SCHADENFREUDE FEVER: Nancy Pelosi’s Horrible Year.
It started with her botched handling of the articles of impeachment against President Trump. Making the fatal error of reading the comments — in this case Twitter and various left-wing pundits — Pelosi convinced herself after the House impeached Trump in late December that she had leverage and embarked on the delusional gambit of withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate to force Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to establish the parameters of Trump’s trial first.
The land resounded with cries of “You go girl!” and “Slay kween!” from her cheerleaders in the media. Another bold stroke from a political master, they insisted. Once a committed opponent of impeachment, Pelosi had now seized control of the process. The ball was in her court. Unless McConnell agreed to her demands for witnesses and documents during the trial, Pelosi wouldn’t serve it. There was nothing he could do.
As it turned out, McConnell was perfectly content doing just that. (He’s not known as the Turtle for nothing.) He insisted to all who would listen that he’d prefer never getting the articles at all. He didn’t want them, his caucus didn’t want them; Pelosi could keep that lump of coal as long as she liked. As for her demand that he release the resolution for organizing Trump’s trial before she sent them over, the senior senator from Kentucky was adamant that the House would run the Senate over his dead body.
In early January, three weeks after approving the articles of impeachment, Pelosi relented and dispatched them to the Senate. Her vaunted leverage had not budged McConnell an inch. In the end, it was the San Francisco Democrat who got nothing and had to like it.
It started with impeachment; the fourth quarter begins with this own-goal: Progressives slam Nancy Pelosi’s ice cream stunt in election postmortem.
Progressive groups conducting a postmortem on the 2020 race slammed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week, saying her “showing off” of her flashy freezer full of ice cream was an “unforced error” that eroded Democrats’ majority in the House.
“The economy was voters’ top concern in this election,” read the letter penned on Wednesday.
“When Democratic leaders make unforced errors like showing off two sub-zero freezers full of ice cream on national television or cozy up with Wall Street executives and corporate lobbyists while Trump tells voters we are the party of the swamp, it is not surprising that we lose,” it continued.
The letter referred to a now-infamous exchange in which Pelosi (D-Calif.) flashed her $24,000 Sub-Zero freezers stuffed with $13 ice creams in an interview with James Corden at the peak of the pandemic.
Progressive groups New Deal Strategies, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement and Data for Progress unloaded on Democratic leadership, whom they accused of being out of touch, and predicted Republicans would recapture the House in 2022.
Or as the New York Post’s front page yesterday summed up Pelosi’s terrible, no good, horrible, very bad year: