Pelosi Prepares to Send Her Most Vulnerable Members to the Slaughter

T he Associated Press reports that, unchastised by Tuesday night’s rout, Nancy Pelosi plans to ready the House of Representatives for a “debate and vote on a revised draft of President Joe Biden’s now-$1.85 trillion domestic policy package.” The decision, the AP suggests, is intended to “show voters the party can deliver on its priorities.”

That’s one way of putting it, certainly. Another might be: Nancy Pelosi hopes to appease the progressive wing of her caucus by sending her most vulnerable members unarmed into the Somme.

Substantively, what Pelosi is proposing is bonkers. For a start, there is no “Build Back Better” bill. It remains what it has always been: a slogan, in search of a topline, in search of an agenda. There is only one thing on which the Democratic Party is agreed, and that is that the United States should spend at least two trillion more dollars over the next decade than it had planned to before Joe Biden won. On what? Well, that depends. Some want tax cuts for the rich. Some want to send checks to Americans who have kids. Some want a bunch of new permanent programs. Some want climate-change-mitigation measures. Some want a second New Deal. At various points during the last few months, all of these things have been in the bill in one form or another, and, at various points, they’ve been taken out again. There is a reason that we have not had a “national debate” over the “Biden agenda,” and that reason is that, beyond its cost, there is nothing concrete to debate.

The result has been the creation of a protean piece of vaporware that nobody in Congress seems much to like, and that the American people seem increasingly to loathe. Since Tuesday’s elections, the institutional Democratic Party has rallied stupidly around the idea that, in order to stave off further electoral losses, it must show voters that it can “get things done” — as if the average American citizen favors action for its own sake. But, of course, it must do no such thing. Reflecting upon this fallacy, Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, noted yesterday that “nobody elected [Biden] to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos,” while Representative Kathleen Rice, her colleague from New York, seemed baffled by the whole thing. “I don’t understand some of my more progressive colleagues saying [that Tuesday] night now shows us that what we need to do is get both of these bills done and shove even more progressive stuff in,” Rice said.

Rice is correct. And yet, inexplicably, “shove even more progressive stuff in” is precisely what Nancy Pelosi has chosen to do in response. Yesterday morning, despite knowing full well that Joe Manchin is implacably opposed to it, House Democrats added a previously removed paid-leave provision back into the bill, and thereby increased, rather than decreased, the electoral risk it poses to swing-district denizens such as Spanberger and Rice. Why? Well, because the less aligned the House and the Senate become, the more likely it is that the House passes a bill that dies a slow death in the Senate, and, in turn, the more likely it is that the raft of moderate House Democrats who end up voting for it will be left stranded. As the victims of the failed attempt to repeal Obamacare will tell you, there is nothing worse in American politics than having cast a recorded vote for an unpopular bill that is defeated in the other chamber; you don’t have any tangible accomplishment to point to for your trouble, and you’re left vulnerable to attack ads in your next campaign.

It has long been a mystery to me why the rebellion against the president’s preposterous agenda primarily comes from the Senate, when members of the House of Representatives have so much more to lose from siding with the White House. If, by next November, the national mood remains dour, the Democrats are going to lose anywhere between 30 and 50 seats in the lower chamber. At present, the party’s majority in the House is just three seats. Surely — surely — there must be three representatives out of the group that is at risk who can see that their leaders are asking them to commit political suicide?