Not even President Trump’s widely condemned tweets this weekend put a halt to the infighting between the establishment and progressive wings of the Democratic Party.
On Monday, anonymous “top Democrats” selectively leaked internal polling data showing progressive freshmen Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., are unpopular with white “likely general-election” Democratic voters have two years or less of a college education. At the same time, progressive Democrats have used the president’s tweets as an opportunity to disregard and even challenge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership, leaving the California representative, who they see as too moderate, in the position of having to once again rein in increasingly rebellious caucus members.
On Tuesday, Pelosi had to throw cold water on efforts by liberal Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, to censure the president, “an extremely rare and serious congressional punishment,” the Washington Examiner’s Susan Ferrechio reported. Pelosi instead pushed her colleagues to seek a resolution condemning his remarks.
“This is, I hope, one where we will get Republican support,” the speaker told Democratic lawmakers, according to a source in the room. “If they can’t support condemning the words of the president, well, that’s a message in and of itself.”
Pelosi’s move to kneecap Cohen’s censure proposal comes just one day after Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts held a press conference responding to Trump’s weekend tweets. The presser was a mishmash of the normal “love will win” pablum, but there were also two notable moments where the “Four Horsewomen of the Aprogalypse” used the nationally televised event to challenge Pelosi’s leadership.
“Please know that we are more than four people,” said Pressley in a none-too-subtle rebuke of the speaker’s charge that the liberal women-of-color bloc is just “four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
“Our squad is big,” Pressley added. “Given the size of this squad in this great nation we cannot, we will not be silenced.”
Then there was the moment where Omar and Tlaib called for Trump’s impeachment, which almost certainly left Pelosi screaming.
“I have not made impeachment central to my election or my tenure,” said Omar. “But it’s not if he will be impeached, but when. It is time for us to stop allowing this president to make a mockery of this country.”
Tlaib said, “Many members of Congress have called for his impeachment. I urge House leadership, many of my colleagues, to take action to impeach.”
Impeachment. Not this again. Since even before Pelosi took back the speaker’s gavel in 2018, she has been begging her Democratic colleagues to drop the impeachment fantasy. She has been clear about this since Trump’s inauguration, saying over and over again that it is not the strategy to pursue, especially as the 2020 elections are just around the corner. Yet Omar and Tlaib called for it anyway on national television, stoking the fire of impeachment and challenging fellow Democrats to get behind an issue that Pelosi has explicitly instructed the caucus to drop.
It is an astonishing thing, really, to see that Trump’s tweets did not serve as a unifying moment for Democrats. It is astonishing to see they did not band together for at least 48 hours, taking full advantage of the political win Trump handed them. One would think that they would have rallied together, putting their strategic and personal differences aside long enough to refocus their attention and energy on a common enemy. But no such thing happened. They could not stop sniping for even 24 hours. It is almost as if Trump did not even tweet.
At this rate, Trump is going to win reelection. Like 2016, Trump’s 2020 victory will come about not because he is terribly savvy or smart, but because his opponents are that monstrously incompetent.
