candidates who represent bold new change in Washington.

Pelosi said Democrats should seek to build on President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act instead of pushing ahead with the more sweeping Medicare for All plan favored by Warren and Sanders that would create a government-run health care system and abolish private insurance.

“Protect the Affordable Care Act-- I think that’s the path to health care for all Americans. Medicare For All has its complications,” Pelosi said, adding that “the Affordable Care Act is a better benefit than Medicare.”

Warren has been under pressure from Biden and other candidates to demonstrate that her plan wouldn’t require tax increases on middle-class Americans.

On Friday, her campaign said it would cost $20.5 trillion and would be funded by raising taxes on large corporations and the wealthy, cracking down on tax evasion, reducing defense spending and putting newly legalized immigrants on the tax rolls. The Biden campaign called that plan “mathematical gymnastics” intended to hide the fact that it would result in higher taxes for the middle class.

Warren swatted back at the criticism, accusing Biden of “running in the wrong presidential primary.”

“Democrats are not going to win by repeating Republican talking points,” the Massachusetts senator said in Des Moines, Iowa. “So, if Biden doesn’t like that, I’m just not sure where he’s going.”

Pelosi also expressed worries about voters’ reactions to the Green New Deal, which Sanders and Warren also support, that calls for radical, rapid reductions in carbon emissions. “There’s very strong opposition on the labor side to the Green New Deal because it’s like 10 years, no more fossil fuel. Really?” she said.

Pelosi said Democrats must stick with pay-as-you-go rules to avoid adding to the debt, a point of contention with left-leaning figures who want to permit more deficit spending for ambitious liberal priorities.

“We cannot just keep increasing the debt,” she said [sounding far more like Herbert Hoover than Franklin Roosevelt].

Pelosi added that she doesn’t understand the race to the left among some candidates, because “Bernie and Elizabeth own the left, right? Is anybody going to out-left them?”

She stopped short of endorsing a tax on wealth, an idea that Warren and Sanders have embraced as a means to reduce income inequality and expand the safety net. The speaker said she wants “bipartisan” tax changes that lower the debt and fix the “dumb” Republican tax cuts of 2017.

She also steered clear of backing a cap on pay for chief executive officers.

Pelosi is living in a different political reality. It pains me to say it but she's old and increasingly senile

Will County progressive and congressional candidate Rachel Ventura (IL-11) reminded us last night that "We are living through a period of American history that is facing enormous challenges, the most pressing of course is the climate crisis. These unprecedented challenges require bold, visionary leadership that is willing and able to steer the ship in the right direction. We don't know who will be running for Speaker of the House, but my obvious hope is that there is a progressive choice or a coalition of new leaders. I will work with the Progressive Caucus and the Squad to position ourselves strategically to be in the best position possible to pass a progressive agenda. For the time being it is important that we get as many progressives into Congress along with a progressive president."

Friday night at the big Democratic Party rally in Iowa, Elizabeth Warren shredded Mayo Pete-- a real Pelosi-kind of candidate-- without mentioning his name: "I'm not running some consultant-driven campaign with some vague ideas that are designed not to offend anyone" and went on to also cut down the other Pelosi fave, Status Quo Joe, saying Biden thinks "running some vague campaign that nibbles around the edges is somehow safe, but if the most we can promise is business as usual after Donald Trump, then Democrats will lose."

The newest polling from YouGov for The Economist asks registered voters if they have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of various American politicians. Pelosi faired extremely poorly.

• Pelosi-- favorable-38% ; unfavorable- 47%
• Trump-- favorable- 40%; unfavorable- 54%
• Bernie-- favorable- 40%; unfavorable- 46%
• Elizabeth-- favorable- 40%; unfavorable- 42%
• Status Quo Joe-- favorable- 39%; unfavorable- 47%
• Mayo Pete-- favorable- 34%; unfavorable- 35%
• Schumer-- favorable- 31%; unfavorable- 42%
• Moscow Mitch-- favorable- 26%; unfavorable- 49%
• Pence-- favorable- 37%; unfavorable- 48%

So that's 47% for the 2 progressives and 37% for the 3 conservatives

By Refusing To Impeach Trump, Pelosi Is Normalizing, In An Historical Sense, His Aberrant Behavior

Hey, Nancy, turn around-- The House is on fire!

I actually hate to say it, but Pelosi, once a champion-- albeit not lately-- for progressive causes, is now the enemy, inadvertently-- an essential part of the Trumpist state. She funded his concentration camps. She's funding his wall. She's no longer fit-- not even a little-- to lead the Democratic Party in Congress and her entire leadership team (Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Ben Ray Luján, Hakeem Jeffries and Cheri Bustos) needs to be removed from leadership with her. House Democrats are jeopardizing their own credibility with the voters by supporting her. Jerry Nadler has wound up with a vigorous primary because of his bowing to her "no impeachment" demands. She no longer looks out for working families-- only for a handful of right-wing Blue Dogs who don't want to be forced into voting on the issues that won the Democrats the 2018 midterms. She's delivering on virtually nothing. And now her impeachment stand is imperiling how voters see the party.

Buzzflash e-mailed the Robert Kennedy meme above. They reminded people on their mailing list that "If Trump normalizes seeking dirt on political opponents through extortion of foreign governments and Nancy Pelosi still won't proceed with impeachment, she is enabling lawlessness."

This past week, Trump admitted that "he had talked with the president of Ukraine about digging up political dirt on Biden's son, Hunter, and Biden himself. It should not be a surprise because not long ago Trump stated that he did not see anything wrong with accepting 'kompromat' (compromising material) from a foreign power... Now, we are facing a Constitutional crisis because the inspector general for our intelligence services wants to turn over an 'urgent' whistleblower report to Congressional oversight committees. However, the Department of Justice (with what we can assume are directives from the White House) has informed the Director of National Intelligence not to release what is assumed to be a highly-damaging report.

What makes the potential revelations-- if Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, can pry loose the whistleblower's report which by law his committee is entitled to-- is that Trump may have been dangling $250 million in military aid to Ukraine to extort them into muddying up Biden through his son's business dealings there. That is taxpayer money that the Grifter-in-Chief was very possibly using in a political shakedown scheme.

After word leaked to Congress of Trump's alarming behavior, he did finally release the $250 million to Ukraine, likely in an effort to protect himself from the assumed charges in the whistleblower's alarming document.

...The Wall Street Journal reported today that in the pivotal phone call on July 25 between Trump and the president of Ukraine, Trump mentioned obtaining "kompromat" on Biden at least eight times. The Washington Post wrote that its sources said that the whistleblower indicated that there may have been multiple calls.

As is is his common practice, Trump is trying to normalize his apparent illegal behavior. His trusted aide is none other than the dumbfounding master of jabberwocky, Rudolph Giuliani. In fact, BuzzFlash ran an article today headlined, Rudy Giuliani Lost His Mind on CNN and Admitted He Was A Co-Conspirator in Ukraine Deal.

Schiff is expressing outrage and promising action to get the whisteblower report released, but at the languid pace the House Dems move, don't hold your breath, even if Schiff appears a bit more stalwart than the other hapless Dem committee chairs.

Today, Nancy Pelosi proposed that a law that she is recommending be passed that would allow for the indictment of future presidents. However, it wouldn't apply to Trump... Given that Trump poses a threat to our national security on a regular basis, you would think that Pelosi would put the safety of the U.S. above her obsession with re-electing twenty representatives that won districts in 2018 that Trump won in 2016.

Moreover, if the whistleblower charges are revealed, not only would Trump have committed another act of obstructing justice, he would have heinously broken the law and imperiled our way of government-- which is nothing new, just in a more glaring way. Meanwhile, he said today, echoing Nixon, that he has the right to do whatever he wants as president.

...[Pelosi] can either try and protect her 2018 Trump district reps-- which assumes that the Dems can control the debate, but that hasn't been the case thus far given Trump's mastery of the media-- or she can stop enabling a chronic and endangering law breaker who holds the highest office in the land.

As an article in This Week was headlined, Trump Officials Are Reportedly Ignoring House Democrats Because They Know Nancy Pelosi Won't Impeach. Pelosi, in her implacable anti-impeachment stance is facilitary Trump's venal and illegal behavior.

To allow the president of the United States to regularly violate the rule of law is to call into question our whole system of justice for the rest of us. Why claim that every person should follow the law or face the consequences when the president of the United States has immunity from egregious crimes?

Pelosi only wants to say that she thinks Trump is deplorable, but she is enabling his law breaking by not holding him accountable. On top of that, she is making the Democrats in the House, such as Nadler, appear weak and ineffectual, which is not going to help the Dems in 2020.

It will be a bit longer before the "urgent" whistleblower crisis plays itself out, but it is already clear that Pelosi must take a stand on behalf of the rule of law or enable Trump's illegalities.

Indeed, her current intractable stance that Trump will not be held accountable may backfire and put the very Dem Reps that she is concerned about in serious jeopardy.

Foremost, however, is that Pelosi must uphold the rule of law, or our system of justice is in grave peril.

On Saturday morning, Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic, noted that If This Isn’t Impeachable, Nothing Is. He's right, of course; but it's crucial to remember that "this" is just one in a long series of impeachable offenses that Trump commits every single week. Maybe this is the worst of them... or maybe not. Pelosi is not up to finding out. Nichols asserts that if the reports about Ukraine-gate are true, Trump "should be impeached and removed from office immediately." He claims-- and he's wrong here-- that "Until now, there was room for reasonable disagreement over impeachment as both a matter of politics and a matter of tactics. The Mueller report revealed despicably unpatriotic behavior by Trump and his minions, but it did not trigger a political judgment with a majority of Americans that it warranted impeachment. The Democrats, for their part, remained unwilling to risk their new majority in Congress on a move destined to fail in a Republican-controlled Senate." Any of the claims against Trump would have triggered an impeachment of any pre-Pelosi president.

Now, however, we face an entirely new situation. In a call to the new president of Ukraine, Trump reportedly attempted to pressure the leader of a sovereign state into conducting an investigation-- a witch hunt, one might call it-- of a U.S. citizen, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden.

As the Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko told the Daily Beast when asked about the president’s apparent requests, “Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.”

If this in itself is not impeachable, then the concept has no meaning. Trump’s grubby commandeering of the presidency’s fearsome and nearly uncheckable powers in foreign policy for his own ends is a gross abuse of power and an affront both to our constitutional order and to the integrity of our elections.

...There is no spin, no deflection, no alternative theory of the case that can get around the central fact that President Trump reportedly attempted to use his office for his own gain, and that he put the foreign policy and the national security of the United States at risk while doing so. He ignored his duty as the commander in chief by intentionally trying to place an American citizen in jeopardy with a foreign government. He abandoned his obligations to the Constitution by elevating his own interests over the national interest. By comparison, Watergate was a complicated judgment call.

In a better time and in a better country, Republicans would now join with Democrats and press for Trump’s impeachment. This won’t happen, of course; even many of Biden’s competitors for the presidency seem to be keeping their distance from this mess, perhaps in the hope that Biden and Trump will engage in a kind of mutually assured political destruction. (Elizabeth Warren, for one, renewed her call for impeachment—but without mentioning Biden.) This is to their shame. The Democratic candidates should now unite around a call for an impeachment investigation, not for Biden’s sake, but to protect the sanctity of our elections from a predatory president who has made it clear he will stop at nothing to stay in the White House... [I]f this kind of dangerous, unhinged hijacking of the powers of the presidency is not enough for either the citizens or their elected leaders to demand Trump’s removal, then we no longer have an accountable executive branch, and we might as well just admit that we have chosen to elect a monarch and be done with the illusion of constitutional order in the United States.

Lenore Taylor is the editor of the Australian version of The Guardian and she was in DC last week and watched the Trump press conference in California, near the Mexican border. She wrote that the whole spectacle stunned her. She suddenly realized "how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect."

She wrote that she "joined as the president was explaining at length how powerful the concrete was. Very powerful, it turns out. It was unlike any wall ever built, incorporating the most advanced 'concrete technology.' It was so exceptional that would-be wall-builders from three unnamed countries had visited to learn from it... The wall went very deep and could not be burrowed under. Prototypes had been tested by 20 'world-class mountain climbers-- That’s all they do, they love to climb mountains,' who had been unable to scale it. It was also 'wired, so that we will know if somebody is trying to break through,' although one of the attending officials declined a presidential invitation to discuss this wiring further, saying, 'Sir, there could be some merit in not discussing it,' which the president said was a 'very good answer.' The wall was 'amazing,' 'world class,' 'virtually impenetrable' and also 'a good, strong rust colour' that could later be painted. It was designed to absorb heat, so it was 'hot enough to fry an egg on,' There were no eggs to hand, but the president did sign his name on it and spoke for so long the TV feed eventually cut away, promising to return if news was ever made."

He did, at one point, concede that would-be immigrants, unable to scale, burrow, blow torch or risk being burned, could always walk around the incomplete structure, but that would require them walking a long way. This seemed to me to be an important point, but the monologue quickly returned to the concrete.

In writing about this not-especially-important or unusual press conference I’ve run into what US reporters must encounter every day. I’ve edited skittering, half-finished sentences to present them in some kind of consequential order and repeated remarks that made little sense.

In most circumstances, presenting information in as intelligible a form as possible is what we are trained for. But the shock I felt hearing half an hour of unfiltered meanderings from the president of the United States made me wonder whether the editing does our readers a disservice.

I’ve read so many stories about his bluster and boasting and ill-founded attacks, I’ve listened to speeches and hours of analysis, and yet I was still taken back by just how disjointed and meandering the unedited president could sound. Here he was trying to land the message that he had delivered at least something towards one of his biggest campaign promises and sounding like a construction manager with some long-winded and badly improvised sales lines.

I’d understood the dilemma of normalising Trump’s ideas and policies-- the racism, misogyny and demonisation of the free press. But watching just one press conference from Otay Mesa helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.

Only Pelosi-- Not McConnell and Not Trump-- Is Keeping An Assault Weapons Sales Ban From Passing The House

 A plurality of grassroots Democrats prefer AOC to Pelosi as party leader, according the a new poll

Yesterday, commenting on the House Dems' absurd impeachment shit-show being orchestrated by Pelosi and Nadler, a former top Capitol Hill staffer, wrote privately that "This is not just a disaster, but is starting to make me question the baseline, fundamental values of our leaders and THEIR commitment to the rule of law. They think this is about elections and popularity; well it isn’t, it’s about Americans all over asking whether anything in the constitution, the rule of law, or any of this matters at all or if it’s all just window dressing... and you know what, that’s depressing and dangerous. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but at this point I feel like these folks need to PROVE to me that they give one iota of shit about all the lines I’ve been fed about American democracy since the 5th grade."

I agree and there's no reason to not go on to discuss the impeachment shit-show he was commenting on. But Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer already did that-- and very well-- at Politico. So let's apply it to something else festering in Congress: the same game that decrepit old Pelosi and her craven leadership team are playing with assault weapons.

She's got Dave Cicilline's sales ban, H.R. 1296, bottled up in the Judiciary Committee. All but 25 Democrats in the House have signed on as co-sponsors. Pelosi and Cheri Bustos haven't. There's even a Republican co-sponsor. Several Republicans have said they will vote for it if it comes to the House but won't co-sponsor it. Although there are hard core NRA Democrats who will oppose it to their deaths-- like Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX), Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY), Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA), Ron Kind (New Dem-WI), Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ), Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ), Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN) and Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR), when Pelosi whines that she can't allow it to be brought to the floor until there are 218 co-sponsors, she's being completely disingenuous. In other words, she has absorbed Trumpism's #1 tenet of governance: Lie with alacrity and you'll get away with it.

Here's the math: 210 Democratic co-sponsors + Peter King (the Republican co-sponsor) + Pelosi + Bustos + non-co-sponsors who will vote yes if Pelosi says to-- Mike Thompson (Blue Dog-CA), Lauren Underwood (D-IL), Terri Sewell (New Dem-AZ), Lizzie Fletcher (New Dem-TX) and Andy Kim (D-NJ) + even ONE of the Republicans who will vote for it, say Michael Turner, former mayor of Dayton, whose daughter was nearly shot in the recent GOP/NRA massacre and who publicly said he'd vote for Cicilline's bill, or Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) or Chris Smith (R-NJ) or Fred Upton (R-MI) or Brian Mast (R-FL) would not just take the score to the 218 she says she needs, but to 219 a vote over what she needs.

The background checks bill that passed the House last February, H.R. 8, only had 2 Democratic NO votes (Collin Peterson and Jared Golden) and it had 8 Republicans who voted for it:

• Vern Buchanan (R-FL)
• Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL)
• Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)
• Will Hurd (R-TX)
• Peter King (R-NY)
• Brian Mast (R-FL)
• Chris Smith (R-NJ)
• Fred Upton (R-MI)

John Katko, who represents a blue district centered around Syracuse, New York and sometimes gets away with calling himself a "moderate," was away when the vote was called but he later issued a statement that had he been in DC, he would have voted against the bill.

Jeff Van Drew is an NRA Blue Dog

What's Pelosi's motivation for not whipping the assault weapons sales ban and passing it? NY Times reporter Sheryl Stolberg figured it out. "As Democrats make an aggressive push for new gun control legislation," she wrote, "they have made a calculated decision to stop short of pursuing their most ambitious goal: an assault weapons ban."

The overwhelming majority of House Democrats-- 211, seven shy of the 218 needed for passage-- are co-sponsoring legislation to ban military-style semiautomatic weapons, similar to the ban in effect from 1994 to 2004. But some centrist Democrats remain skittish about any proposal that keeps firearms from law-abiding citizens-- a frequent charge against Democrats by Republicans and gun rights groups-- making any such ban politically risky for moderates in Trump-friendly districts. In the Senate, it draws less support.

The split reveals just how complicated gun politics remain inside the Democratic Party, even as mass shootings are terrorizing the nation and the Twitter hashtag #DoSomething has captured the mounting public demands for Congress to act.

On the presidential campaign trail, Democrats like former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. are rallying behind an assault weapons ban, and Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman from Texas, has gone so far as to call for a mandatory government program to buy back the weapons of war. But on Capitol Hill, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, have barely breathed a word about reviving the ban.

Even Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who sponsored the 1994 assault weapons ban and is one of its most ardent defenders, did not raise the issue when she spoke about gun safety alongside Mr. Schumer on Tuesday afternoon. “We don’t have the votes to pass it,” she later explained. [She was lying, either consciously or because Pelosi fed her a line of bullshit.]

“Let’s be honest,” said Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, the sponsor of the current assault weapons measure, who described himself as a “huge proponent” of the ban. “Every other bill that we’ve done tries to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. This is the one piece of legislation that keeps a particular weapon out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. A lot of people have enormous objections to that.”

...The push for background checks instead of an assault weapons ban makes political sense for Democrats, who see it as a winning issue. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found 89 percent of Americans in favor of universal background checks. While a majority also supported an assault weapons ban, the support was much thinner-- just 56 percent.

The 1994 law, which passed as part of a broader crime bill championed by Mr. Biden, then a senator, banned the sale of 19 specific weapons that have the features of guns used by the military, including semiautomatic rifles and certain types of shotguns and handguns.

It also outlawed magazines that could hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, while allowing people who already had such weapons to keep them. But it had a sunset provision, and Congress refused to renew it when it expired in 2004, in part because Democrats were nervous that it could cost them re-election.

The politics have shifted since then, especially after a summer of deadly mass shootings.

Some Democrats in surprising corners of the country have also embraced a ban, even though the political reality is that Mr. Trump would never sign such a measure.

Two moderate Democrats who beat Republicans for House seats last year-- Representatives Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Jason Crow of Colorado-- spoke out last month in favor of a ban, with an opinion article in USA Today. Both are military veterans, and Mr. Crow ran on an aggressive platform of combating gun violence.

Even some Republicans have signed on to the idea. Among them is Representative Michael R. Turner, Republican of Ohio, whose district includes Dayton, where a gunman killed nine people outside a bar last month. Representative Brian Mast, Republican of Florida, where a 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland galvanized a youth movement for gun safety, also supports a ban.

But for centrists like Representative Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Kendra Horn of Oklahoma-- both of whom also flipped seats in districts Mr. Trump won-- supporting an assault weapons ban could be politically toxic.

Representative Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Texas, who enjoys the backing of the National Rifle Association and is facing a primary challenge from the left, does not support a ban.

“I am for reasonable gun reform,” Mr. Cuellar said in a recent interview. “But I’m not going to take guns away from people like they want to do.”

The bill does not advocate "taking guns away from people." Cuellar always uses Republican Party/Fox News talking points to frame his reactionary agenda. He's one of the worst scumbags in the Democratic Party and what good is Pelosi if she lets garbage like him-- and worthless coward Kendra Horn-- dictate which votes are allowed on the floor and which votes have to be killed in committee? Democrats should remove Pelosi as Speaker before she does irreparable damage to the party's chances to win in 2020.

Eva Putzova is the progressive Democrat running against an incumbent-- former Republican state legislator Tom O'Halleran, currently pretending to be a semi-Democrat (as a Blue Dog) and, of course, vehemently against banning the sale of assault weapons, something Eva is just as vehemently in favor of. "Who," she asked, "benefits from the assault weapon sales? It’s not the people of this country but corporations who sell them. I can’t imagine being a Representative, seeing reports on mass shootings terrorizing our communities almost daily and doing nothing. Standing on the sideline and refusing to co-sponsor the assault weapons sales is a total failure of leadership."

Who Would Have Ever Imagined That Nancy Pelosi Would Go Down In History As One Of The Worst Speakers Ever-- If She Resigned Tomorrow It Would Not Be Soon Enough

According to strange #NeverTrump Republican Andrew Sullivan, in his New York Magazine column Friday, many voters who are not Democrats may have "voted for the Democrats last fall because we wanted a serious check on President Trump’s intensifying authoritarianism. That includes many of us who don’t support the far left’s takeover of the Democrats, but who saw the urgency of an opposition with teeth, confronted as we are by a deranged, tyrannical bully in the White House. What would happen if the Mueller Report emerged with a Republican House still intact, we worried? How could we begin to investigate Trump’s tax returns, or his cronies’ corruption, or his foul pedophile friends, or his murky real estate money-laundering, if Paul Ryan, the Randian eunuch from Wisconsin, were still in charge?"

And speaking of eunuchs... who even needed Paul Ryan! With Trump sniping at Pelosi's progressive "enemies"-- especially AOC, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib-- there almost seems to be an unspoken alliance between the fake president and lame-duck, increasinbgly detested speaker. And #NeverTrump Republicans like Sullivan are noticing: "It turns out, six months later, that on all these topics, the Democratic House majority didn’t matter much at all. Whenever a serious administration abuse of power seems to demand investigation, Speaker Pelosi springs almost instantly into inaction. There is nothing she won’t not do."

Pelosi?

When, for example, a highly dubious decision years ago by Labor Secretary Alex Acosta-- to give Jeffrey Epstein an incredibly lenient plea deal for the sexual abuse of 40 underage girls-- blew back into the headlines, Pelosi instantly ruled out any notion of impeaching Acosta: “It’s up to the president, it’s his Cabinet. We have a great deal of work to do here for the good of the American people and we have to focus on that.”

Really, Madam Speaker, oversight of shady dealings by Cabinet officials is the work of the president now? And holding a corrupt administration to account is not “work … for the good of the American people”? This “distraction” from real “work” meme is, in fact, a Republican talking point. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise described the oversight process this week as “presidential harassment rather than focusing on the priorities of the American people.” Trump himself tweeted a demand that Democrats “go back to work!” How practically different is that spin from Pelosi’s? (Even though the question is largely moot now that Acosta has resigned, it came as a relief to see Elijah Cummings was pledging to investigate him.)

The most epic moment of Pelosi’s oversight abdication was, of course, her response to the Mueller Report. She was completely out-foxed by Bill Barr’s shameless misdirection at first, and once his sleight of hand became obvious, she seemed to have no strategy to hold Trump to account in any way. She was presented with striking evidence that President Trump repeatedly abused the power of his office to obstruct justice-- the charge that brought down Nixon, and one charge that forced even Bill Clinton into a Senate trial-- and was all but invited by Mueller to move the ball forward through impeachment: “If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Pelosi immediately, reflexively, punted.

Later this month, we will finally get testimony from Mueller. This week, the House Judiciary Committee has issued 12 new subpoenas for Trump officials, including Jared Kushner. This time, they tell us, they’re serious. These subpoenas come after almost all previous ones were rebuffed entirely by an unprecedented blanket assertion by the president that all oversight inquiries are of a partisan nature and should therefore be ignored. But last month the Democrats passed a resolution seeking court enforcement of their subpoena power. How long will this process take? Who knows? Many seem to think the process could go on for years-- probably likely to take longer than the rest of Trump’s term-- thereby nullifying any practical oversight at all, and giving all future presidents a precedent of immunity by stonewalling. What we do know is that six months into this Congress, we know nothing more from their efforts than we did in January. Could you speed this up if these subpoenas were part of an impeachment inquiry? Almost certainly yes. But Pelosi appears to be in no hurry at all.

Or take the issue of Trump’s tax returns. Judd Legum is aghast that it took the Democrats four months even to ask for them! When Trump (surprise!) refused to hand them over, Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal filed a lawsuit arguing that the reason he was doing so was not because he wanted to see if Trump had committed fraud or other financial crimes, but that he needed “to decide if legislative action is needed” on “the mandatory presidential audit program.” He believed the claim should be as modest as possible to help guarantee an eventual court victory. But “eventual” is the operative word here.

The goods are there though. So when Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill allowing Trump’s state tax returns to be examined directly by Neal, Neal refused, even though the data would be largely the same as the federal returns. He preferred to wait for the result of his own federal legal case-- which could be months or years in coming! And so the clock ticks on. It will likely tick past the next presidential election. This is the fierce urgency of whenever. It is an effective abandonment of a critical tool for exposing presidential corruption.

Maybe Pelosi could hold hearings and then merely vote on a measure of censure of the president? But no: that’s not on the table either. “I think censure is just a way out,” Pelosi said last month. “In other words, if the goods are there, you must impeach.” But the goods are there. We waited months on a thorough investigation, and it found multiple cases of obstruction of justice, a supremely impeachable offense for Congress to pursue. Isn’t she, rather than censure, Trump’s “way out”?

What would she use her oversight powers for? She has argued, for example, that the attorney general openly “lied under oath” to the Congress, her branch of government, a criminal offense. So what will she do? Impeach? Censure? Wait for it: She won’t be “speaking to anything more that he has to say.” Bill Barr must be trembling in fear. What did she do when Trump crossed a clear Constitutional red line and, via a fake national emergency, funneled money to his wall against Congress’s express wish? Yes, you guessed it: nothing. Not even censure. She’s a Speaker who will jettison even the power of the purse rather than take on a tyrannical president.

For good measure, she told Maureen Dowd that Trump “every day practically self-impeaches by obstructing justice and ignoring the subpoenas.” A word to Madam Speaker: People cannot actually impeach themselves. And if you read the Constitution, it’s your job. Why are you persistently refusing to do it?

I know that aggressive oversight, especially impeachment hearings, is a politically fraught decision, full of risk. I know the polls suggest it splits the country and, by her own expert counting, divides the House Democrats as well. I know her party won the House in 2018 by focusing on health care, rather than Trump. I think that should be their focus next year as well. But fortune favors the brave. If she doesn’t act against a serious threat to the Constitution, voters will infer that the Democrats don’t actually believe there’s a threat. If she lets this president own the narrative, as he keeps doing, Democrats will end up following his story rather than their own.

And there is no essential conflict between holding impeachment hearings and making the case for your policies. It should be possible for a competent and gifted Speaker to do both. But Pelosi, alas, is not exactly gifted in persuasively making a case for anything outside her hyperliberal constituency. And she’s deeply unpopular across the country. She has a worse favorable/unfavorable rating than Trump-- and during the partial shutdown in January, she had the lowest ratings of any politician in the country. But if she can’t deploy rhetoric or popularity, at least she could use her Constitutional prerogative.

Her strengths lie in her considerable skills for legislative cat-herding and winning news cycles in the mainstream liberal media. Because she is the first female Speaker, she is largely untouchable in the nonconservative press. I love Maureen Dowd, but her most recent column was beyond fawning. The only substantive achievement Dowd could point to in her glowing account of Pelosi’s political talents was that Pelosi had “gotten into Trump’s head” and that she “has offered a master class, with flair and fire, on how a woman can spar with Trump.” Seriously? Yes, she can provide some cutting retorts. But, substantively, a master class in capitulation strikes me as more accurate.

And isn’t it more plausible to say that Trump has gotten into Pelosi’s head? Here’s an example of what Dowd calls her “flair and fire”: “Oh, [Trump would] rather not be impeached… But he sees a silver lining. And he wants to then say, ‘The Democrats impeached me but the Senate’-- he won’t say Republicans-- ‘exonerated me.’” So fucking what? Of course he’d say that. Why are you allowing his future spin to affect your present Constitutional duty? You’re in a defensive crouch, Madam Speaker. Against a bully, that never works.

The best gloss I can think of to explain Pelosi’s abdication is that she believes that it’s only a matter of time before Trump loses in 2020, so why risk alienating moderates who get nervous with the I-word now? Why impeach when the Senate will acquit? Why go to war now, when it might imperil electoral victory next year?

Here’s why. There is a strong possibility that Trump is going to win the next election. I know it’s early but the head-to-head polling against most of the Democratic candidates is very close-- and that’s before the GOP has gotten to work on oppo research on those Democrats who aren’t well known. Incumbency in a strong economy is usually dispositive. The Dems have almost all decided to run further to the left than even Hillary’s woke-a-thon in 2016: free health care for illegal aliens, abolishing private health insurance, publicly funding abortions, declaring America in 2019 a product of white supremacy, etc. Their strategy seems designed to alienate every white person in the Midwest and give Trump another victory in the Electoral College. Only Biden has a serious polling advantage, and he’s looking frail and weak.

If Pelosi keeps playing it safe and Trump is reelected, it will set a precedent that a president can obstruct justice and be rewarded for it. He can avoid all serious congressional oversight and get away with it. The Congress will continue its journey as a withered limb in a Constitution that actually gives it pride of place, Article 1. And every time Trump gets away with another crime, or abuse of power, he is emboldened. Vindicated by re-election? God help us.

And what Trump now knows after six months of Democratic control of the House is that he is as free from congressional checks whether it is run by Democrats or Republicans. Pelosi has shown every future president that they can obstruct justice with impunity, refuse every subpoena with impunity, lie with impunity, and violate the separation of powers with impunity.

At some point, Madam Speaker, history may show you had one critical chance to stop this slide toward populist authoritarianism. And you decided you had better things to do.

Meanwhile, Pelosi has accomplished nothing-- not even raising the minimum wage increase she promised to do immediately after the Democrats won the House back. Oh, wait-- she hasn't accomplished nothing; I was wrong. She got Trump's concentration camps funded. And she passed PayGo, to make sure no big progressive ideas would pass. She is utterly worthless and destroying the Democratic Party, having launched an anti-progressive jihad, threatening members of her conference who were about to endorse Bernie with retribution, directing the DCCC to prevent progressive candidates from an even playing field and going war against 4 progressive women of color, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Omar Ilhan and Ayanna Pressley. What's the thermometer for? So you can contribute to the campaign of the progressive Democrat running to replace Pelosi in her San Francisco congressional district, Shahid Buttar.

This morning, Buttar noted that "As disturbing as it might be for Democratic Party activists to recognize, Speaker Pelosi is either entirely ineffective in mounting resistance to our criminal president and his corrupt administration, or instead unfortunately co-opted. Both of those possibilities are unacceptable. There is too much at stake-- especially with the twin cataclysms of fascism and climate catastrophe already unfolding-- to defer to the continuing failures of a careerist inclined towards accommodation. With a would-be tyrant in the White House, now is a time for full-throated resistance for real. The American people deserve leaders willing to oppose kleptocracy instead of enabling it. And we deserve representatives who will meet the needs of the future by expanding human rights, instead of doubling down on the predictable failures of corporate rule and eroding them even further."