By Noah Rothman
Thursday, July 11, 2019
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knows how government works.
She has ample institutional authority, and she knows how to wield it. But the
days when Pelosi could reliably corral her caucus are over. In the Obama years,
Pelosi and her fellow Democrats expanded the rules of political engagement,
blurring the lines between political disagreements and personal attacks. Now
those new rules are being turned against her.
Pelosi is currently engaged in what promises to become a
full-blown war with a would-be tetrarchy of prominent progressive House
members: Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez. “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter
world, but they didn’t have any following,” she said of this vexing
quadrumvirate. “They’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got.”
Pelosi was lamenting the modest progressive revolt that nonetheless helped
scuttle the House Democratic effort to unite behind an alternative to the
Senate’s bipartisan emergency border package. The “squad,” as they call
themselves, sacrificed the good for the perfect, and they lost. They forced
moderate Democrats into the GOP’s hands, and delivered Pelosi a “striking
defeat.”
This isn’t the first time the “squad” has exerted its
influence over the Speaker. Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow progressives trampled
all over House leadership’s efforts to frame a campaign-finance reform and
anti-corruption bill (deemed H.R. 1 to connote its importance) in favor of
their embarrassing Green New Deal legislation. They also led the successful
effort to thwart a resolution condemning the imminently condemnable
anti-Semitism routinely displayed by Rep. Omar, forcing Pelosi to settle
instead for the vaguest of watered-down resolutions looking askance at “hate.”
Pelosi is right. These four representatives don’t have
much institutional authority. What influence they wield is derived from their
grassroots following and the press, but that’s nothing to sneeze at. Moreover,
they have demonstrated their mastery of the moment by deploying a tactic Pelosi
herself used to great effect: spurious accusations of racism.
Ocasio-Cortez, who spent Wednesday complaining that her
congressional committee assignments might have been designed by leadership to
keep her “busy” and out of the way, unleashed a disproportionate retaliatory
strike on the Speaker. “The persistent singling out,” she said, “it got to a
point where it was just outright disrespectful—the explicit singling out of
newly elected women of color.” The implication is blindingly clear: Pelosi’s
criticisms of Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues are illegitimate because they
are tainted with racial animus.
AOC isn’t out on this limb alone. “The thing that upsets
the occupant of the White House, his goons in the Republican Party, many of our
colleagues in the Democratic Party,” Rep. Omar recently asserted, “is that they
cannot stand that a refugee, a black woman, an immigrant, a Muslim shows up in
Congress thinking she’s equal to them.”
It’s a struggle to summon up sympathy for the embattled
Speaker. She’s used these sordid tactics to her own advantage when it suited
her. During the 2012 election cycle, Pelosi accused Mitt Romney of
intentionally seeking to be booed in an appearance before an NAACP audience
just to rile up his supporters. She claimed the former Republican presidential
nominee had little to no respect for women. She said that Jews were “being
exploited” by Republicans who claimed to support Israel more than did Barack
Obama. When Paul Ryan dedicated himself to addressing transgenerational poverty
“in our inner cities, in particular,” (a construction Barack Obama also used)
Pelosi called the comments “shameful” and joined her colleagues who insisted
that Ryan’s description of American urban centers was coded language to
describe African-Americans.
Joe Biden, too, held this same tiger by the ears right up
until it got the better of him. Did the then-vice president of the United
States go too far when he told a mixed-race audience in 2012 that the
Republican ticket wanted to “put y’all back in chains?” Barack Obama’s
reelection campaign didn’t think so, though they laughably insisted that Biden
was speaking metaphorically of Romney’s financial policy preferences. If Biden
had offended the Obama campaign’s sense of decorum, its surrogates hadn’t
received the memo. Obama’s “Truth Team” surrogate, Virginia state Sen. Louise
Lucas, also insisted that Mitt Romney actively appealed to voters “who don’t
like a black man in the White House.” The press, too, performed acts of
divination to racialize Romney’s campaign themes. When Romney attacked the
Obama administration for supporting cuts to Medicare and opposing work and
job-training requirements to qualify for welfare, the attacks were said to have
“racial overtones” because they appealed to “highly racialized terms.”
And now the monster has come for Biden. For the sin of
taking pride in working with segregationist Democratic senators who also
happened to chair the Senate Agriculture and Judiciary committees,
respectively, Biden has been attacked as a closet racist (or, at least, being
suspiciously comfortable with that sort). The former senator has endured a
conspicuously timed deluge of new scrutiny involving how he dealt with racial
matters during his decades in office. From his support for an anti-crime bill
at a time when rates of violent crime were twice what they are today to his
opposition to forced busing, The Week’s Ryan Cooper observed, “Biden has
repeatedly wielded his power to devastate the black community.” Given “Biden’s
considerable complicity in racial injustice,” the New Yorker’s Eric
Levitz deemed him “unfit for rehabilitation.” To Mother Jones reporter
Tim Murphy, Biden’s comments about his racially backward colleagues were
evidence of his nostalgia for “a time when segregationists controlled
committees and a total of zero senators were women.”
The accusations that Pelosi and Biden harbor racial
animus in their hearts are certainly unfair, but they are no more flippant and
opportunistic than the attacks on Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. That frivolity
surely contributed to the right’s casual dismissal of their more racially
sensitive critics when they were confronted with the real thing in their midst.
The monster to which Democrats gave life over this decade has turned against
its creators. That’s nothing to celebrate, but the left only has itself to
blame.
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