A Close Encounter With Nancy Pelosi
A Close Encounter With Nancy Pelosi
Can the veteran House Democrat steer her party to victory in November? Plus, heat pumps for freedom; backlashes in VA, TX and FL and much more.
Welcome back to another weekly edition of The Connector, where I focus on news and analysis at the intersection of politics, movements, organizing and tech and try to connect the dots (and people) on what it will take to keep democracy alive. This is completely free newsletter—nothing is behind a paywall—but if you value it and can afford a paid subscription at any level, please hit the subscribe button and choose that option. Feel free to forward widely; and if you are reading this because someone shared it with you, please sign up!
Yesterday, I got to attend an invitation-only townhall meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and my congressman Rep. Jamaal Bowman, which they hosted at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the far northwest corner of the Bronx, overlooking the Hudson River. It was framed as a demonstration of the Speaker’s “big tent” approach to her caucus, which includes progressives who call themselves socialists, like Bowman, as well as far more corporate friendly types such as Pelosi herself, who has proudly said “we’re capitalists.” Opening the event, which took place on a converted basketball court, with black-webbed safety bunting hanging overhead, Bowman cited Pelosi’s slogan, “Our diversity is our strength; our unity is our power.” And the session was indeed a lovefest, with Pelosi praising Bowman’s leadership on issues like equity in education, and Bowman affirming how “empowered” he has felt under her Speakership, saying that she has “always created space for me to be true to myself” and that “she’s never called me into the principal’s office to say, ‘Jamaal don’t do this or don’t say that.’”
Even though Pelosi admitted, in a short press conference that concluded the event, that she was “upset” when Bowman bucked House leadership last fall to vote against the bipartisan “hard” infrastructure bill because he didn’t want to give up on the other domestic needs covered by the now-defunct Build Back Better bill, she also added, “I don’t think he would have let the bill go down.” They were both at pains to make clear, as Bowman put it, that “Despite the rhetoric and the framing of a party at odds with itself, that is not true at all.”
Well, I’m not going to tackle that assertion here right now. What was more interesting to me about the event was the chance to listen to Pelosi unfiltered in a pretty sympathetic environment. The roomed was filled with friendly local Democratic elected officials, many of them women and people of color, something Pelosi and Bowman both went out of their way to celebrate. “Nothing in politics is more hopeful to me than the increased participation of women and minorities,” Pelosi declared as she looked out at the Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson, NY State Senator Alessandra Biaggi, three local mayors, and several Yonkers city councilors, all of whom are women. They looked back, adoringly.
While the event was billed as a “townhall” the audience was not invited to ask questions. We were props for the cameras, unpaid extras for what passes as democracy in America today. I don’t know exactly when party leaders started treating the public this way; in 1995, President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich famously participated in a townhall in Claremont, New Hampshire where they fielded questions from a live audience and even shook hands on creating a nonpartisan commission to reform campaign finance. (A pledge they both shamefully broke later.) One might think that Pelosi could have handled spontaneous questions from a friendly audience, but instead she took softballs from Bowman on the role of education in protecting democracy, the Ukraine situation, her approach to leadership, the crisis in black maternal health, and gun violence.
Apart from some cogent words condemning Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine as “outside the circle of civilized human behavior” and warning that if the US tried to impose a no-fly zone by shooting down Russian planes “it would be the beginning of World War III,” everything Pelosi said could have been said thirty years ago. I really felt as if I were in a time warp and it was the late 1990s, and not a single new idea had crossed Pelosi’s desk since then. “The three most important issues facing Congress are,” she declared, “our children, our children and our children.” Spending money on education is “not a cost, it’s an investment in the future.” The reason she is a Democrat is the one in five children in America who grow up in poverty. Investing in education is important because it’s our key tool for building a pathway to the middle class, and “the basis of democracy is a strong middle class.”
As the captain of the Democratic ship in the House, Pelosi surely sees the iceberg she is going to hit in less than eight months, when a wave of angry Republicans and independents are going to turn out and many disappointed and disaffected Democratic base voters are likely to stay home, sending her majority into oblivion. But she showed no sign of changing course. None of the new ideas that have bounced around center-left policy circles in the last few years seem to have found a resting place in the part of her brain that calls up talking points. The “care economy,” universal basic income, breaking up monopolies that block competition and hurt consumers, liberating millions of young people from crushing student loan debt, using the Defense Production Act to accelerate production of climate change mitigating products like heat pumps—none were worthy of note. If “our children” is all she thinks about, surely she could have said the words “revive the child care tax credit,” which temporarily cut the poverty rate by about 30%, but no. Even fighting inflation didn’t come up, even though Pelosi noted that what she focused on most was “kitchen table” concerns and how they resonate with “the people.” This is what happens when you are an incumbent for too long and you don’t have to face the public much.
Last week, Pelosi and her colleagues in Democratic leadership managed to do the one thing that they still seem good at, which is to jam a gigantic spending bill through Congress at the last possible moment. Facing another government shutdown because of Republican intransigence that the GOP no longer pays a price for, the House voted on a $1.5 trillion 2,700-plus page spending bill that members were first shown at 1:00am in the morning the day of the planned vote. Pelosi may say that she wants to protect democracy in America by ensuring the sanctity of our votes, but that doesn’t include actually giving our elected representatives time to read the bills they are rushed into voting on. (Dems have gotten into a bad habit of breaking their own 72-hour rule for posting bills in advance of votes.) How would you feel about an election where you were only introduced to the candidates a day before voting? Pelosi is renowned for her legislative legerdemain, but even here she seems to have lost a step, putting a flawed bill out that would have cut billions in COVID-19 funding from several states, calling it “magnificent,” and then having to rapidly backtrack when faced with a rare revolt from her own Members upset about losing money they were counting on for their states.
The bill was a giveaway to almost every powerful interest. The Pentagon got another big bump (when will we talk about the trillions it is slated to get over next decade?) but so did many domestic programs. Plus, it had about $9 billion in earmarks, which have been revived under Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in a much less corrupt form called “Community Project Funding Requests,” since Members have to post their requests online well in advance. Oddly, for all the talk that insider Dems share about Pelosi’s toughness: a number of Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election were rewarded in the bill with tens of millions in bacon for their home districts. One member of the sedition caucus, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), for example, is bragging about obtaining about $78 million in “wins” for her upstate district, which is heavily Republican; Bowman got less than one-tenth of that for our district. Posting these funding requests in one place is an improvement over the past, though we still don’t have a single website that aggregates all the details. As to how House barons determine who gets their requests approved? There’s no light on that. (For a much tougher conservative assault on earmarks, check out John Hart’s Substack.)
I’m certainly not rooting for the Democrats to lose their majority in Congress next fall, given what a House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would do to the country. But surely it’s time for new leadership on the Democratic side, whatever happens this fall.
Organizing News
—More than 200 groups have signed on to a joint letter to the Biden Administration urging it to use the Defense Production Action to “help Ukraine by accelerating the clean energy transition.” Building on a proposal lofted at the end of February by longtime climate change organizer Bill McKibben, the groups are urging Biden to start building heat pumps in massive quantities in order to install them across Europe before next fall, to help the Continent wean itself off Russian oil and gas. According to a story a week ago in the Washington Post, the White House is seriously considering the idea. I can’t decide which outcome I prefer—the administration making the right decision on its own, or rejecting the idea and thus giving climate action protestors a useful target to organize around. Beyond sending humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine and taking in refugees, we need to offer people tangible and visible things they can do to make a difference. (Related: There are now more than 80 Global Climate Strike rallies scheduled around the US for March 25th.)
—Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who got elected by riding a wave of parental anger at local school boards seen as too concerned with diversity education and COVID safety and indifferent to the stresses faced by working families, is now facing his own backlash. All of the state’s 133 school district superintendents have signed a letter slamming him for rolling back diversity and equity education in the schools, saying that his moves may “set public education back in Virginia many years.” They are also demanding that he eliminate a tipline his office set up for parents to report instances of “divisive” subjects, stating that it “impedes positive relationships” between parents and educators.
—Did you miss the Queer Youth Walkout that happened last Friday? According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, kids at nearly 50 schools walked out midday to protest attacks on LGBTQIA+ youth around the country, with a focus on Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s disgusting decision to label providers of medical services to people in transition as “child abuse.” Walkouts took place at dozens of schools in Massachusetts, where walkout organizer Queer Youth Assemble is based, including the towns of Acton, Bedford, Belchertown, Brookline, Marlborough, Mattapoisett, and Walpole. Nearly 1,000 walked out in Burlington, Vermont. Protests also took place in Columbia, Ellicott City, and Marriottsville, Maryland; Iowa City, Iowa; Denver, Colorado; Delray Beach, Florida; Providence, Rhode Island; and Terra Haute, Indiana. Teens are also in motion against Florida’s pending “Don’t Say Gay” law, with at least 2,000 rallying in Weston on March 9th. With Governor Ron DeSantis saying he is going to sign the bill, these protests are likely to grow.
—Meanwhile, the People’s Convoy, which Monday amounted to just 258 cars, 68 motor homes and 95 trucks, is literally getting nowhere as it circles the DC Beltway.
Life in Facebookistan
—The best part of Benjamin Wofford’s long feature story in Wired on Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s chief lobbyist in Washington, is how he connects Kaplan’s “win at all costs” role in the Brooks Brothers Riot of November 22, 2000, which tipped the Florida election recount to George W. Bush, to Kaplan’s success at preventing Facebook from clamping down on political misinformation in the weeks after the November 2020 election. “You can draw a pretty straight line from allowing Joel Kaplan to influence their moderation decisions to what happened on January 6,” one tech lawyer says in the piece. Stop the Steal, after all, was “authentic” political activity, something Facebook had decided it doesn’t want to throttle, even if it was also a coordinated effort to delegitimize the election.
—In case we needed another reminder of how Facebook still hasn’t solved its content moderation problems, Lara Putnam has a chilling report in Wired about how the platform is riddled with groups targeting young children for intimate contact. Even worse, after she reported several groups using Facebook’s system, tagging them for containing nudity or sexual activity involved children, she got back automated responses days later saying they had been reviewed and did not violate any specific community standards. Even more worse, “as reply after reply hit my inbox denying grounds for action, new child sexualization groups began getting recommended to me as ‘Groups You May Like,’” she writes. “As Facebook’s recommendation engines function like a seamless Uber for abusers, the safety side functions like the DMV circa 1990: manual data entry, inaction as default.” Even after her story was published, Facebook’s recommendation algorithm continues to push her toward child predation groups.
Civic Tech News
—UkraineTakeShelter.com is a new website connecting Ukrainians in need of housing with would-be hosts.
—Propel, the fintech startup serving people on food stamps, just announced that it has raised $50 million in Series B funding. Its core app is free to users, which leaves me wondering—a la Crisis Text Line—how much Propel is profiting from selling user data to third parties. According to Forbes’ Isabel Contreras, “Propel’s business model relies heavily on third party companies that pay for space on the app to promote offerings such as insurance coupons, affordable utilities, grocery discounts, healthcare programs and job postings. Over 50 different companies pay Propel to promote their content. Two of its biggest clients are Assurance Wireless (which provides free smart phones and phone plans) and Internet Essentials by Comcast (which promotes discounted home broadband).
—In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Scott Smith and Lina Srivastava explain why they’re skeptical about “Web3 for good” start-ups. They write, “At its best, the ‘X for Good’ framework allows for community-led development of appropriate tools that help create positive social impact in areas such as poverty alleviation or social justice movements. Too often, however, it results in tech solutionism and the imposition of tools on a community, neither designed with nor by communities.”
—Finally, a book that cuts through the hype about AI and gives common-sense guidance to nonprofit leaders on how they can get smarter in how they use tech to power their organizations. My friends Allison Fine and Beth Kanter have just published The Smart Non-Profit: Staying Human-Centered in an Automated World. Buy it!