Speaker of U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi led a U.S. congressional delegation to Ghana from July 28 -31, 2019 to commemorate the “Year of Return” and mark 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia. Official U.S. Embassy photograph by: Archibald Sackey and Courage Ahiati.
America doesn’t yet know how many seats the GOP will regain in the House of Representatives, but one thing is certain, Democrats there are angry.
Centrist Democrats are angry that Nancy Pelosi caved into the BLM-Squad agenda of “Defund the Police” and “Socialism.”
Radical Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the Squad” are angry that Pelosi didn’t go far enough.
Democrats Trade Blame for Failures
Details of a recent conference call of House Democrats have leaked. The call did not go well. Scott Wong and Mike Lillis report for The Hill:
Moderate House Democrats lashed out at their liberal colleagues Thursday, using a marathon caucus-wide conference call to bash progressives for advancing an agenda that, the centrists said, cost the party a number of seats in Tuesday’s elections.
An impassioned Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who squeaked to victory in central Virginia, took liberals to task for promoting the policy of redirecting funds away from police departments, an idea that took off following the death of George Floyd in May — and that Republicans used on the campaign trail to hammer Democrats with charges of nurturing crime.
Spanberger called the Democrats’ campaign strategy “a failure.”
“I do disagree, Abigail, that it was a failure,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) interjected. “We won the House.”
Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas) delivered a similar condemnation, lamenting that the far left’s approach to several issues — including moving funds away from the police and banning fracking — had given ammunition to GOP attack ads. Veasey said he had watched GOP “commercial after commercial” using video footage of Democrats uttering the words, “defund the police,” to great effect.
Liberals immediately pushed back on the moderates’ narrative.
Progressive Caucus co-Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) jumped into the fray and argued that Democrats would not be on the cusp of ousting President Trump from the White House without tremendous energy from the far left.
Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and others repeatedly warned colleagues not to leak information from the post-election private “family meeting” to reporters, but that didn’t stop them from sharing the blow-by-blow details of the marathon 2 1/2-hour call with The Hill and other media outlets.
The clash between the ideological wings of the caucus reflects the high levels of frustration among Democrats of all stripes following a demoralizing turn at the polls on Tuesday.
Heading into the elections, party leaders had predicted they would pick up seats, even in deep red districts won soundly by Trump in 2016. Instead, they saw Republicans knock off at least seven Democratic incumbents, most of them first-term lawmakers who had helped deliver the party’s House majority just two years ago. And as of Thursday afternoon they’d failed to flip even a single seat held by a Republican incumbent — a trend that defied both their internal polls and most conservative expectations.
What Does it Mean?
With their new expanded minority in the House and the Democrat majority divided along ideological lines, Republicans led by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy can exploit their opponents’ divisions to slow down the left’s agenda.
Republicans today are in much the same position Democrats found themselves in after election 2010 when centrist GOP incumbents were having trouble compromising with a slew of rookie Tea Party representatives who had come to Washington D.C. to stir things up.
Who’s Fault Is It?
One thing both sides seem to be agreeing on is that losses in the House are Nancy Pelosi’s fault. When taking the speakership after the election of 2018, Pelosi promised she would only serve for four years. She has served two already. If some Democrats get their way, she may not serve another two.
