What World Is Nancy Pelosi Living In

If the Democrats win control of the House of Representatives next week, it will provide immediate relief on a few different fronts—such as putting the brakes on some of the GOP’s worst agenda items, including the repeal of Obamacare—and will finally give Democrats the power to investigate the abject corruption of the Trump administration.

Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi, the frontrunner to be the next Speaker of the House if the Democrats win, had another prediction for how things might get better during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night.

“There’s been a lot of talk about lowering the temperature of political discourse,” host Stephen Colbert asked. “Have you seen evidence of that?”

“Well, I think when we win, you will see evidence of that,” Pelosi said to applause. “Because when we do win, we will have, as we open the new Congress, we will honor the vows of our founders. E Pluribus Unum. From many, one.”

Here is a quote from a speech then-President Barack Obama gave in June 2012:

I believe that If we’re successful in this election, when we’re successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.

The CliffsNotes version of what happened next is that Obama did win the election, the fever absolutely did not break, Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat from Obama, and then they nominated the rich guy from TV whose biggest foray in politics prior to running for president was insisting for several years that Obama was not born in the United States. Then that guy won the presidency on a platform of demonizing immigrants and refugees, and now his biggest concern after bombs are mailed to everyone he thinks has wronged him is how soon he can start attacking them on Twitter again.

Take this story from Politico today, in which it appears that the administration is already planning to blame Democrats for everything that goes wrong in the next two years:

In recent days, Trump and his senior advisers have repeatedly argued that recent turbulence in the stock market reflects investor fear that Democrats will retake the House in the midterm elections next week. “If you want your Stocks to go down, I strongly suggest voting Democrat,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. And he has repeatedly bashed the Federal Reserve in recent interviews for its modest campaign of rate hikes.

The Trump campaign’s closing ad of the midterm cycle — using footage from the 2008 financial crisis — suggests that handing power to Democrats would bring back sky-high unemployment. “I think election risk is a big part of this correction,” Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser, said in an interview. “The market doesn’t want to see an overturning of the business tax cuts or the deregulation or the energy boom. Until this is settled, it’s going to be hard.”

Furthermore, it doesn’t end with Trump. The far right in all of its forms has been emboldened under Trump to be more openly racist, more violent, and more powerful than at any other point in recent history. This is what America is now—and, in many ways, what it always has been—and the refusal of top Democrats to acknowledge what they’re up against has not done us any favors.

But what Pelosi did here was a step beyond even this. For all of the worries pundits raise about Democrats promising things that they can’t deliver (such as a publicly-funded healthcare system or impeachments of corrupt politicians or judges), Pelosi’s message that electing a Democratic House will help relieve growing political tensions because of, uh, “E pluribus unum,” is ridiculous on its face—especially when you consider that the governing principle of the Republican Party is owning the libs.

Pelosi and other top Democrats could stand to learn a lot from those in their ranks who are willing to publicly identify who and what exactly is driving those tensions—such as Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, as well as U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (a target of one of the bombs sent to prominent Trump opponents last week) and other members of Congress who have been admonished by the feckless Democratic leadership this year for fighting back against Trump. It’s not pointlessly divisive, or fear-mongering, or self-sabotage to be honest about what the opposition to right-wing rule is up against. On the contrary, it’s necessary.