Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi outside the West Wing after meeting with Donald Trump, October 16, 2019
I know it was nearly a year ago, which is a millennium in internet time, but Nancy Pelosi made herself a lame duck speaker at the beginning of this Congress. She vowed to serve no more than four years, until the end of 2022. And if she wants that last term, for the next Congress, she needs to secure the support of two-thirds of the Democratic caucus in order to hang on.
At this point, Progressive Caucus leaders might want to find the necessary votes—only 79 members, if the caucus majority remains the same—to force Pelosi to give up the gavel. Her active undermining of the causes animating two of the three leading choices in the presidential race and the majority of rank-and-file Democrats is needlessly dividing the party. Pelosi has chosen the side of capital and industry, and progress simply cannot be made with her in charge.
In the other chamber, Chuck Schumer has kept a lower profile, primarily because he’s not in charge of a caucus. That’s looking more likely to change, amid a run of bad polling and fundraising reports for incumbent Senate Republicans. The prospects of a Democratic Senate majority are as bright as they’ve been all year. But who will take over those seats matters, and a phalanx of moderates built to line up behind Schumer and rock no boats have taken charge of the Democratic primaries, against little resistance from progressives.
Put together, this means that a hypothetical Sanders or Warren presidency would be beset on all sides by saboteurs, with fellow Democrats opposing their policy priorities at every turn. There’s time to prevent this headlong crash from happening, but it will take a much broader commitment from the activist community than the current commitment to the presidential primary above all else.
First, let’s examine Pelosi’s remarks on Bloomberg over the weekend, where she managed to denigrate Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and the wealth tax—the very issues that have driven the most interest and discussion nationally—in the space of a short interview. “What works in San Francisco does not necessarily work in Michigan,” Pelosi said, somehow arguing that a city where one out of every 11,600 people is a billionaire would have a friendlier attitude toward taxing wealth than the working-class enclaves of the Great Lakes State.
Pelosi supported building on Obamacare over nationalizing the insurance system, supported … I don’t know what, instead of reducing carbon emissions to the level scientists believe necessary to save the planet, and insisted that Democrats adhere to pay-as-you-go budgeting rules to hamstring all progressive priorities, foregrounding the national debt over the deficits of the middle class’s health and well-being.
What’s revealing about that last bit is that the Paygo rules in place today have been waived numerous times to make room for messaging bills from the Democratic majority that have foundered in the Senate. Pelosi is OK with deficit spending when she knows the underlying legislation will run into the Mitch McConnell–Donald Trump brick wall; if that dynamic changes, she’s content to be the brick wall herself.
As Jeet Heer points out, Pelosi is wrong on the merits—with interest rates so low, this is an ideal time for deficit spending, especially to counteract the national emergency of the climate crisis. The politics aren’t a slam dunk for her either, as plenty of surveys show widespread support for bold policies like the Green New Deal and government intervention in the health system.
Pelosi’s commitment to limiting her service as speaker opens an opportunity for progressive House Democrats. They could deny Pelosi their support for a final term as speaker in 2021-2022 if she continues to frustrate a progressive agenda, especially if a progressive becomes president. There are many more than 79 members of the Progressive Caucus, and given the moderates who routinely deny Pelosi support you might not even need that many.
As Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal told me in an interview last week, when Democrats unite, polling support for progressive issues spikes. “Look at impeachment, it went up 10 points when Democrats got on the same page,” she said. The roadblock to that unity is Nancy Pelosi, and progressives have the power to demand a speaker who is on the same page with the rank and file of the party.
Let’s turn to the Senate, where at least two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have not committed to supporting the Democratic nominee, especially if it’s Sanders or Warren. Sanders responded to the question of how to move Manchin to his side by vowing to hold rallies in his state, which Manchin responded to by saying he wouldn’t vote for Sanders over Trump, a dispiriting start to the potential for persuasion at best.
The bigger problem might be the reinforcements behind Manchin. In state after state, Democrats outraised Republicans in key Senate races, and now have a path to take over the chamber. But who would create that margin of victory?
John Hickenlooper, last seen shouting “socialism is not the answer” in his short-lived campaign for president, has lapped a fractured field in Colorado, which hasn’t settled on a main progressive challenger. In Arizona, liberal Ruben Gallego begged off a run, all but handing the primary to Mark Kelly, Gabby Giffords’s husband, who can be expected to be strong on gun safety but has revealed precious little else beyond the profile of a standard-issue moderate back-bencher. Schumer-backed candidates Theresa Greenfield in Iowa and Cal Cunningham in North Carolina have been anointed front-runners, thanks to establishment support.
Many of these and other Senate primaries feature progressive candidates, from Erica Smith in North Carolina to Eddie Mauro in Iowa to Wilmot Collins in Montana to Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, a longtime organizer, in Texas. But in our only-the-president-matters culture, all of these potentially promising candidates go largely ignored, and the establishment can easily push through their preferred models.
In a nationalized political environment where Trump will dominate the 2020 election, candidate variance will probably matter less than anyone would expect. If Democrats are favored in places like Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, and Iowa, it would pay to have candidates more inclined to support a policy imagination beyond some incremental trifling like tax-advantaged savings accounts for small business owners.
There’s time to rally progressive support in Senate primaries, just as there’s time to either encourage Pelosi to stop bashing progressive policy or show her the door. But unfortunately, it involves paying attention to more than just the latest poll out of Iowa or New Hampshire.
Whoever shows up on January 3, 2021, to take the oath of office, as Speaker of the House and in the Senate, matters just as much if not more than who shows up on the Capitol steps a couple weeks later to be inaugurated as president. Progressive policy ambition will either be a team effort between a president and Congress, or a jousting match where moderates and conservaDems will drop anything promising like a rock. Those who hope for transformative advances for the country and its citizens need to pay more attention to what’s playing out in the House and Senate.
A president can do a lot with a Day One Agenda. But they cannot do everything alone.
