This is undoubtedly the best bit of news that President Trump saw on Twitter today:
JUST IN: Dems overwhelmingly nominate Pelosi as new House Speaker https://t.co/FpXbQIlmhA pic.twitter.com/bTSvLPk0NF
— The Hill (@thehill) November 28, 2018
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) claimed victory on Wednesday, saying she had won the Democratic nomination for Speaker amid an entrenched rebellion from insurgent lawmakers who pose the starkest threat to her long reign atop the party.
The outcome was no surprise. Pelosi was running uncontested and enjoys widespread support within the liberal-heavy caucus she’s led since 2003.
The much higher bar will come in the first week of January, when the full House meets to choose the Speaker in a public vote requiring a majority of the entire voting chamber. It’s there that the insurgents feel they can block Pelosi’s ascension, even as Pelosi and her allies have projected nothing but confidence that she’ll retake the gavel she lost following the red wave elections of 2010.
Pelosi was a very powerful and effective speaker the last time she had the gavel. She did more to sell Obamacare than Barack Obama did. In what was surely a bitterly ironic outcome for her, President Obama’s “signature” legislative achievement sent her into minority party exile for eight years.
She was never more vulnerable in her leadership role than after the Republican midterm victories of 2010 and 2014, and she survived both of those. There will probably be a push for new blood in January, but Pelosi has already been working overtime to take care of that.
The Obama people haven’t forgotten their debt to her and have already been helping her cause.
Since election night, I and many others have said that having Pelosi do a second turn as speaker may be the best thing for President Trump’s 2020 run. The Democrats are signaling that they won’t be relentlessly focused on badgering the president via investigations and threats of impeachment, but is there any reason to believe that after the last two years?
Many have been reporting that Pelosi has been backing off on the impeachment front, but even that was handled with her characteristic muddy political speak:
“We shouldn’t impeach the president for political reasons and we shouldn’t not impeach the president for political reasons,” Pelosi recently told The Associated Press.
Sure thing, Grandma Nan.
As we saw during the Kavanaugh confirmation, the Democrats are better at uniting Republicans and conservatives than the Republicans are. A couple of years of them leading the charge in the House may just be all that President Trump needs for #MAGA 2.0.
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