Nancy Pelosi -- Should she maintain a leadership position for the dems?

Pelosi strikes deal with rebels, will step aside by 2022 to win speaker votes.

“I think what it is is a moral victory for some people trying to figure out how to land their plane,” Richmond added, referring to the rebels. “You can land it, you can get shot down or you can run out of gas. Might as well land it.”

WASHINGTON — Nancy Pelosi said Democrats will begin to seek President Donald Trump's tax returns — a move likely to prompt outrage from the White House - when they take control of the U.S. House of Representatives in January.

The House Ways and Means Committee will "take the first steps," said Pelosi, who has the backing of her members to become the next speaker of the House in January.

"There is popular demand for the Congress to request the president's tax returns," she said, speaking to reporters. "I'm sure the White House will resist, so the question is where do we go from there."

Trump defied decades of tradition when he refused to release his tax records while running for president and after taking office. There is no law or rule compelling a president or candidate to do so, but nearly every nominee and president since 1976 has done so.

Democrats have argued that Trump's tax returns are crucial in determining whether his sprawling business operations present a conflict of interest. Trump opted not to divest from his business, but turned over control of day-to-day operations to his sons Donald Jr. and Eric.

Several committees expected to investigate Trump could find use for the returns.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Pelosi's remarks.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Thursday that obtaining President Trump’s tax returns as part of an investigation into possible tax evasion or other lawbreaking will be “challenging.”

“I think it’s a little more challenging than you might think,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday. “Yes there is popular demand for the Congress to request the president’s tax returns,” but, “I’m sure that the White House will resist and the question is, where do we go from there?”

The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which is expected to be Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., in the next Congress, will have the power to request tax returns of anyone, including the president and his company. Several times last year Democrats moved to have the committee vote to request those returns, but were turned back by Republicans who decried the maneuver as a political stunt.

Pelosi said she thought Neal and the incoming Democratic majority at the committee would request those returns, but that she would leave the decision to him.

“I think they see a path in that direction but you have to talk to them about that,” she said. “I think that they’ll take the first steps.”

Though Democrats can request Trump’s returns from the Treasury Department, which the Internal Revenue Service is a part of, it’s not yet clear how Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin would handle such a request. He’s said multiple times only that he will consult with the department’s legal counsel.

Another hurdle to satisfying Democrats' desire to request Trump’s tax information is that disclosing that information without the consent of the president would be a felony. That means Democrats may have to come up with some creative ways to achieve their stated goal of illuminating Trump's finances.

Of course, Trump could end the discussion by voluntarily releasing his tax returns to Congress, as President Richard Nixon did when he was suspected of underpaying taxes on a real estate sale. Though Trump has repeatedly said he cannot because of an ongoing audit, there’s nothing preventing him from doing so. Every president is automatically placed under audit by the IRS.

Paraphrasing what someone told her at a recent event, Pelosi joked about Trump’s audit.

“When the president says the Mueller investigation is going on too long, tell him, not as long as your audit, Mr. President,” the California Democrat mused.

joefromchicago wrote:

Pelosi is the only Democratic leader with any balls. She shouldn't be minority leader in the house, she should be president.

Do you still believe this nonsense? To say Nancy Pelosi is a political doormat would be an insult to all doormats around the world.

Pelosi is the only Democratic leader with any balls. She shouldn't be minority leader in the house, she should be president.

The vindication of Nancy Pelosi
How Pelosi delivered Trump the most humiliating loss of his presidency.
By Ezra Klein@ezraklein Jan 25, 2019, 4:50pm EST

After the midterm elections, 15 House Democrats signed a letter urging their colleagues not to support Pelosi for speaker: “We promised to change the status quo and we intend to deliver on that promise.” To recapture the gavel, Pelosi had to promise to be a “transitional” speaker, and many Democrats felt she only regained the role because there were no compelling alternatives.

It’s not that House Democrats dismissed Pelosi’s skills as a legislator, but what they needed was an answer to President Trump, and that didn’t seem like a role Pelosi was suited to play.

But in recent weeks, Speaker Pelosi proved a powerful foil to Trump, politically humiliating him in a way no other public figure has. Today, Trump buckled, agreeing to reopen the government in exchange for absolutely nothing, just days after he agreed to Pelosi’s demand to postpone the State of the Union.

Pelosi’s success turned on a few key factors. The first is the legislative and coalitional skill that even her skeptics always admitted she possessed. Pelosi held her caucus together easily and calmly, creating a united front that offered Trump few avenues of egress. When the president tried to invite moderate Democrats to negotiate without Pelosi present, they simply stood him up. With her caucus firm, she was able to pick a position and hold to it.

“We’re grateful to Democrats on both sides of the Capitol for their unity. That was very, very important in these discussions,” Pelosi noted in her victory lap press conference Friday afternoon.

Second, Pelosi correctly read Trump’s personality and had the steel to act on that read. For years now, members of Congress have divided on whether Trump is strong or weak, whether his political success shows an intuitive tactical genius that needs to be respected or a hollow showman who connects to conservatives but is easily flummoxed.


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Pelosi has long held that Trump is weak, easily confused, and easily baited. That informed her strategy. Along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, she baited Trump into saying, while the cameras were rolling, “I will shut down the government. I am proud to shut down the government. I will take the mantle.” In interviews and meetings, she tweaked the president, calling the crisis “the Trump shutdown” to Trump’s face and suggesting the billionaire thought furloughed workers “could just ask their father for more money.” She was betting that Trump would overreact rather than turn her into the aggressor, and he did.


Pelosi also drew a hard line on the wall, and then made an even higher-risk gamble in postponing the State of the Union, betting all the while that Trump would blink. Again, she was right.

Third, Pelosi had the crucial assistance of Trump himself. He forced a shutdown his own party tried to avoid, he publicly took ownership of that shutdown, and he held to a position that was unpopular at the start and grew more toxic by the day. The core structure of this conflict was always that the public didn’t want a government shutdown, Democrats didn’t want a government shutdown, and Trump was forcing a government shutdown. Pelosi would’ve had to make some terrible tactical errors to lose from a position that strong, and she didn’t.

Now, just days after agreeing to postpone the State of the Union at Pelosi’s insistence, Trump has agreed to reopen the government without any funding for his wall. Pelosi has proved what many didn’t believe about Trump: that he is subject to the normal laws of political gravity, and that for all his bluster, he is no more capable of sustaining an unsustainable position than any other politician.

During the shutdown, Pelosi’s chief of staff from 2011 to 2017, Nadeam Elshami, put it this way to my colleague Ella Nilsen: “[Trump] hasn’t experienced Nancy Pelosi in the majority, let me just say that.”

Now, he has.

Trump’s decision to force this fight has both delivered him a loss and reset Washington’s expectations going forward. Pelosi is now the clear leader of the Democratic opposition, and she has shown herself more than Trump’s equal in a legislative showdown. She has enhanced her standing in her caucus, and he has diminished his standing inside his own. You don’t hear many House Democrats these days grumbling about Pelosi’s leadership. But you hear plenty of Republicans lamenting Trump’s.

Of course Pelosi should keep her leadership role! She was by far the most effective Speaker of the House in my lifetime. She foiled pretty much every Republican attempt to block them.

What about that screams 'replace me with a mealy-mouthed moderate?'

Advice from those on the right-wing saying that Pelosi should go ought to be totally and completely ignored.

Cycloptichorn

Don't sacrifice Pelosi in panic. Build on the good stuff we got.

As a non-Nancy aficionado I have to say that Nancy proved her creds today.