If one reads the Salon.com article titled, “The Threat to Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership Is Suddenly Serious”, one has a basic understanding about what is going on regarding the fight for and against Nancy Pelosi’s bid to once again become Speaker of the House. When I first heard about how some House Democrats did not want to vote for Nancy Pelosi, my first thought was, ”OK, who do they want to vote for?” When the Anti-Pelosi crowd did not seem to have a firm candidate in mind, I wondered what else might be going on.
“They promised not to vote for her during their campaigns.” I heard. “OK”, I thought, “but don’t they still need an alternative?” Still, they did not seem to want to definitely settle on anyone else, and the one name that I heard someone mention, Marcia Fudge, had way less support than Nancy Pelosi. Also, Marcia Fudge seems like a really nice person. I find it hard to believe that she could live with getting the speakership in such a horrid way.
Then I heard that it was about too much power being entrenched in people who have been around forever, but still, there seemed to be no young new candidate that the Anti-Pelosi rebels were really pushing. Finally, when I started doing the math to figure out how many people that the Anti-Pelosi insurgency would need to throw the Speaker of the House position to the Republicans, I realized what was going on. “This is good old-fashioned political extortion”, I thought.
You see, currently, House Democrats have at least 229 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in the upcoming 2019 term. I believe that there are about seven House races still to be determined--maybe a couple less than that—it is hard to tell, so even if they got all of those, the most the Democrats would end up with would be 236 seats. Democrats need 218 votes to outvote the Republicans, which means the Democrats can only lose about 19 seats to an Anti-Pelosi insurgency, and that is if the Democrats snag every remaining seat. Tim Ryan says his Anti-Pelosi group has more than 20 members, which means, if true, they have enough people to throw the Speakership to the Republicans, regardless of how many seats the Democrats end up with. So, this group of 20 plus people feel that they can start making demands because of the damage that they can do.
However, people should think about this for a moment. By my estimation, more than 200 Democratic House members want Nancy Pelosi to be Speaker of the House, and about 20 do not.
How on earth would it be fair for the 200 House Democrats that want Ms. Pelosi not get their choice while 20 House Democrats do get their choice? Our country is founded on Democracy—on the idea of majority rule—and why on earth would the 200 people who had to put up with this want to listen to the person chosen by 20 people over the 200 people? The very idea is absurd. I will tell you this much, if I were one of the 200 House Democrats that support Nancy Pelosi, and I had to end up with some leader the 20 House Democrats chose, for the next few years, I would tell the 20 to go pound sand. I would make sure that they were political nobodys. Also, if they were allowed to get away with this, would we not have to put up with this every single time a speakership is chosen? The whole thing is ridiculous.
Nancy Pelosi should meet with each of the members of her opposition and see what they want to calm down, and she should do her best to try and come up with some reasonable offers that they could live with. I believe that she has already started meeting with at least one of the group. Under no circumstances should she abandon the will of the 200 for the 20. In the end, there is a good chance that Nancy Pelosi can come up with something that they can live with. If not, and if the 20 hold firm and refuse to vote for her, the remaining 200 should completely ostracize the 20, and in 2 years the 20 should be primaried into oblivion. Being reluctant to vote on a bill so that your state can get a new courthouse paid for by the federal government is one thing. This level of political extortion is something else entirely. Anyone following through with it is no better than a Republican, and they should be treated as such.