Pelosi Goes Awol in Lame Duck
Suzy Khimm reports:
In the basement of the Capitol building, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi briefly exited a meeting where the members of her Democratic caucus were wringing their hands over President Barack Obama's tax bill last Tuesday night. A scrum of reporters and television camera crews immediately materialized around her, pelting the Speaker with questions about the liberal revolt that threatened to derail the president's deal. Pelosi lowered her well-coiffed head and kept walking silently—she was simply heading to the ladies' room. When the Speaker finally emerged, she answered one unrelated question about a separate spending bill, then swiftly disappeared back into the room without saying another word.
The highest-ranking Democrat in Congress, in her final days as Speaker, would remain largely silent for much of the week, while a debate raged in the halls of the Capitol over this defining policy move. Obama's $858 tax bill—which tied progressive policy initiatives to the extension of George W. Bush's bonus tax cuts for the rich—had put the famously bold, unapologetically liberal Pelosi in an unenviable position: she was wedged between a House Democratic caucus that despised the deal and a president who owned it. If she blew off her angry members, she'd be defying her own party. If Pelosi ceded to their demands to change or oppose the deal, she risked sabotaging the president's grand compromise—the equivalent of staging a political coup. So Pelosi decided to go AWOL.
Having shepherded Obama's biggest legislative priorities through Congress, Pelosi has been heralded as the most powerful speaker in recent history. But when Obama decided for the first time to secure GOP support before relying on his own party, Pelosi sat on the sidelines—delegated, it seemed, to minority status even before the House Republicans officially took the helm. And as Obama's re-election campaign inches closer, the president may try to strike more deals with Republicans in a bid for independent voters. How will Pelosi fit into this political calculus? Will she continue to demur as minority leader—or will she try to assert her independence as the leader of the most liberal faction of Democrats in Washington?
Last week placed Pelosi out in the cold, and her decision to enter a deep freeze left her caucus at loggerheads. While her liberal members protested, bickered, and cursed out the president over the bill, Pelosi issued a mild statement explaining she was still trying to "continue discussions with the President...in the days ahead to improve the proposal." Though she managed to eke out clean energy tax credits in the Senate version, the tweak hardly mollified her agitated members. Subsequently, Pelosi sat on her hands: she neither rallied behind the bill, nor actively whipped for amendments to change it. Resigned to the bill's passage, at one point she gave a brief, 10-minute speech, outlining the benefits of the package. She held no press conferences during the week.
In the final stretch, Pelosi and her deputies seemed disconnected from their Democratic comrades. When the tax bill was finally brought up for a vote on Thursday afternoon without any of the final changes her caucus was demanding, Pelosi was unexpectedly forced to pullthe legislation off the House floor when she didn't have the votes to move forward. "No one knew what was going on—and I don't think leadership knew what was going on," a House Democratic aide told me. Late that night, the mammoth tax measure finally passed the House. At the White House signing ceremony the next day, Pelosi was conspicuously absent.
