Tense meeting

Pelosi shuts down critics in tense meeting

The Democratic leader refused to offer a timeline for stepping down, loath to turn herself into a lame duck speaker.

By RACHAEL BADE, JOHN BRESNAHAN and HEATHER CAYGLE

Nancy Pelosi was having none of it.

A trio of her fiercest Democratic critics — lawmakers trying to bar her from reclaiming the speaker's gavel — were trying to pin her down on exactly when she planned to relinquish power.

But Pelosi, huddled in her office in the second floor of the Capitol Wednesday afternoon, wouldn’t answer them. Instead, the California Democrat launched into a lengthy monologue about how successful she’d been throughout her career and how 2020 is a presidential year, so voters wouldn’t care who the speaker was next election.

“They went in hoping to begin some type of conversation about a transition to leadership and it never even left the ground,” said one source familiar with the conversation.

Pelosi and her three biggest critics are talking past each other — and it appears unlikely that they can bridge that divide.

The rebels, led by Democratic Reps. Kathleen Rice of New York, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Tim Ryan of Ohio, want her to go, or at the very least commit to passing the gavel by a certain deadline. But Pelosi doesn’t feel like she needs to and isn’t even considering such a concession.

Indeed, just an hour after she left that session, Pelosi won a strong show of support for her leadership during a Democratic Caucus meeting. That test vote was the first step to Pelosi reclaiming the position she lost when Republicans took the House in 2010. And most news reports highlighted Pelosi’s apparent momentum in getting there by the Jan. 3 roll-call vote on the House floor.

Moulton, Rice and Ryan opened up the discussion with the California Democrat hoping to find out what exactly Pelosi meant when she said in October that she'd serve as a “transitional” leader — particularly after Pelosi later said all leaders are transitional in some way. But Pelosi refused to even acknowledge the idea since she’d make herself a lame duck speaker, crippling herself just as she’s going up against Democrats' biggest foe: President Donald Trump.

“They want her to lame duck herself,” complained one Pelosi ally. “It’s not just about her. They want her to put a timeline on herself. That erodes the authority of the entire Democratic majority.”

The meeting, while entirely unfruitful according to sources familiar with the discussion, highlights how the anti-Pelosi rebel cause has shifted.

While Pelosi's critics inside the caucus previously hoped to oust her entirely before this Congress, the group is now coalescing behind the idea of supporting the California Democrat if she publicly declares an exit strategy. The most important thing, they say, is having a plan in place to install new, fresh faces atop the Democrat Party. But it’s not clear they’ll get even that.

Rice later said she still plans to vote against Pelosi on the floor.

“It was not a terribly productive conversation,” Rice admitted to reporters after the meeting. “People need to know when this leadership team plans to turn the reins over to a new group of leaders.”

Pelosi, Moulton and Ryan's offices all refused to comment for this story.

But according to sources familiar with what happened, Rice, Moulton and Ryan expressed concerns about incoming Democratic freshmen who vowed to vote against Pelosi and are being pressured to break those campaign promises. The incoming class needs to back a speaker that could help them politically and that “they can be proud of,” they argued. Freshmen could be punished for backing her in 2020, they continued.

Pelosi, however, dismissed their argument entirely, vowing to help these incoming freshmen by raising them money to fend off any such attacks. In fact, the entire thrust of their argument was insulting to Pelosi, her allies said — particularly because Pelosi believes Democrats’ 40-seat Election-Day romp proved that GOP attacks against her are no longer effective.

The tense standoff came just before Pelosi handily won the House Democratic nomination to be speaker in a closed-door caucus meeting. She only lost 32 votes, well below the 63 who opposed her in caucus in 2016. Indeed, Pelosi allies argue that she has momentum at her back as she works to twist arms and cajole reluctant opponents in her bid to win 218 votes on the floor.

Pelosi herself called the caucus tally "a vote of confidence" in her leadership, and noted several times that no other lawmaker challenged her.

"Are there dissenters? Yes," Pelosi said. "But I see this as a powerful vote of confidence."

Pelosi may never win over the trio she met with Wednesday. But she may not need them to re-claim the gavel anyway. Ultimately Pelosi can afford to lose 17 votes on the floor and still become speaker.

The current House minority leader has already demonstrated that she can pick off major players in the group of insurgents organizing against her, flipping Reps. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) and Brian Higgins (D-N.Y.) just before Thanksgiving. And she appears close to a deal with Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), who exited a meeting with Pelosi Wednesday expressing confidence in her ability to win the gavel.

Fudge, who briefly considered challenging Pelosi before changing course and endorsing the Californian, also declared confidently that Pelosi will become the next speaker. The Ohio Democrat was not sure, however, what it would take for Pelosi to win Rice, Moulton and Ryan, suggesting “some of them, they’re just not going to do it.”

But others in the group of Pelosi critics are winnable, Fudge continued: "I think that she’s going to have the votes.”

Some in the anti-Pelosi camp saw Wednesday's face-off as a way to give the rebels cover should the speakership battle get really ugly.

If the anti-Pelosi faction is able to block her on the House floor in January, the caucus — and the broader party apparatus beyond Capitol Hill — would devolve into chaos. At that time, the anti-Pelosi insurgents would be able to say they tried to engage her in a conversation to win their votes, one source argued.

Yet it’s not clear they’ll have the numbers to do this. Currently, roughly 20 lawmakers have said they’ll oppose her on the floor — but so did Fudge and Higgins before they changed their minds.

And Pelosi still has five weeks to revise their thinking.