Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) may be the House Democratic leader, but if the drama surrounding President Joe Biden’s fitness for office has told us anything, it’s that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is still pulling the strings.
House Democrats with concerns about Biden’s ability to win the 2024 election against former President Donald Trump have looked to the former House speaker to deliver the kill shot to the president’s sagging reelection campaign.
Not only is the Capitol Hill veteran respected by colleagues in both parties, her steely no-nonsense attitude may be the jolt some are hoping Biden needs to call it quits.
“That’s why some of us are going to Pelosi,” one House Democrat told Axios. “She’s a tough cookie, she’ll tell you like it is.”
Another called her a “f***ing power-broker.”
“She’s the hatchet,” the person added.
Pelosi is part of a so-called group of “super friends” made up of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate President Pro Tempore Patty Murray (D-WA), Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), and Jeffries.
“The super friends are assembling,” a House Democrat told Politico. “There’s a group of people who are going to go make their case to whomever they can get to at the White House that he needs to step aside and we’re going to get our a**es kicked if he doesn’t.”
The pressure campaign’s alleged goal is not only to see Biden step aside but also to end the perception that the Democratic Party is fractured heading into the high-stakes November election, in which control of Congress is also up for grabs.
This week, Pelosi stopped short of endorsing Biden, seemingly hinting that she hoped he would come to his senses and step aside.
“He’s beloved, he is respected, and people want him to make that decision, not me,” Pelosi said on Morning Joe, Biden’s purported favorite news show. “I want him to do whatever he decides to do, and that’s the way it is.”
She also said it was “up to the president to decide if he is going to run.”
“We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short,” she said.
While her comments were delivered with typical political deftness, they stunned some White House officials and Democrats because Biden had, in no uncertain terms, stated he was staying in the race. Pelosi’s comments that “time is running short” let people know that the discussion was still alive.
By the end of Wednesday, two more House Democrats, Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Pat Ryan (D-NY), added their names to the list of lawmakers calling on Biden to pull out of the race. That number is 19 and counting, as of Friday afternoon.
“Because of the stature she has had over her decades of leading, whether it was the chair of the Democratic Party here in California or as speaker of the House, she does have a certain amount of gravitas and a certain amount of respect,” California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson told the Washington Examiner. “It also says a lot about the ‘rising stars’ of the party.”
Pelosi had a historic, 19-year run as the first female and longest-serving head of the Democratic Party in the House.
When she was elected speaker in 2007, she became the highest-ranking woman in U.S. history. She reclaimed the gavel in 2019 and swore in Vice President Kamala Harris, another California Democrat, in 2021.
Pelosi was also crucial in getting the Affordable Care Act passed against steep odds in 2010 during former President Barack Obama’s first term.
If Biden steps aside, it is unclear who would be added to the ticket.
Some contenders are Harris and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), though he has repeatedly said he is all-in on Biden.
“I think it is incredibly sad for the Democrat Party that that is their bench,” Patterson said. “I think either Gov. Newsom or Vice President Harris at the top of the ticket would be absolutely disastrous for Democrats. You need to look no further than their records.”
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Patterson pointed to California’s budget deficit, homelessness, drug epidemic, and crime, which she pinned on Newsom and Harris’s shoulders.
“California ranks at the top of all of the wrong lists,” she said.