Pelosi the Super-Speaker and the stumble over Ilhan Omar

Rachael Bade and Mike DeBonis reported on this moment during the Democratic establishment's attempt to discredit Congresswoman Ilhan Omar over her criticism of the Israel lobby. It's a data point that informs the discussion about whether Pelosi is a "master legislator" (a favorite media talking point) or sympathetic to Democratic progressives (‘Like herding cats’: Pelosi struggles to unify Democrats after painful fight over anti-Semitism) Washington Post 03/11/2019:

To me, this is the most telling portion:

During a leadership meeting on Tuesday night, Pelosi grew angry and raised her voice to Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) when Dingell pulled out her phone and read a tweet by Ocasio-Cortez, according to two people who were there and requested anonymity to disclose details of a private meeting.

In the tweet, Ocasio-Cortez defended Omar, her close friend, as Pelosi and her leadership team were readying an initial version of the resolution responding to Omar’s foreign allegiance remark.

In the meeting, Dingell agreed with Ocasio-Cortez’s assessment that House Democrats shouldn’t be focused on rebuking one of their own but should also be calling out homophobia, racism and xenophobia in general. According to the people in the room, Pelosi was offended at the suggestion that Democrats didn’t already stand up against all forms of hate and grew visibly angry.

As it turned out, Dingell wasn’t the only lawmaker who wanted to broaden the scope of the resolution.

The Congressional Black Caucus - furious that their colleagues hadn’t done more to call out racist comments in the past - agreed, as did some of Omar’s liberal colleagues and several Democrats running for president, who took to Twitter and pushed back against Pelosi’s original plan focusing on anti-Semitism alone. A Pelosi spokesman said the speaker supported broadening the language all along.

The Democrats in the House and the Senate have been far too mild in general about calling out racism, Islamophobia, and, yes, anti-Semitism. So far as I can see, Christian fundamentalist groups like John Hagee's Christians United For Israel are the biggest ideological group promoting anti-Semitic attitudes today with their End Times ideology/theology that looks forward to a supposedly divinely ordained mass slaughter of Jews. They are the direct breeding ground for anti-Semitic terrorist violence, although the Chritian Identity ideology is very important on the far right. But Hagee-style fundi Christian Zionists are important and very influential in the Republican Party. The Democrats should be actively challenging ideologies like this. But they are reluctant to take on the Christian Right on anything that might sound vaguely like a "religious" matter.

Pelosi's use of the Ilhan Omar controversy in that matter was an important illustration of how cynical she is willing to be in fighting Democratic progressives. And how willing she is to use very belabored interpretations of their comments to bash them.