Pelosi actually did take more progressive positions not so long ago. When she led the House Democrats to winning a majority in 2006, she wasn't notably aggressive in trying to reign in the Bush-Cheney Administration during its last two years. But when Obama was elected President, Pelosi was key in pushing hard for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and even for the public option at a moment when the Obama-Biden Administration seemed to be on the verge of throwing in the towel. Ryan Grim gives a substantial account of that process in his We've Got People (2019).
But becoming House Speaker again when the Democrats took the House majority again in the 2016 election, Pelosi spent half a year fighting against impeachment hearings for Trump, ludicrously talking about how Trump was "self-impeaching". And she was pushed into that by some of the most conservative Democrats, who had been her excuse for not wanting to alienate moderate voters by actually fighting Republicans. The mainstream media tend to treat her as a brilliant leader and "master legislator". But in a year where the Democrats won the Presidency with a record number of votes and even taking a majority in the Senate by (among other things) winning two Senatorial elections in Georgia, the Democrats lost seats in the House, leaving them with a more narrow majority than before.
After Trump sent a lynch mob to invade the Capitol, some of whom wanted to murder Pelosi in particular, chanting "Kill the infidels!" that galvanized her into the second Trump impeachment, during which she took a surprisingly resolute stand.
Apparently that's over now. She made a statement on the insurrection yesterday calling for ... appointing a independent committee to look into it (Dear Colleague: Security, Security, Security 02/15/2021).
The House and the Senate can and should investigate the January 6 insurrection. I'm not much inclined to criticize the Democrats for not calling witnesses in the impeachment trial. But they definitely should hold extensive public Congressional hearings to both uncover the facts and let the public see in detail what the witnesses have to say.
The Republicans during the Obama-Biden Administration held more hearings on the pseudoscandal of Benghazi! Benghazi!1 BENGHAZI!!! than Congress held on the Pearl Harbor attacks.
Now the Democratic Speaker of the House defaults to her version of, let's appoint a commission to look at it.
Lindsey Grahmm wants a commission, too. We know, because he said so in the same breath he said we need to find out what Nancy Pelosi knew about the insurrection and when she knew it. And Pelosi herself ... agrees with him.
We have to give Pelosi credit, though. It took her all of five weeks after the insurrection to revert back to her tired business-as-usual clichés.
And with that comes the "bipartisan" rhetoric than in the current asymmetric partisan polarization just sounds to Republicans like preemptive surrender. Here are a couple of excerpts from her statement:
George Washington was the patriarch of our country ... who with his prescience, cautioned against political parties at war with their own government, warning that through parties, “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”So parties are un-American? What? Yes, this is from the Democratic leader in the House of Representtives in 2021 in the wake of a lynch mob invading the Capitol to kill - among others - her. Also: George Washington was Patiarch as well as President?
The next paragraph is the kind of thing that gives the use of historical imagery in politics a bad name:
Abraham Lincoln saved our country from division by winning a war and the battle of ideas. He wisely said that if division and destruction ever come to America, it will come from within. In his Lyceum Address, he said, “If [danger] ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”We need to give her credit for getting that Lincoln quotation right, since it has often been quoted in a similar but not exact form.
But besides the Lincoln-quote trivia, the quote is from his famous Lyceum Address of 1838, which was dedicated to denouncing lynch mobs by defenders of slavery. It was very definitely polemical and partisan. It was not some nicey-nice appeal to bland nonpartisanship. (See also: Harold Reutter, Abraham Lincoln warned of mob rule in 1838 Grand Rapids Independent 02/16/2021)
What Pelosi is calling for is "an outside, independent 9/11-type Commission."
Civil libertarians and people on the left have been cautioning about knee-jerk reactions to the insurrection that gives police and security agencies new legal authority that could easily be abused. So it's woth taking notice of the ACLU's concerns over the recommendations along that line: 9/11 Commission n/d, a collecion of links to ACLU analyses. Note that Pelosi's statement is titled "Security, Security, Security", not "Defending Against Violent Rightwing Sedition and Terrorism."
Federal and local governments have been negligent in taking the violent far-right groups seriously enough and not using the substantial authority they already have to deal with crimes they commit.
But as concerned as I am about this being used as an excuse to violate people's rights, and as much as I realize that police and security agencies in the US are "blind in the right eye" and are therefore more likely to use their authority against left and liberal and antiwar groups than against rightwing militias, I'm not ready to say that we don't need any new laws. Finally passing a federal anti-lynching law, for example, is something that is still needed.
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