Speaker Pelosi has announced that she’ll run for Minority Leader. That means that Steny Hoyer or is out or he has to run for the second ranking position in the minority — namely, whip. James Clyburn held that position in the Majority. And he’s just announced that he’s going to run for it again in the Minority.
So Hoyer either has to run against Clyburn or he’s out of the leadership.
Of course, another part of this story is that Hoyer is the more conservative member of the House leadership team. And a lot of his core constituency, more right-leaning Dems from swing states or conservative districts — was booted in this election.
Right after the 1994 midterm you had a bunch of Republicans come out of the woodwork with really wild eyed proposals on various policy fronts. And it seems like deja vu all over again. Newly re-elected Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) says states should be able to secede from the Social Security program.
Wonder how many Texans agree with that. And that’s not a throwaway remark; I’m genuinely curious.
If MSNBC president Phil Griffin is going to suspend every on-air personality who violated the company’s policy against making political contributions, we may be seeing a lot of new faces on the air. More soon …
Eeesh. This is moving quickly on the Dem leadership front.
Pelosi says she wants to be Minority Leader. Clyburn says he wants to be Whip.
The next person down the totem poll is John Larson as Caucus Chairman. According to Roll Call, Pelosi is encouraging (sub.req.) him to run for Caucus Chair again. So Pelosi moves down, Clyburn and Larson remain in place. So there’s no room for Hoyer. He’s standing when the music stops. And he’s got no chair.
The key tell here is that Pelosi seems to be encouraging the people down the totem poll to stay in place. So she’s blocking Hoyer’s ability to perhaps get Clyburn to agree to step down the ladder with him.
I think I remember this scene from The Godfather.
Folks up on the Hill, send me your emails on this one. We want to get every detail of this one.
TPM Reader EA:
I don’t get why Democrats would want to maintain the same leadership personalities in the House. Don’t people all around the country really really hate Nancy Pelosi and probably James Clyburn too?
Don’t we have any ‘young guns’ to showcase over the next couple of years? Doesn’t an even more ‘liberal’ minority leadership structure only increase the likelihood we’ll see the dreaded triangulation from the President?
I’m wondering if this is Murtha for Majority Leader part two.
Remember, back in 2006 after the Dems took over, Pelosi was Minority Leader and Hoyer was Whip. Pretty openly, Pelosi supported Jack Murtha to run for Majority Leader, the position Hoyer wanted. The same basic dynamic. Hoyer beat Murtha.
I find the Keith Olbermann story bizarre, on both sides but mainly on MSNBC’s. First, political contribution records are the most public thing in the world for anyone who is even somewhat in the public eye, certainly for someone who courts controversy. So political giving strikes me as something done entirely in the open for someone of Olbermann’s stature. On the one hand that sounds like MSNBC is flipping out about something that must have been all but an open secret. On the other, if this is MSNBC’s policy, why was Olbermann openly flouting it?
Second, MSNBC’s policy forbids employees from making donations to political candidates, unless they ask for permission to do so, in which it seems usually to be granted. That seems to me to undercut the principle behind the policy.
But of course all of this pales behind the larger point which is that Olbermann’s job at MSNBC is to be an extremely opinionated commentator on politics. And he’s the centerpiece (along with Maddow and more equivocally, Matthews) behind the business strategy of making MSNBC the liberal cable news/chat network. (How they square that with simultaneously having a more traditional and by the books NBC News is something they clearly have yet to work out.) But when you take that all into account, seeing him now all but canned over a handful of individual political contributions because he’s compromised the objectivity he’s supposed to bring to the job sounds like a bit of a joke.
This doesn’t mean I don’t see the point of rules barring people in the news business from giving money to politicians. I do. I think they usually make sense. And whatever the rules, organizations have the right to their rules and if you want to work there you need to follow them. But against the canvass of the media and political world we’re living in and everything that’s happening in it, the scale of MSNBC’s response this seems bizarre, arbitrary and excessive.
(ed.note: I’ve appeared a few times recently on Olbermann’s show.) Read More