Obama as Speaker is a silly idea. He has no experience in Congressional leadership, and all of his legislative successes as President can be laid at the feet of Nancy Pelosi. It would be like firing the woman who got things done and replacing her with the man she did those things for.
It’s been pointed out that the speaker of the house need not be a member of the house.
Here’s an interesting constitutional question: could the President (keep this non-partisan, please) be elected speaker of the house?
No, you can’t service in more than once branch of government at same time (except for being Vice-President)
One solution is for Pelosi to agree from the outset not to run for reelection in 2020.
This, exactly. A lot of the mud is specific to her, or rather the mud that is sticking is associated with her. Hell, I know Democrats who don’t like her for God knows what reason. She would do a fine job, but I think it’s time to move on. I don’t know who I would pick, but anybody else.
Really? Remind me, please, how long did it take them to dirty up Elizabeth Warren? Maxine Waters? Fredericka Wilson? Debbie Wasserman-Schultz? (Notice anything those people have in common, by the way?)
I don’t have a problem with picking someone besides Pelosi, but Pelosi has earned her votes each and every term. If she can earn them again, I have no problem with it. And I’m sick of playing on Republicans’ turf, letting them define for Democrats/progressives on what basis they should pick their leadership.
But to my understanding it is exactly the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that most want her gone. For the Republicans she’s a mixed bag - dangerous in her fund-raising ability( which apparently is second to none ), but also a convenient boogeyman to trot out on the campaign trail. The pragmatic old guard DP leadership goes along with her because of that prodigious fund-raising ability and energizer bunny work ethic.
It’s the slightly younger, slightly more progressive wing of the party that mostly want her to make way for a new generation of leadership.
I’d like to propose Eric Swalwell. He’s young, smart (esp. on legal matters) and not one of those “oh gee let’s cross the aisle because this time it won’t backfire on us” bullshitters.
…Of course now I see that he’s announced interest in running for Pres. in 2020. Crap. Although he might not be a bad choice, but I’d like to keep the good representatives in place while we can.
The Speaker is never popular, so trying to pick someone to be popular is pointless. I think the only recent Speaker who wasn’t actively unpopular was Dennis Hastert and that was only because he kept a low profile and most people had no idea who he was (though, uhh, maybe he had other reasons for that).
Didn’t work much in this last election, did it? She’s the convenient boogeyman who has lost all her teeth to scare voters into voting for Republicans.
I have no problem if the younger, slightly more progressive wing of the party want her to leave and make way for a new generation of leadership. I think she understands this, too. She has asked for the gavel for a period of time after the new Congress is sworn in and some time to aid in picking a new more progressive replacement. She gets it.
My point is, it should be Democrats who decide their leadership, full stop. Not Democrats responding to Republican mudslinging. Look how fast they got rid of Al Franken when they decided he’d be a significant threat to Trump in 2020. Remember, Roger Stone knew all about the impending attacks on Franken before it happened.
They will smear anyone and fast. We just have to stop buying into it.
I think Swalwell is a fantastic choice, too, but he’s immersed in the Trump/Russia investigation along with Schiff on the House Intelligence Committee. I think that to take him away from bringing these sods to justice would be like prying a barnacle off a rock.
LOL, ummmm… maybe.
Schiff spent a solid year leaking everything he could to the press. The odds are decent that he’ll be hauled away by the FBI at some point - or at least members of his staff will. The optics on that won’t be great.
And I’ll also mention that the whole reason that he was leaking stuff was to try and force the Republicans on the Intelligence Committee to investigate Trump. They didn’t. And so if we ask what the job of the Speaker is, it’s strategizing how to get people to go your way when you need them to. If you have proved to not be able to do that, then you’re probably not a very good pick.
Schiff also got them crazy eyes.
But getting back to the topic of strategizing, I’d want someone who is good at that. Who’s the slickest bastard in the House? Who’s Democrat Mitch McConnell? I’m pretty sure that’s not Pelosi, but I don’t know who is.
If it’s true that the Speaker doesn’t need to be a member of Congress, they could talk to John Boehner and see if he’d come work for them. I don’t know how much of a strategist he was, but he might be able to pull people from the opposite side.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz could be a good candidate. If she can screw over Bernie, she can screw others over as well.
Show. Don’t tell.
Graph the number of posts to this thread per week. Note when that falls off a cliff. Compare to the date at which the House Intelligence Committee shut down their Russia investigation.
OK. I’ve done that. Is the graph supposed to spell Adam Schiff’s name or something.
Not even close to adequate. You’re just repeating a right wing talking point.
I’ve never read any source, right wing or otherwise, making the claim. It’s my own claim based on the dropoff of information, how active Schiff was in fighting to keep the investigation going and open it up to go in more directions, and because he was the only one with access to FBI information, as part of the Gang of Eight.
Take the first mention in the news of Manafort’s meeting notes from the Veselnitskaya meeting. That’s a report on a direct physical piece of evidence in the custody of the FBI. The only people seeing that are FBI and the Gang of Eight.
If we’d continued to get choice leaks like that after the House Intelligence Committee shut down, then there would still be the option of an FBI leak or Mark Warner. But since it cut off, that really pinpoints Schiff.
There’s really no doubt that he was doing it. And while I think that he tried too hard for too long, and probably ended up just making Mueller’s job harder, I don’t strongly fault him for doing it. I’m not trying to throw the man under the bus, I’m just talking about the reality of the situation.
It could be that he shared everything with the media in entirely clean ways that can’t come back to him. A lot of people seem to leak to the media without getting caught. But there’s always the potential for some bit of evidence to come to light, and they’re going to be digging HARD to find it.
No, y’all are thinking about it wrong.
The whole leadership team has gotten long in the tooth. Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn are 78, Steny Hoyer is 79. Absent any challenges, Pelosi would be Speaker, Hoyer would be Majority Leader, and Clyburn would be Majority Whip in the new Congress.
If you bump off Pelosi, the differing factions would cancel each other out, and Hoyer becomes Speaker. Just what we need, an old, pro-business white guy as the public face of the Democratic Party of 2019.
I think it’s Hoyer and Clyburn who need to be pushed out and replaced with younger leaders who can be ready to take over when Pelosi retires. Having a leadership trio who will all turn 80 during the Congress that starts in January is just a bit much.
To be fair, it didn’t take them any longer to “dirty up” Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Jon Tester, Andrew Gillum, Beto O’Rourke, and a host of others whose chromosomal makeup is somewhat different from the folks on your list :).
Not to invalidate your point–I’d agree that women have gotten the worst of it–but GOP-strewn mud certainly hasn’t been limited to women.
And of course the dirtying up of Wasserman Schultz was accomplished much more effectively by the Bernie Sanders campaign than by anything the GOP did.
Anyway, I agree that it wouldn’t take long for Republican operatives to smear whoever the Dems got to replace Pelosi. That being said, I’d still like a younger Speaker (and younger presidential candidates as well).
You are wrong to think that any of those women has the name recognition and unfavorables of Pelosi, save perhaps Warren.
You can’t really think that a decade-long campaign spending hundreds of millions of dollars can be replicated overnight.