SPEAKER PELOSI. Now that Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer have gone into overdrive to patch things up and get the caucus unified after last week's fight, we've been reminded that the key challenge of Pelosi's leadership is likely going to be less intra-leadership squabbling with the majority leader than handling the disparate strategic and substantive priorities of the committee chairs. Her batting down of Charlie Rangel's draft push is one early glimmer of the kind of control we're likely going to see her exerting frequently on the chairs in the next two years. That, combined with the strategic sense of theater indicated by the leadership's plan to break up the ethics reform package into constituent parts to prolong the debate and showcase incoming freshmen, offer new reasons for optimism about the strong hand Pelosi will be using as Speaker. (Don't tell the press, of course.)
--Sam Rosenfeld
