When Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi was asked by New York Times Opinion columnist Ezra Klein “why House Democrats have held together more easily than House Republicans,” the former California lawmaker replied: “It’s very hard to find leverage with people who don’t have really any beliefs or any agenda. It’s hard to negotiate with somebody who wants nothing.”
Since President Joe Biden stepped dropped his reelection bid last month, reports have pointed to Pelosi as one of the Democratic leader who urged the president to make that decision for the sake of the Party’s future.
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In a Sunday, August 18 op-ed, Klein submits that while “Democrats have their own ideological tensions,” it was Donald Trump’s 2016 “victory turned Democrats into a ruthlessly pragmatic party. It was that pragmatism that led them to ultimately nominate Joe Biden in 2020. It was that same pragmatism that led them to abandon him in 2024.”
When it Biden stepped down, he said, “Nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy, and that includes personal ambition,” Klein notes, adding, “Try to imagine Trump giving up the nomination by saying that his personal ambitions must be secondary to his party’s success in the election.”
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There is a contradiction at the heart of the Republican Party that does not exist at the heart of the Democratic Party. Democrats are united in their belief that the government can, and should, act on behalf of the public. To be on the party’s far left is to believe the government should do much more. To be among its moderates is to believe it should do somewhat more. But all of the people elected as Democrats, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Senator Joe Manchin, are there for the same reason: to use the power of the government to pursue their vision of the good. The divides are real and often bitter. But there is always room for negotiation because there is a fundamental commonality of purpose.
On the other hand, the columnist adds:
The modern Republican Party, by contrast, is built upon a loathing of the government. Some of its members want to see the government shrunk and hamstrung. This is the old ethos, best described by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who famously said: ‘I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.’
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“I can’t tell you which Republican told me this,” US Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) told Klein, “but a Republican who I work very closely with has always said, ‘Adam, I’ll trade you our nuts for your nuts.’ And I’ve always said, ‘No deal.'”
The Washington congressman emphasized, “I don’t think we actually have nuts in Congress in that senseI’ve worked with every single member of the squad on the National Defense Authorization Act. I know they’re not going to vote for it, but they offer ideas. For the Republicans, if government is trying to do something, they want to try and stop it. Just reflexively.”
