A Disinformation Loop

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Annie Karni, Malika Khurana and Stuart A. Thompson at NYT:

Within hours of the brutal attack last month on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the speaker of the House, activists and media outlets on the right began circulating groundless claims — nearly all of them sinister, and many homophobic — casting doubt on what had happened.

Some Republican officials quickly joined in, rushing to suggest that the bludgeoning of an octogenarian by a suspect obsessed with right-wing conspiracy theories was something else altogether, dismissing it as an inside job, a lover’s quarrel or worse.

The misinformation came from all levels of Republican politics. A U.S. senator circulated the view that “none of us will ever know” what really happened at the Pelosis’ San Francisco home. A senior Republican congressman referred to the attacker as a “nudist hippie male prostitute,” baselessly asserting that the suspect had a personal relationship with Mr. Pelosi. Former President Donald J. Trump questioned whether the attack might have been staged.

The world’s richest man helped amplify the stories. But none of it was true.

The flood of falsehoods showed how ingrained misinformation has become inside the G.O.P., where the reflexive response of the rank and file — and even a few prominent figures — to anything that might cast a negative light on the right is to deflect with more fictional claims, creating a vicious cycle that muddies facts, shifts blame and minimizes violence.

It happened after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, which was inspired by Mr. Trump’s lie of a stolen election, and in turn gave rise to more falsehoods, as Republicans and their right-wing allies tried to play down, deny or invent a different story for what happened, including groundlessly blaming the F.B.I. and antifa. Mr. Pelosi’s attacker is said to have believed some of those tales.

“This is the dynamic as it plays out,” said Brian Hughes, a professor at American University who studies radicalism and extremism. “The conspiracy theory prompts an act of violence; that act of violence needs to be disavowed, and it can only be disavowed by more conspiracy theories, which prompts more violence.”

Pelosi and Communion

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.

Mica Soellner at The Washington Times :

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will no longer be served Holy Communion in her home city of San Francisco due to her stance supporting abortion, the church announced Friday.

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone made the announcement, notifying the California Democrat that her views on reproductive rights are not in line with the Catholic Church.

“A Catholic legislator who supports procured abortion, after knowing the teaching of the Church, commits a manifestly grave sin which is a cause of most serious scandal to others. Therefore, universal Church law provides that such persons ‘are not to be admitted to Holy Communion,’” Archbishop Cordileone wrote to Mrs. Pelosi.

Pelosi at Work

Carl Hulse at NYT:

On a Wednesday night in September, while President Biden backslapped in the Republican dugout during the annual congressional baseball game, Speaker Nancy Pelosi sat nearby, sober-faced and wagging her finger while speaking into her cellphone, toiling to salvage her party’s top legislative priority as it teetered on the brink of collapse.

On the other end of the line was Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, a crucial swing vote on Mr. Biden’s sweeping social policy bill, and Ms. Pelosi, seated in the V.I.P. section behind the dugout at Nationals Park, was trying to persuade him to embrace $2.1 trillion in spending and climate change provisions she considered essential for the legislation.

In a moment captured by C-SPAN cameras that went viral, Ms. Pelosi appeared to grow agitated as Mr. Manchin, according to sources apprised of the call, told her that he could not accept more than $1.5 trillion — and was prepared to provide a document clearly laying out his parameters for the package, benchmarks that House Democrats had been clamoring to see.

The call reflected how Ms. Pelosi’s pivotal role in shepherding Mr. Biden’s agenda on Capitol Hill has reached far beyond the House that is her primary responsibility and into the Senate, where she has engaged in quiet and little-noticed talks with key lawmakers who have the power to kill the package or propel it into law. 

Her efforts — fraught with challenges and littered with near-death experiences for the bill — finally paid off on Friday with House passage of the $2.2 trillion social policy and climate change package.

...

While her main responsibility was wrangling the House, Ms. Pelosi devoted considerable time to Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema, both of whom hold the power to scuttle the deal in the evenly divided Senate if they balk.

Ms. Pelosi has ties to both. She has bonded with Mr. Manchin, who like Ms. Pelosi grew up in a political family, over their shared Italian heritage and Catholicism and her work on health and pension benefits for coal miners, represented in her office by a statue of a miner gifted to her by Mr. Manchin.

 

I wonder of there’s a discussion about reconciliation going on here pic.twitter.com/0MvWLWvSDn

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 30, 2021

"Power Is Never Given. It's Always Taken"

Ezra Klein at Vox:

Ro Khanna first ran for Congress in 2004. It was the apex of post-9/11 politics, and Khanna, then a 27-year-old idealistic intellectual property lawyer, was furious that Tom Lantos, the long-serving Democrat from California, had supported not just the Iraq War but the Patriot Act. “For the South Asian diaspora, that was a symbol,” he says. “It was about standing up for the ‘other.’”

Khanna got crushed. But Lantos saw potential in his young challenger, and he called Nancy Pelosi, then the minority leader of the House Democrats, to tell her about the kid who’d tried, and failed, to defeat him. “Pelosi saw that the only Indian face in politics at the time was Bobby Jindal,” Khanna says. “She saw there was a huge South Asian community. And so she told me, get involved, and after redistricting, there’ll be an opening.”

So Khanna got involved. He went to work for the Obama administration. He wrote a book on bringing manufacturing innovation back to America. And then, with Pelosi’s blessing, he opened an exploratory committee to run in 2012 for the House seat Rep. Pete Stark was expected to retire from.

But redistricting didn’t bring Khanna the district he’d hoped for. Fremont, California, where he intended to run, was merged into Rep. Mike Honda’s territory, and Honda had no intention of stepping down. Still, the new district was heavily South Asian, and it included tech giants like Apple and Yahoo and Intel; Khanna thought he had a chance. So he decided to challenge another incumbent Democrat, and asked Pelosi to stay neutral in the race.

“Pelosi invited me to her house,” Khanna recalls. “And when I asked her not to make an endorsement, she said, ‘Absolutely not. I stand for my incumbents.’ So I get very discouraged, and Pelosi could see that. As I’m leaving the room, she said, ‘Ro, let me tell you something. If I had waited around, I’d have never been speaker of the House. Power is never given. It’s always taken.’”

Motion to Recommit and Party Strategy

Heather Caygle and John Bresnahn at Politico:

House Democrats held an emotional debate behind closed doors Thursday over how to stop losing embarrassing procedural battles with Republicans — a clash that exposed the divide between moderates and progressives.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) took a hard line at the caucus meeting, saying that being a member of Congress sometimes requires taking tough votes.

“This is not a day at the beach. This is the Congress of the United States,” Pelosi said, according to two sources.

Pelosi also said vulnerable Democrats who had the “courage” to vote against the Republican motions to recommit would become a higher priority for the party leadership and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the superstar New York freshman lawmaker, suggested she would alert progressive activists when Democrats are voting with the GOP on these motions, said the sources.

In the end, Pelosi and other top Democrats didn’t agree to any rules change and will continue to study the issue. The motion to recommit offers the House minority one last shot at changing legislation before it receives a final floor vote. Typically, the motion is used to try to squeeze the majority party, but it rarely succeeds.

Electing a House Speaker

Matt Glassman at Legislative Procedure:

Traditionally, a norm has existed in both parties that all members support their party nominee when the vote goes to the House floor. That is, even if the vote in the caucus is 130-110, the 110 who did not vote for the nominee are expected to back them on the House floor. From 1947 until 1997, there was not a single defection from this norm. In recent years, however, a small number of members of both parties have defected from their party nominee. In 2011, 18 votes went to candidates other than the party nominees. In 2013, 14 votes did. In 2015, 28 did. In 2017, 5 did. In none of these cases did the votes comprise the balance of power such that they could deny the election to the majority party’s candidate. In several of the elections, however, a faction of conservative Republicans explicitly sought to use the floor vote to deny their party’s nominee the Speakership.

This time, a faction of Democrats is threatening not to support Nancy Pelosi.

Many observers believe that a commitment by Pelosi or other current leaders to step down in the near future might satisfy the insurgents; the current top Democratic leadership has been in place for 16 years, and there is definitely some general caucus dissatisfaction related to the inability of members to move up the leadership ladder. Alternatively, Pelosi might threaten to punish members who vote against her on the floor; rule 34 of the Democratic caucus binds members to vote for the nominee. When two members of the GOP leadership voted against Speaker Boehner in 2015, he immediately removed them from the Rules Committee.

If bargaining fails, Pelosi could call the insurgents’ bluff, and simply win the nomination in the caucus and go to the floor with it, daring them to deny her the Speakership. Similarly, she could lean on some of them to vote “present” on the floor, rather than for a different candidate. Under current House rules, nominees need a majority of those voting “for a person by name” to win the Speakership. If anyone votes “present,” the total number of votes is reduced by 1, meaning that for every 2 people who vote “present,” the threshold needed to win reduces by 1 vote. If Pelosi could convince 10 Democrat insurgents to vote “present,” she would only need 213 votes, which would neutralize the balance of power held by the holdout insurgents.

Tactically, Pelosi could also employ the help of Republicans, though relying on them to sustain her Speakership would be a dangerous (and highly unlikely) move. Republicans could outright vote for her for Speaker to make her majority, or they could vote “present” to reduce the majority threshold. They could also vote in favor of a resolution declaring that the Speakership be decided on a plurality basis; this broke the Speakership deadlocks in both 1849 and 1856. But again, all of these possibilities are highly unlikely.

Very Strange Ad

An earlier post displayed a very strange political ad in Texas. Here is another odd ad, this one from California.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's opponent uses zombies to play on his status as a "sacrificial lamb"  in the race:

Pelosi and Religion

At a press conference yesterday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) suggested that religion and politics are separate realms:

Q: Leader Pelosi, what about the 43 Catholic institutions that have now sued the administration over the regulation that requires them to provide contraceptives, sterilization, abortions in their health care plans and they say that violates their religious freedom. Do you report the Catholic Church in their lawsuits against the Administration?

Leader Pelosi. Well, I don't think that is the entire Catholic Church. Those people have a right to sue, but I don't think they are speaking ex cathedra for the Catholic Church and there are people in the Catholic Church, including some of the Bishops, who have suggested that some of this may be premature.

Q: But do you agree with the Catholic Church teaching that...

Leader Pelosi. You know what? I do my religion on Sunday in church and I try to go other days of the week. I don't do it at this press conference.

But on May 6, 2010, she took a very different perspective on the topic:

They ask me all the time, ‘What is your favorite this? What is your favorite that? What is your favorite that?’ And one time, ‘What is your favorite word?’ And I said, ‘My favorite word? That is really easy. My favorite word is the Word, is the Word. And that is everything. It says it all for us. And you know the biblical reference, you know the Gospel reference of the Word.”

“And that Word is, we have to give voice to what that means in terms of public policy that would be in keeping with the values of the Word.

Video Footage in Attack Ads

An earlier post mentioned Andrew Kaczynski, a college student who posts video clips of current presidential candidates.  He is part of a bigger story. A few years ago, Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi appeared in a spot ad about climate change.  Gingrich now regrets it, as The New York Times reports:

He has good reason to fret. Scenes from that 2008 public service announcement appear in no fewer than four television advertisements now running in Iowa and can be found in numerous videos on the Web, all made by rival Republican presidential campaigns and outside political groups that are trying to sink Mr. Gingrich’s candidacy.

It is the attack-ad technique of choice for the 2012 election: anything you have said or done on film will be held against you. And its prevalence has helped make the Republican primary campaign a ferociously negative contest. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Iowa, where commercials that portray candidates in an unflattering light now account for two-thirds of the money spent on advertising for the caucuses.
...
Turning the candidates’ own words against them is, of course, one of the older tricks in the political playbook. But today more than ever, when a candidate’s every kaffeeklatsch, rope-line handshake and editorial board interview is captured on camera, there is a wealth of material. With news outlets like C-Span digitizing their video archives and making them available online, old footage is easy to come by. Anyone with an Internet connection and the patience to conduct a lengthy Google search can be an opposition researcher. And the willingness of some campaigns not only to employ old film but to rip it out of context seems to be greater than ever.        

Religion, Legislative Leadership, and Speaker Pelosi

In The Christian Science Monitor, Gail Russell Chaddock offers a shrewd portrait of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, illustrating the fine points of legislative leadership and the pervasive influence of religion on American politics:

Even before she took over as Speaker, Pelosi had maintained close relations with Catholic women's religious organizations. They shared not only the same faith but often also the same politics. Catholic activists would meet at least weekly with members of her office. They worked together on issues such as support for the uninsured, child nutrition, immigration, and expanding health coverage for poor children. Those ties were about to become pivotal.

...

A week before the vote [on comprehensive health legislation], it had all come down to a fierce, intraparty dispute over language limiting federal funding of abortion. Rep. Bart Stupak, an anti-abortion Democrat from Michigan, publicly backed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he and at least 40 of his supporters would vote down a Senate bill that did not contain the stronger House language blocking public abortion funding.

In response, 40 abortion-rights Democrats, led by Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado, signed a letter pledging to vote down any legislation that further restricted a woman's right to choose. For the speaker, it appeared to be a cul-de-sac.

Enter the nuns. In a decisive move, Sister Carol Keehan, president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association, and Sister Simone Campbell, representing NETWORK, a social-justice lobby for Catholic churchwomen, said publicly that the Senate language did not, in fact, expand federal funding for abortion and announced their support of the Senate bill – a rare public break with the bishops. "Our contacts there [in Pelosi's office] helped us know the rhythm and concerns of the speaker's office," Sister Campbell says. "We knew where the votes were or weren't. It's not rocket science. Key Catholic votes were needed – and [these members] needed assurance that this new abortion mechanism would work."

Mr. Stupak was stunned. "We had never heard of these nuns before," he says.

At the climactic hour, Pelosi offered Stupak and other holdouts a sweetener: The White House would issue an executive order clarifying that public funds would not be used to fund abortion. This agreement, as well as the public backing of the Catholic churchwomen, gave anti-abortion Democrats cover for backing the Senate bill – and gave Pelosi her last critical votes for passing the Senate health-care bill. "Three or four in the Stupak coalition went over to the other side explicitly saying they [were] moved by the nuns...," says Deal Hudson, president of the Catholic Advocate, an anti-abortion advocacy group. "So it was a very powerful move at that moment in time."

Speaker Pelosi on Religion and Politics

At a May 6 Catholic Community Conference on Capitol Hill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described how religion matters to her:

They ask me all the time, ‘What is your favorite this? What is your favorite that? What is your favorite that?’ And one time, ‘What is your favorite word?’ And I said, ‘My favorite word? That is really easy. My favorite word is the Word, is the Word. And that is everything. It says it all for us. And you know the biblical reference, you know the Gospel reference of the Word.

C-SPAN and Health Care Deliberations

At several points in our text, we discuss the role of C-SPAN in making policy deliberations more accessible.
Brian Lamb, founder and president of C-SPAN, has asked congressional leaders to open all important negotiations, including conference committee meetings, to the network's cameras.  According to The Politico, Speaker Nancy Pelosi dealt with the request at a press conference:

A reporter reminded the San Francisco Democrat that in 2008, then-candidate Obama opined that all such negotiations be open to C-SPAN cameras.  “There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail,” quipped Pelosi, who has no intention of making the deliberations public.  People familiar with Pelosi's thinking wasted little time in explaining precisely what she meant by a “number of things” – saying it reflected weeks of simmering tension on health care between two Democratic power players who have functioned largely in lock-step during Obama’s first year in office.

On August 21, 2008, candidate Obama made the following pledge:

"I'm going to have all the negotiations around a big table. We'll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies -- they'll get a seat at the table, they just won't be able to buy every chair. But what we will do is, we'll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies. And so, that approach, I think is what is going to allow people to stay involved in this process."