House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is ticking off some House Democrats for publicly opining on what her party did wrong in 2024.
Pelosi needs to let House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) lead the caucus, Democrats tell Axios.
“She needs to take a seat,” said one senior Democratic lawmaker.
“Making scattershot comments is not just unhelpful, it’s damaging,” said the lawmaker.
“Hakeem has been tremendously graceful and respectful of her, but I don’t think she is being respectful of him,” said a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Both lawmakers insisted on anonymity.
Pelosi still instills fear in the members she led for two decades.
The mounting frustration with Pelosi exists in the private conversations among House Democrats in various corners of the caucus.
The trouble started when Pelosi agreed to an interview with The New York Times in which she suggested Biden should have dropped out of the race sooner.
Had that happened, “there may have been other candidates in the race,” she said.
Her comments ignited another round of finger-pointing and blame-shifting between the Biden and Harris camps.
The NYT wrote up their story on Friday but didn’t post the full interview until Saturday.
The transcript had more caveats and compliments than the initial article indicated, but it didn’t really matter. Pelosi had started a fire.
Many of Pelosi’s Democratic colleagues privately cheered when she asserted her will over the party this summer by helping push Biden out of the campaign.
The country’s first woman speaker didn’t appear to care that Biden’s feelings were hurt. “We just have to win the election,” she said.
Jeffries’ allies, including Pelosi, note Democrats picked up three seats in his native New York.
On Pelosi’s home turf of California, Democrats hoped to knock off five Republicans. So far, they have only taken out one.
“He did a masterful job in New York in this election,” she said in her controversial NYT interview,
“Speaker Pelosi is immensely proud of Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his masterful stewardship of the House Democratic Caucus,” a Pelosi spokesperson told us.
“We all should praise the excellent progress made by House Democrats under his leadership.”
Recriminations are flying over Democrats failing to take the House, with some members airing their grievances in a caucus meeting this week.
Jeffries told members that “the buck stops with me.”
Some Democrats are clearly frustrated Pelosi isn’t fading into the sunset like she promised when she lost the gavel two years ago.
“My advice to my fellow Democrats is simple: Follow the leader. Hakeem Jeffries has done a great job,” Pelosi said in 2023.
“I understand that this is a difficult transition for her, not being the leader, but she is not,” the member of the Congressional Black Caucus told us.
“She needs to understand what her new role is.”
