The Democrat leadership consists of people no one wants, but that hardly anyone wants to replace.
Take Biden or Kamala, neither of whom the party wants anymore, but no one is stepping up to replace. Or take Pelosi. In 2018, she secured another run as House Speaker by promising to step down in 2022.
Nancy Pelosi announced on Wednesday that she will step down as top Democrat in the House by 2022 in a deal with Democratic lawmakers pushing for generational change. The deal secures her the votes she needs to become speaker of the House in January.
Since then Pelosi has played coy about whether she would actually step down. Now she’s becoming even less coy.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi will stay until at least after the midterm elections, extending her nearly 20-year run as the House’s top Democrat after she turns 82 and, perhaps, beyond.
She is planning to file and run for reelection in her San Francisco district next year — at least for now — in keeping with her pattern of deciding about staying in Congress after the elections, when she likely will have won an 18th full term.
And sources familiar with Pelosi’s thinking say she isn’t ruling out the possibility of trying to stay in leadership after 2022, despite her original vow to leave as the top House Democrat.
There had been pressure on Pelosi to step down in 2010 when the GOP took the House. But I suspect there’s going to be much less pressure this time around, because who really wants her job? Sure, some Squad members would be happy to raise the red flag, but few House Dems would let them. Slot in Rep. Clyburn? He doesn’t have the pipeline to Pelosi’s San Francisco cash machine.
And no one really wants to ride the Titanic down. House members are retiring, they’re not scrambling for Pelosi’s job.
That leaves Pelosi, like Biden and Kamala, with a figurehead title that no one else really wants, and with the job of brokering dirty deals for the special interests that put them there.
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