Master Legislator Nancy Pelosi is starting to really discourage a lot of the Democratic base

This is begining to sound ominous to me.

Do Democrats really think we can be more divided than we are? What does that look like? Outright civil war? Is that what they think impeaching Trump will lead to?

If that's so we are already so far gone they might as well just turn the government over to the GOP and go home.

— digby (@digby56) May 12, 2019

Digby is presumably responding to Nancy Pelosi's seemingly determined opposition to impeachment proceedings against Trump. Clare Foran et al, Pelosi: Trump 'is almost self-impeaching because he is every day demonstrating more obstruction of justice' CNN 05/09/2019 report on Pelosi's comments on this past Thursday:

Pelosi reiterated that impeachment would be a very divisive process for the country and argued that it is not a binary choice to impeach or not to impeach.

"Sometimes people act as though it's impeach or nothing. It's not that," she said. "It's a path that is producing results and gathering information and some of that information is that this administration wants to have a constitutional crisis because they do not respect the oath of office that they take to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States ... We won't go any faster than the facts take us or any slower than the facts take us."

Democrats supporting Pelosi's surrender-on-impeachment position argue that the Democratic Party should focus instead on stressing their popular issues for the 2020 elections. But Pelosi herself doesn't seem to be doing such a good job on that, either. One most obvious devices that she and the Democratic majority in the House have at their disposal is pass popular laws and programs in the House and thus force the Republican Senate and the White House to take a position on them. The Dems understandably mocked the Republicans for passing Obamacare repeal dozens of times when Obama was President even though they knew that Obama would veto any such bill. But that action not only pleased their base but validated that position among their base and establish that as an important signature partisan issue.

Pelosi did pass an election-integrity bill that included some excellent positions that would motivate the base and appeal to swing voters. Ed Kilgore wrote about how it even demonstrated an unusual instance of that party unity that establishment Democrats claim to value when they tell progressives not to criticize Joe Biden (House Democrats Pass Landmark Voting Rights Bill on a Party-Line Vote New York 03/08/2019):

Aside from its scope, what’s most remarkable about HR1 is that every single House Democrat voted for it ...

And every Republicans voted against it, which means the GOP is determined to use barriers to full participation in elections - along with related abuses like partisan gerrymandering and unregulated campaign spending - to maintain its competitive position, regardless of public opinion.

It’s quite a shift from how the two parties divided on the original Voting Rights Act, in which 61 House Democrats voted “no” while 112 House Republicans voted “yea.” As recently as 2006, George W. Bush signed a bill extending the VRA, including the key provision SCOTUS struck down seven years later. Full party polarization on voting rights is a very recent development. [my emphasis]

Great! The Democrats pass a bill with popular measures against money in politics that also challenges and highlights the Republicans' racist vote-suppresison tactics against African-Americans and Latinos, and every Republican House vote was against it.

But if you're thinking that didn't seem to make much of an impact in news coverage and public impressions, there's a good reason for that. Look at the date: "03/08/2019 Passed/agreed to in House: On passage Passed by the Yeas and Nays: 234 - 193." March 8 was a Friday. Here's Chuck Todd's opening comment on Meet the Press that Sunday, March 10: "This Sunday, divided Democrats: Bernie versus Biden, progressives versus traditional Democrats, highlighted by this comment from freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar." (my emphasis)

This Week, March 10:

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You have no comments about this resolution passing?

[NARTHA] RADDATZ: -- a freshman congresswoman's remarks about Israel spark Democratic infighting and a debate over what constitutes anti-Semitism.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I certainly am not going to be quiet when there’s anti-Semitism.

Face the Nation, March 10:

ED O'KEEFE: The House this past week had the vote on a resolution condemning hate of all sorts because of what one congresswoman had said, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

Judy Woodruff, PBS Newshour, March 8:

A vote in the House of Representatives to condemn bigotry, and the 2020 Democratic presidential field comes into a little better focus, just two of the stories shaping our week, and topics for analysis by Shields and Gerson. ...

So, Mark, let's talk about this anti-bigotry resolution the House passed yesterday. It was originally they were looking at talking just about anti-Semitism, but they decided to do something bigger than that, passed overwhelmingly.

What do you make of this approach by Democrats? What were they dealing with here?

Lazy media groupthink and sensationalism? That goes without saying. But the more relevant point here is that Nancy Pelosi undercut the campaign-reform and vote protection bill's political value by taking the initiative to target Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for a comment that it took some imagination to spin as anti-Semitism. Among Mark Shields stumbling comments about it in that segment:

Well, I guess I think the speaker [Pelosi] had a — didn't seek this fight, didn't want it.

And, certainly, it's not something the Democrats — the Democrats had to confront it. There's no question about it. But, I mean, we're talking about a president, Judy — let's be very blunt about it — who, when the white supremacists marched through the streets of Charlotte with torches, saying, "Jews will not replace us," said there's good people on both sides.

I mean, so this is — if you want to see anti-Semitism ...

Pelosi's attack on Congresswoman Omar was so weak that other Democrats in the House refused to go along with it, requiring her to water down the resolution she proposed to a meaningless, platitudinous condemnation of all hate.

And dozens of Republican Members of Congress voted against even that.

In other words, Pelosi's resolution, which she initiated and which other Democrats refused to support in its original form, was something done on her own initiative. You expect the Republicans to try to use some other issue or pseudoscandal to distract from the significant of the campaign-contribution and voting bill. But if the Democrats do that job for them, it doesn't require much effort on their part.

Establishment Democrats and various pundits keep telling us what a Master Legislator Nancy Pelosi is. Which is particularly embarrassing in this case, essentially since shet nullified the publicity and political benefit that the House Democrats could have generated with that bill by herself pushing a pseudoscandal against a Democratic Congresswoman. The only way that is Master Legislating is if she intentionally stepped on her own party's message.

But I'll be generous and assume it was a clumsy self-own by the Master Legislator. A really significant, clumsy self-own. Of which the Republicans took full advantage, of course. Something the Democrats seem almost incapable of doing.

And we haven't seen Master Legislator Pelosi set up any comparable opportunities to use their House majority to make the kind of political case they should have been able to make with the March 8 bill.

But she tells us the Democrats need to concentrate on other issues and forget about impeaching Trump.

The Republicans are willing to fight and lose with Congressional votes that gin up the base and use that to their political advatage. Democrats aren't. And on impeachment, the Democrats would have to be willing to take the risk of fighting and losing on removing Trump. Because the only way the Democrats can force Republican Senators to take a stand on it is to impeach Trump without being guaranteed in advance a Senate vote to remove him.

Pelosi's latest excuse for supporting Trump in avoiding impeachment is to argue that Trump "is almost self-impeaching," which apparently means he's making himself more unpopular and so he will lose the 2020 election and so we should forget about impeaching him. A video of her Thursday press conference is here from PBS Newshour. In her opening statement, she does talk about passing a bill to block the Republicans' efforts to allow health insurers to decline people for preexisting conditions, "the Administration's reckless sabotage of the Affordable Care Act". Whether she will exploit that sure-to-be-blocked-in-the-Senate bill politically more effectively than she did with the March 8 bill remains to be seen. I'm sure there's another progessive Democratic Member of Congress who needs to be rebuked if the Democrats start getting good press from aother one of this attempts.

And, no, dull press conferences by the Master Legislator won't be enough to dramatize Democratic programs being blocked by Republicans. Especially when she insists on repeatingly using the word "bipartisanship" during them.

The result of this situation includes moments like the following Brooks-and-Shields segment this past Friday. Back in 1991, after two terms of Reagan as President and Old Man Bush in his first term, it was the smug conventional wisdom that of course Repubolicans would win the Presidential race of 1992. Mark and Bobo seemed to be having a 1991 flashback. It sounded like whatever the Democrats do about Trump will help the Republicans, and whatever they don't do about Trump will help the Republicans. Shields and Brooks on Trump's subpoena standoff, China trade war PBS Newshour 05/10/2019; transcript here:

Mark sounds especially intimidated by polls showing that Trump has "91 percent approval among Republicans." Wow! An authoritarian rightwing party's partisans support their Party's authoritarian rightwing President. I guess that means all the Democrats can do is what they do best: