Tangle - Nancy Pelosi steps down.

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

Nancy Pelosi steps down from her leadership position. Plus, an update on a reader question from last week about candidate funding, and an important under the radar story on the Supreme Court.You can read today's podcast here, today’s “Under the Radar” story here, and today’s “Have a nice day” story here.Find the AP piece about Republican infighting following the delegation of election race funds here.Today’s clickables: Quick hits (1:00), Today’s story (2:14), Right’s take (11:48), Left’s take (7:00), Isaac’s take (16:38), Listener question (21:31), Under the Radar (24:00), Numbers (24:43), Have a nice day (25:22)You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about Nancy Pelosi and the fact that she is stepping down, which is obviously some pretty

big news. Stepping down from Democratic leadership, I should say. It sounds like she's going to stay in Congress, but we will get to that in a moment. As always, before we jump in, we'll start off with some quick hits. First up, Twitter CEO Elon Musk has reinstated the account of former President Donald Trump, though Trump says he won't return to the platform. Separately, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel named Jack Smith to oversee the criminal investigation into Trump now that he has officially announced his presidential campaign. Number two, a shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs has killed five people and injured dozens more. Two patrons reportedly subdued the shooter, who is now in police custody. Number three, a Democrat Adam Frisch conceded his closely watched and unexpectedly

tight house race to Representative Lauren Boebert, the Republican. Boebert won by just 551 votes despite running in a district where Republicans held a nine-point advantage. Number four, President Biden asked the Supreme Court to let his student loan debt relief program go into effect while the legal challenges to it play out across the country. Number five, police in Idaho say they are still looking for a suspected killer who stabbed four Idaho University students, setting off a statewide manhunt. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a legislative juggernaut, a fundraising titan, a woman who threw both her triumphs and missteps, served at the vanguard of liberal politics for decades,

announced her intention this week to step back from her role leading House Democrats. With great confidence in our caucus, I will not seek re-election to Democratic leadership in the next Congress. Will this new generation of House Democrat leaders be more radical than Pelosi? Or will they finally realize Americans want a more common sense approach? America is ready to turn a page on Nancy Pelosi. I feel like Congress is, obviously the House Republican caucus is, but I would say even for the House Democratic caucus. On Thursday, the California Democrat who made history as the first woman to be named Speaker of the House announced that she was stepping down after 20 years as Democratic leader.

Pelosi had served as the head of her party in Congress since 2003 and was first elected Speaker in 2007, and the decision ends one of the most powerful and longstanding political careers in recent memory. Pelosi, now 82, made the decision ends one of the most powerful and long-standing political careers in recent memory. Pelosi, now 82, made the announcement shortly after Democrats narrowly lost control of the House in this year's midterm elections, just weeks after her husband Paul was assaulted inside their California home, an attack that required surgery for a fractured skull. When I first came to the House floor at six years old, I never would have thought that someday I would go from homemaker to House speaker, she said on the House floor. For me,

the hours come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect. Pelosi also stated her intention to remain in Congress, saying the attack on her husband convinced her to stay. President Biden praised Pelosi as the most consequential speaker in the nation's history. Pelosi first entered Congress in 1987 when her top priority was helping address the AIDS epidemic. She first took the leadership post for Democrats in 2002 to succeed Richard Gephardt, who stepped aside when Republicans took control of the House. She served as speaker from 2007 to 2011 and from 2019 to the present, and was the first Speaker to lose and then regain the post in over 60 years. In 2010, after Democrats lost a

wave of seats in the House, Pelosi defied critics by running for leadership again and managed to pull off the upset victory. Her career was defined not just by the length of her stay at the top of the party, but by her central role passing the Affordable Care Act, leading Democrats as the opposition party against Donald Trump, and her ability to usher through two of the largest bills in U.S. history in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She was also the most prolific fundraiser in the party's history, raising $310 million in this election cycle alone, and by some estimates, close to $1.3 billion during her 20 years in leadership. In 2020, she drew the ire of conservatives when she tore up then-President

Trump's State of the Union address while sitting behind him. Her announcement leaves the Democratic Party with a power vacuum at the top, unsure of who will take the gavel for the first time in many years. Pelosi's longtime ally, Steny Hoyer, the 83-year-old majority leader from Maryland, and James Clyburn of South Carolina, the 82-year-old number three Democrat in the House, also announced they'd be stepping down from their leadership positions. That leaves an opening for a fresh, young slate of Democratic leadership to enter the fray. New York Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a 52-year-old lawmaker who could become the first Black leader of a major party in U.S. history, is the odds-on favorite to replace Pelosi as leader of the party. Pelosi said she has no

plans to endorse a replacement. Meanwhile, Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican from California, is expected to face fierce opposition in his attempt to become new Speaker of the House, the role that Pelosi served for the last four years. Today, we're going to take a look at some reactions from the left and the right, and then my take. First up, we'll start with what the left is saying. Many on the left celebrate her as perhaps the greatest speaker in U.S. history. Some argue she guided Democrats through the most challenging moments of the last 20 years. Others praise her for keeping the party together, which outweighed any cons. In Bloomberg, Jonathan Bernstein called her the greatest speaker of the House in U.S. history. Her four terms as speaker,

two during unified Democratic government and two under Republican presidents and divided government, were unusually productive, Bernstein said. During President Barack Obama's first term, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, she steered the Affordable Care Act into law. When her party operated with a fragile majority over the last two years, she somehow again found ways to pass liberal priorities, sometimes on party-line votes and sometimes with bipartisan support. None of this was assured. Pelosi proved to be a genius of process and people. If she brought something to the House floor, everyone knew she had the votes.

Over and over again, she found creative ways to package the Democratic Party's priorities in a manner that allowed something people thought was a lost cause to wind up on the president's desk, he added. Most notably, she managed to save the Affordable Care Act when a filibuster-proof supermajority had evaporated in the Senate by adopting some components of the bill using a procedural maneuver known as reconciliation. More than a decade later, she drove a huge legislative agenda, including a bipartisan infrastructure agenda, including a bipartisan infrastructure bill, as well as the Inflation Reduction Act addressing climate change, healthcare, and other priorities. All the procedure in the world can't help if the votes aren't there, but Pelosi would find a path when one wasn't a parent.

In the New York Times, Michelle Cottle said anyone who worked with Pelosi will remember her as a total badass. By that term, I don't mean that Ms. Pelosi is some swaggering, performative tough guy. Quite the opposite. In her two decades atop the House Democratic Caucus, whether in the majority or minority, she has been a strikingly effective leader in part because she doesn't much give a flip about her public image, Cottle wrote. What matters to her is getting stuff done, be it passing legislation, thwarting the opposition's agenda, or protecting her members come election time. She is brutally pragmatic, too much so for some in her caucus, and has a shrewd sense of the political pressure

points of allies and opponents alike. She doesn't hog the credit for her clever ideas, nor does she waste time publicly rationalizing or blaming others for her bad ones. No one outworks her, and aides and allies have happily cultivated the legend of her endless energy. Key points, she doesn't need sleep and she runs on chocolate. Ms. Pelosi has frequently been underestimated. It is one of her competitive advantages, Cottle said. That whole grandmother and pearls thing led many to assume that she could be talked down to or outmaneuvered or intimidated. More than one Republican president and congressional leader has seen his best laid plans shatter against her vaguely awkward, excessively bright smile. Ms. Pelosi has never been natural in front of the

camera. Mr. Bush's second term goal of remaking social security never had a prayer. Even President Donald Trump was clearly in awe of her and had no idea how to deal with her treating him like a petulant man-child. He still doesn't. The poor guy can't even come up with an insulting nickname for her that sticks. In The Guardian, Moira Donegan said she was a hate figure for the right and left. To Republicans, Pelosi has long taken on a kind of mythic malice. To the Fox-watching white male, Pelosi symbolizes liberal elitism, a vague but totalizing specter of corruption, and that particular kind of liberal decadence that can be evoked by the name of the city that makes up nearly all of her longtime congressional district, San Francisco, Donegan

wrote, which was always a bit of a stretch, because the fact of the matter is the American left tends to hate Pelosi too. To them, her two terms as Speaker, first from 2007 to 2011 and then again from 2019 until this coming January, were eras of strictly enforced centrism. Under Pelosi's tenure, the congressional agenda was kept well to the right of the base's preferences, and leftist stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were needlessly sidelined. Neither of these understandings of Pelosi really capture the most striking aspect of her career, which has been characterized above all by an almost preternatural ability to discipline her caucus, Donegan said. Perhaps no speaker has been so successful at securing votes and cultivating the loyalties of her members. In interviews,

Democratic House members speak of her with awe, like she's something between a charismatic high school teacher and an emotionally withholding mom. This charisma is carefully cultivated. She famously tells no one her secrets, but has a long memory, both for past favors and past grievances. Some members seem to eagerly seek her approval. None seem willing to cross her. All right, that is it for what the left is saying, which brings us to what the right is saying. Many on the right acknowledge Pelosi's strength as a politician, but criticize how she has changed the country. Some argue she spent too much money and criticize how she made partisanship worse. Others call out how little she worked across the aisle during her time in office. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said Republicans who loathe Pelosi can still learn from her how to effectively wield power. At her best,

Mrs. Pelosi believes in American freedom and has no illusions about U.S. adversaries. This year, she visited Ukraine and Taiwan, and she didn't back down from the latter trip despite heavy pressure from China, the board said. At her worst, Mrs. Pelosi is a petty partisan. Recall the 2020 State of the Union when she tore up President Trump's speech while he was standing in front of her. She put allies like Representative Adam Schiff in charge of the Intelligence Committee and let him make wild claims about Trump-Russia collusion when it was politically useful. She insisted on impeaching Mr. Trump twice, though both times it strengthened him with GOP partisans. Yet there's no denying

that Mrs. Pelosi has been an effective House leader, the most powerful speaker in decades. Were Republicans paying attention? In last week's elections, the GOP regained the House, but its new majority will be as small as Mrs. Pelosi's current one. The narrow margin next year calls for a strong speaker and Republican unity. If the GOP wants to convince the electorate to give it a real mandate in 2024, it needs to show it can govern. This week, Kevin McCarthy won a party vote to be nominated speaker, 188 to 31, but he needs 218 votes in January, the board said. Mr. McCarthy's majority will be 222 at most.

That number was enough for Mrs. Pelosi to avoid pointless brinkmanship over the last two years and pass an ambitious agenda for Mr. Biden. Mr. McCarthy and Republicans could learn from the example. T'was the season of chaos and all through the house, not one person was stressing. Holla differently this year with DoorDash. Don't want to holla do the most? Holla don't. More festive, less frantic. Get deals for every occasion with DoorDash. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown.

When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. In Spectator, Daniel Flynn said Pelosi lacked the ability to make deals with Republicans. She carried a big stick to beat Mavericks in her own caucus into submission. She never wielded the olive branch to extend to the other party. A single House Republican voted for Obamacare, which numbered one more than the Republicans who voted for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021,

and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Her refusal to consider a more palatable Build Back Better Act resulted in a Democrat-controlled Senate refusing to pass it, Flynn said. One does not expect a House leader to cave to the opposing party on their legislation. But Pelosi's iron-fisted leadership that prevented all but a few Democrats from crossing the aisle to support much of the major legislation advanced by Republican presidents generally meant no concessions to Democrats and laws more extreme than ones in which both parties took a role in crafting. An extreme woman influenced our politics to move further to the polls. While whipping a caucus into uniformity speaks to talents as a disciplinarian, the almost complete absence in a record of persuading and cajoling the other side to support the bills that Democrats championed indicates a glaring failure in the

one skill typically associated with great legislatures, he said. Her two immediate predecessors as Democratic House leaders both lived in districts that contained high enough Republicans to make elections not foregone conclusions. Pelosi represents the ninth bluest district in the United States and the fourth wealthiest. If you live in a city that bans Happy Meals and tears down statues of Ulysses S. Grant, then your sense of the middle likely veers far from it. In the New York Post, John Poderitz said Pelosi's legacy is that she has spent a colossal amount of money. Her contributions to this country on matters of policy, rather than shepherding or opposing bills in the House, have been negligible. She was impotent when it came to dealing with an

anti-Semitic outbreak in her caucus in 2019, for example, he said. And she descended into childishness to match her target's behavior when she ripped up Donald Trump's State of the Union speech as she sat behind him in 2020. But fair is fair. She has proved herself a political technician of immense skill. And if you like the game of politics, you have to enjoy someone who plays it masterfully, even if she's on a team you dislike. It was Pelosi who became Speaker 12 years later, who figured out how to herd the House's cats and make the body into a weapon for progressivism. In 2009 and 2010, Pelosi forcefully subordinated the individual interests of her party's members

to the national interests of the Obama administration and prevailed upon Democrats in conservative districts to vote for ruinously expensive and status regulations, voter it said. And when Joe Biden became president, after Trump screwed things up again for Republicans by helping Democrats win the Senate and Georgia runoffs in 2020, she painted her masterpiece. With an incredibly scant majority in the House, she managed to help Biden secure around $5 trillion in new spending in just 20 months' time. Alright, that is it for the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take.

Writing about someone as divisive as Nancy Pelosi in this newsletter is really not easy. So in the interest of fairness, I'll try to make it crystal clear both what I appreciated about her and where I think her biggest faults lie. For starters, there's no doubt she was a barrier breaking figure. The first Madame Speaker came to Congress directly on the heels of being a stay-at-home mother of five, a story that, even now, is vanishingly rare in our politics. But framing Pelosi in these terms is both reductive and diminishing. Even if she had been a man who had taken the typical route to the top of the chamber, her career would have been remembered as one of the most significant in the history of U.S. politics. If you talk to any Democratic politician, strategist, or donor,

they all say the same. She was prolific, good at her job, a menace, iron-fisted. She kept the party in line and got what she wanted. Ushering in the Affordable Care Act is a good example. You can go read Obama's memoir if you want to know exactly how critical she was. But there are dozens of others. Like Mitch McConnell in the Senate, she is hated by her opposition precisely because she was such a shrewd and ruthless political operator. And if you talk to Republican politicians, especially off the record, which I have done, they'll say the same thing about Pelosi. Smart, effective, incredible power over her chamber. They may not like her, sure, but many of them concede they envy and admire her when the cameras aren't rolling, and some still say it out loud. One of my favorite

moments during the Trump presidency was when we got a rare, real-time look at how Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Pelosi, and Senator Chuck Schumer were negotiating. The press was present for a debate the four had on border security and the potential for a government shutdown, and despite the presence of Schumer and Vice President Mike Pence, it was clear the conversation was really between Pelosi and Trump. Throughout the exchanges, Trump and Pelosi went toe-to-toe in front of the cameras. Trump insisted he wouldn't keep the government open without funding for the wall, and the government did indeed shut down. But Pelosi held the caucus together, called his bluff, and he ultimately signed a stopgap funding bill she whipped through the House without border wall funding. Those were the days when Trump would

say things like this about her. She works very hard. She's worked long and hard, and I give her a great deal of credit for what she's done and what she's accomplished, she said once. More recently, Trump has called her an animal who is, quote, incapable of doing deals and said she was a nasty, vindictive, horrible person. But back then, Pelosi was a formidable opponent in the room to a man famous for owning the room. Like her or not, this is who she was and how she'll be remembered by her supporters and detractors. At this point, these things are basically indisputable about her. She was also deeply flawed.

Putting her politics aside, we could write a whole edition on the pros and cons. As you might expect, she's fought for some stuff I like and some stuff I do not. My two biggest beefs with the soon-to-be former Speaker were how she has made Congress a less deliberative and more dysfunctional body, and her family's ethically dubious involvement in getting rich off her position of power. On the former, she continued and accelerated the long-term trend of leadership gobbling up power from rank-and-file members. She's pushed forward a new kind of Congress where bills are negotiated, crafted, and agreed to by leadership, and then shoved down the

throats of members in their caucus, only for tweaks to be made after the fact to win votes or browbeat people into submission. This kind of legislating has taken real power, not just from representatives, but from the voters who put them there, and Pelosi has helped perfect it. This is a critical part of her legacy, and it is one that has made our Congress worse. The House is worse off today because of it, which means the Senate is negotiating and passing bills that are less representative of the country as a whole. And a whole new generation of Democratic leadership that worships her is going to come into power and try to emulate how she did things. As for her exorbitant wealth, it's still more smoke than fire, but there is a lot of smoke. Pelosi's wealth has grown by $140

million since she took office thanks to the trades made by her husband, Paul Pelosi, many of which coincided with major congressional decisions. Their unbelievable success in the stock market has become so legendary that there are entire websites dedicated to tracking the family's trades so retail investors can shadow them, often with great success. It's almost farcical at this point, despite Pelosi denying she has ever tipped her husband off. Not surprisingly, she was extremely resistant to bipartisan efforts to ban congressional stock trading, a terrible look for the party and for her. But this is who she is. Tough, smart, a tactical political technician, power-hungry, out of touch, and maybe even corrupt. She has undoubtedly left her mark on Congress and on U.S. politics. I'd bet everything I own there will one day be a congressional building named after her and dozens of books written on her time. But if you're paying attention, I think you'll see her legacy is

just as complicated as it is notable. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to today's reader question. So today I'm actually going to do something a little different. During our election coverage, I answered a reader question about funding in the 2022 cycle. Richard from Afton, Missouri, asked why Democrats had so much more funding than Republicans. The broad stroke of my response was that they didn't. Republicans outfunded them in plenty of races. Richard followed up, though, noting that my answer dealt specifically with overall spending that included outside groups and the primaries, while his question was specifically about candidate fundraising, where Republicans were outspent in Senate races in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin,

Nevada, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. After clarifying, Richard asked again why Republicans were outspent across the board. So, this is my answer. First, apologies for misunderstanding the crux of the question from the outset. This was actually a pretty fun one to revisit. I think the answer to your more specific inquiry is also straightforward, though. In short, many of the inexperienced candidates with the widest funding gaps, like Blake Masters in Arizona, actually failed to raise much money on their own. That led Republican leadership, like Mitch McConnell, having to make tough decisions about which races to dump money into. Funny enough, the Associated Press actually just dropped an entire piece about this, there's a link to it in today's episode description, and some of the infighting that has ensued because of it. But key to the whole thing,

in my view, is that the candidates themselves failed to raise enough money. Democratic candidates outraised Republicans nearly two to one in battleground states. Whether that is Democratic voter enthusiasm, Trump hogging most of the party's donors, or weakness of the candidates causing such a difference, that's where the whole thing begins. In Arizona, for instance, Masters was out-fundraised by an eight to one margin, then blamed McConnell, who spent $232 million on Senate races, for not funding his campaign. But if you're McConnell and you see that, it's easy to interpret the data as meaning Masters didn't have a chance. He lost pretty handily, so McConnell may have been smart not

to back him. One other piece of nuance in this story, Republicans relied more on super PACs in this cycle, and super PACs have to pay more money than individual candidates for TV spots. So, Democratic candidates who raise lots of money on their own could buy television ads for a lower and super PACs have to pay more money than individual candidates for TV spots. So Democratic candidates who raise lots of money on their own could buy television ads for a lower cost and then raise more money, meaning that virtuous cycle could build on itself. Again, I think Republican candidate fundraising struggles were at the root of the issue from the outset. All right, that is it for your questions answered, which brings us to our under the radar section. First up, a former anti-abortion leader is alleging that Supreme Court Justice Samuel

Alito once leaked the outcome of a decision he had drafted before it was public. Reverend Rob Shank says he was told the outcome of the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case three weeks before it was released and shared emails from that time with the New York Times to support his claim. The revelation has drawn new speculation about Alito's possible role in the leak of the decision to strike down Roe v. Wade to Politico, a story that is still being investigated by the court. The New York Times has the story on what Reverend Schenck is saying, and there's a link to it in today's episode description. on what Reverend Schenck is saying, and there's a link to it in today's episode description.

All right, next up is our numbers section. The number of terms Nancy Pelosi has served as a member of Congress is now 18, totaling some 35 years. The percentage of the vote she won in her last race for Congress in California's 11th district was 83.9%. Her age when she won her first seat in Congress was 47, and her age today is 82. The percentage of U.S. voters who said they wanted to see Pelosi step down from her leadership post was 60%, according to a Morning Consult poll from earlier this month. The percentage of Democrats who said she should remain House leader was 49%. said she should remain house leader was 49%. All right, and finally, last but not least, our have a nice day section. A horse in Utah has returned home after eight years of running around with wild Mustangs. Shane Adams says his horse Mongo has been missing from home for eight years, a time period in which he went through a divorce, lost his home, and suffered a traumatic brain injury. But in September, he finally received some good news. His horse Mongo

had returned. Adams had been riding almost his entire life, but never felt a bond with any horse like the one he had with Mongo. He had alerted the Bureau of Land Management about the missing horse, and then a worker there suspected she had wrangled a domesticated horse during gathering in Dugway Proving Ground, eventually recognizing him from Adam's notices and reaching out. Fox 9 has the story, which they are calling a miracle, and there's a link to it in today's episode description. Alright everybody, that is it for today's podcast. We'll be right back here same time tomorrow to pick up with some more coverage. I think we've got a pretty good one incoming, so stick around. We'll see you then. Have a good one. Peace.

Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Our script is edited by Ari Weitzman, Sean Brady, and Bailey Saul. Shout out to our interns, Audrey Moorhead and Watkins Kelly, and our social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who designed our logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our website at www.readtangle.com.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, Thanks for watching!