Progs clash as Dems crash
Revolutions eat their own — right, Madame Speaker?
It feels like just yesterday that Nancy Pelosi was telling Leslie Stahl on “60 Minutes” that the progressive wing of the party known as The Squad was “like five people.”
Well, those “five people” are proving to be a major headache for an increasingly desperate Joe Biden.
The president has only himself and his best friend Nancy to thank for the current gridlock in D.C.
Although I hate to Monday-morning quarterback a “master legislator” like Pelosi, perhaps she could have avoided the current in-fighting among Democrats had she kept her caucus in check.
Instead, Pelosi traded in her party’s sanity and sense for Rolling Stone covers with Rep. Ilhan Omar and glowing coverage from the crew at “Morning Joe.”
For a while, it probably seemed like a good trade-off.
The speaker was the octogenarian It Girl, ripping up Trump’s State of the Union Address to the applause of deranged liberals across America and doing latenight TV interviews about her extensive collection of designer ice creams in Sub Zero freezers.
The Twittersphere met anything Nancy did, from her fashion choices to her clap backs, with a big “YAS QUEEN.”
So what happened? Well, while the #GirlBoss Nancy Pelosi was busy lapping up the glowing coverage from the mainstream media, the progressive “wing” of her party started sharpening their temper-tantrum skills.
(Remember Rep. Cori Bush’s melodramatic pleas for Biden to defy the Supreme Court and keep the eviction ban going, lest millions end up homeless? And then … nothing happened. The Squad’s had a lot of that going on, or not.)
These overblown sit-ins, theatrical interviews and constant attacks on “white supremacists,” science deniers, et al., posed no problem for the Democratic Party as long as they were directed at Orange Man and the GOP.
But now the object of the Squad’s fury is “moderate” Democrats (well, as moderate as modern Democrats can be).
Like a kid who has been given every chocolate bar, golden egg and Oompa Loompa they’ve ever whined for at the checkout counter, there is no reasoning with these celebrity socialists.
“No” is not a word they understand, and the only thing they lack more than proportion is the ability to compromise.
Besides their inflated egos, Squad members are not as sold on the stick-together mentality that so many Democrats have always adhered to.
The fact that Sen. Bernie Sanders has spent the last week egging on this latest Democrat civil war doesn’t help Pelosi’s cause, either.
Last week the millionaire socialist with three homes tweeted, “I strongly urge my House colleagues to vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill until Congress passes a strong reconciliation bill.”
Tanking the infrastructure bill until the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is passed could have disastrous results for Joe Biden.
The president might be left with no domestic wins if the House Democrats insist on playing hardball.
But why wouldn’t they? Met Gala clothes show horse Alexandria OcasioCortez told her gaggle of fans on Friday that she would not go along to get along.
“And I was like I don’t know if you all know yet by now, but I’m from the Bronx. When you tell me isn’t something better than nothing, what I hear, what you’re actually telling me is, isn’t something for you better? And why don’t you accept nothing so I can get something?”
It was the kind of cringeworthy political theater that someone like Pelosi would have applauded a mere nine months ago.
When this kind of gratuitous grandstanding targeted Trump, Nancy was more than happy to encourage it.
Now that these stunts are making her party look inept and overwhelmed, the Speaker might be having a change of heart.
And she isn’t the only one. When asked about the progressives’ unwillingness to compromise, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said, “I’ve been a legislator for 44 years, I’ve got cars older than quite a few of the progressives.”
That might be true, but the older legislators in D.C. did not try to humble or teach these young know-it-alls. Rather, they tried to appease them.
Winston Churchill once famously said, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile — hoping it will eat him last.”
The Democrats stoked the egos of these whining Twitter stars in the hopes that they would be spared in the revolution. Robespierre and Trotsky, among so many others, were hoping for the same break. But revolutionaries, like crocodiles, don’t tend to negotiate.
And unfortunately for Nancy Pelosi, they are very hungry.