NEVER BET AGAINST NANCY PELOSI

I remember well the only time I ever met Nancy Pelosi. It was in April 1974, at a fund-raising event for my then-boss, who was running in the Democratic Primary for State Controller. The event was held at the Haas Family (i.e., Levi Strauss) mansion, and a goodly number of San Francisco Political Heavyweights were in attendance.

I ended up back in a corner of the living room, standing next to the wife of the brother of Ron Pelosi, who was a good friend and ally of my boss on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. At the time, I knew her well enough to place a name to the face and identify her as the wife of the brother of my boss’ ally. In other words, not very well at all. She at the time was primarily known as a wife and mother; in other words, most people didn’t know her very well.

We ended up chatting, and during that conversation, she proceeded to identify every single San Francisco Political Heavyweight in the room, and describe why they were there and what they were looking to get for having shown up. I knew enough about a couple of them to know she was right in her analysis of them, so I believed (correctly as it turned out later) her analysis of the others. It was a master performance of a retail politician. When she was finished, I said to her, “Mrs. Pelosi, you should run for office.” She smiled at me. I later learned who exactly she was: daughter of a famed Baltimore mayor and sister of another, someone who had grown up with that kind of political knowledge imparted to her since she was old enough to understand the English language. In other words, a Serious Pro.

Thus, ever since she won election to Congress in 1986 (after her children were grown and out on their own - she had her priorities straight), nothing in the career of Nancy Pelosi since has surprised me. I think she’s one of the three most-knowledgeable and adept politicians I have ever known - the other two being Jesse Unruh, the inventor of the modern state legislature, and his successor Willie Brown, the best operator of a modern state legislature. Nobody ever knowingly crossed either of them, knowing what the inevitable result would be, and Pelosi has demonstrated the same skill.

Which is why I am constantly amazed that political morons like Josh Gottheimer haven’t figured out who she is, and keep getting their heads handed to them on a platter as a result.

Who is Josh Gottheimer? He’s an alleged “Democrat” in the mold of the drooling moron Rahm Emanuel, who thinks his shit doesn’t stink because he is the “bipartisan co-chair” of the Problem Solver’s Caucus in the House, a collection of Democratic “moderates” who still believe they can trust the Republican “moderates” they ally with and whose causes they always support. A caucus that has yet to solve a single problem, though they are pretty good at trying to create problems, and stabbing other members of their party in the back - or at least trying to.

A better title for this crop of idiots is Vichy Democrats. You can expect me to use that term from now on when describing these people.

The Vichy Democrats, whose leader is Gottheimer, include Carolyn Bourdeaux (Georgia), Filemon Vela (Texas), Jared Golden (Maine), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Ed Case (Hawaii), Jim Costa (California) and Kurt Schrader (Oregon). They’re now getting a lot of attention from the otherwise-unemployables of the Washington Press Corpse for a letter they sent to Speaker Pelosi, in which they demand an immediate vote on the famed Bipartisan Infrastructure Package that passed the Senate earlier this week, in opposition to the position of the House Progressive Caucus and the stated position of the Speaker that there will be no vote on this bill until the Senate passes the Budget Reconciliation Bill and it is voted on in the House. That is expected to happen sometime in October.

The Vichy Democrats’ letter concludes: “With the livelihoods of hardworking American families at stake, we simply can’t afford months of unnecessary delays and risk squandering this one-in-a-century, bipartisan infrastructure package. It’s time to get shovels in the ground and people to work.”

The estimable Charles P. Pierce notes that the district Gottheimer represents in New Jersey Gottheimer, is one “in which the median household income is north of $110,000...”

Pierce also quotes from a Reuters dispatch regarding how the $3.5 trillion “soft infrastructure” bill will be paid for: “Roughly doubling the tax rate paid by high earners on their investment income to 39.6% from 20% and lifting the highest tax rate on ordinary income to 39.6% from 37%. Increase the corporate tax rate and set a minimum tax on foreign income as part of a global minimum tax. Increased scrutiny of higher-income taxpayers at the Internal Revenue Service.”

Does anyone think there is not a connection between the demographics of Gottheimer’s district and the manner in which the social infrastructure bill will be paid for, and his belief the bill “goes too far”? Does anyone not think that Gottheimer’s plan here is to press the Speaker - who has a three-vote loss margin to pass legislation in the House - to pass the “bipartisan” bill so he can vote against the social infrastructure bill and return home to tell his constituents he’s getting their potholes fixed while protecting them from the Infernal Revenue Service?

The nation’s finest fishwrap, er, I mean the New York Times, frames the issue thus:

“If they stick to their position, Democratic leaders and President Biden face their first major test in the process. More than half of the nearly 100-strong Congressional Progressive Caucus has taken the opposite position, saying they will not vote for the infrastructure bill until they have a social policy measure funding their priorities: climate change, education, health care, family leave, child care and elder care. With the promised defections from the Progressive Caucus, it would appear that Ms. Pelosi faces a stalemate, lacking the votes to either deliver the infrastructure bill to President Biden’s desk or advance the budget resolution needed to protect the final legislation from Republican obstruction.”

Gottheimer, who wasn’t in Congress in 2010, would do himself a favor if he was to read some congressional history from back then.

Back in 2009, the Democrats were forced to wait nearly six months forAl Franken to arrive in the Senate after he narrowly defeated Norm Coleman in Minnesota in 2008, an event that finally provided the necessary 60 votes in the Senate to overcome the GOP filibuster and pass Obamacare. But just after the Senate passed their version - which was considerably different from what the House had passed, Ted Kennedy died in August 2009. All progress on final passage of the bill in the House and then the Senate awaited the results of the special election called to fill Kennedy’s seat; given it was Massachusetts, everyone expected that Martha Coakley would win - no matter how poorly she was campaigning - and the filibuster-proof majority would be restored so the bill could be finessed and finalized. Except that on January 19, 2010, there was a shocking result when the race in Massachusetts was called for Republican Scott Brown, and the Republicans regained the ability to filibuster Obamacare just as it reached the negotiation finish line.

Moments after the result was announced, liberal firebrand Representative Barney Frank declared that since the people of Massachusetts had spoken, “we cannot do health reform in its present form.” Josh Marshall correctly defined this as the “embodiment of fecklessness, resignation, defeatism and just plain folly.”

Frank quickly regained his equilibrium, but the rest of the Vichy Democrats - led by White House Chief of Staff the execrable Rahm Emanuel and political “genius” David Axelrod - counseled President Obama to accept a trimmed -down bill that focused on the needs of lower income Americans. Obama listened to them and was very close to going along with the idea. At that point, Speaker Pelosi told the president to tell Emanuel to shut up and stop pushing on a mini-bill. According to a report at the time by Molly Ball, Pelosi told him in an Oval Office meeting, “Mr. President, I know there are some on your staff who want to take the namby-pamby approach. That’s unacceptable.” Fortunately, Obama listened.

At her press conference a week after Brown’s victory, and shortly after her conversation with the president, Pelosi was pressed on how she proposed to salvage the legislation. Her reply was epic, one for the ages: “As I said to some friends yesterday in the press, we will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in. But we are going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”

It took a grueling two months for Pelosi to lead the House to accept the one road to victory that was possible as a result of the changed political circumstances in the Senate: the House Democrats had to pass the Senate version of the bill, word for word, regardless of the fact a majority of the House Democrats had called that bill unacceptable. Not only that, Pelosi had to bring them to support a version of the ACA she herself disagreed with.

Without a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, there was no possibility of success in a fight between House and Senate Democrats over the different versions of the Affordable Care Act. No more-progressive bill would get the single Republican vote necessary to overcome a filibuster.

And on March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act.

Critics immediately noted the Affordable Care Act was itself incomplete and imperfect. But even the most critical had to note that what had happened was a feat of political strength and determination by the Speaker.

At the time, being a political historian, I noted as often as I could in online discussions that the original Social Security Act passed in 1935 was highly restrictive - occupations held by women and People of Color were deliberately not included among those that werev covered. It was a bad bill, and the New Deal progressives of the day were bitterly disappointed in the result. But the real result was seen over time. Social Security was now law. And laws can be amended and changed. Which is what happened between 1935 and 1968, when the system we all now recognize finally came into existence.

Take a look at what is in the Budget Reconciliation Bill: it’s not “Medicare for All,” but benefits are expanded to include vision, hearing and dental care - all of which I have only been able to successfully deal with by virtue of the Veteran’s Administration and the Saban Clinic here in Los Angeles (thank you Senator Sanders). Once this is passed, everybody will be able to deal with those issues. And anyone who declares that is of no value when compared to Medicare for All doesn’t have the brains to know what they are talking about.

The Vichy Democrats aren’t going to torpedo the Reconciliation Bill any more than are the progressive lions and lionesses in the House who have declared the Reconciliation Bill is now open to further debate. They will all re-learn how to work with the Speaker.

Jesse Unruh and Willie Brown were the most hard-nosed political realists I ever knew. They each had a vision of a society worth living in, and they both knew that progress toward that might sometimes, occasionally, surprisingly, be measured in miles, but more often it’s measured in millimeters. You take your progress where you get it. As Unruh famously said, “If you can’t drink their booze and screw their women and vote against them in the morning with a smile on your face, you have no business in this business.” I doubt Speaker Pelosi would even think in those words, let alone say them, but I’m absolutely certain she’d agree with the point made. Which is why she is a Great Politician, perhaps the greatest Speaker of the House since Thomas Brackett Reed. (Go pick up a copy of Barbara Tuchman’s “The Proud Tower” if you don’t know who he was. There’s a whole long interesting chapter on him there, a good political education all by itself.)

Political reality is never simple or pretty. But at those “clutch moments” where it is “do or do not, there is no try,” no one in government is more determined and indomitable than Nancy Pelosi. Which is why she has been my favorite American politician for a long time.

Josh Gottheimer’s about to find out how his problem gets solved.

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