Remember House Blue Dog Caucus Whip Heath Shuler challenged Pelosi’s run for House Minority Leader because she wasn’t in tune with Tea Baggers like he was or conservative enough for him or something:
SEABROOK: Well, Heath Shuler has announced that he will, in fact, run against her if no one else does, and he’s one of those conservative Democrat blue dogs. But remember, their numbers have been decimated, and the numbers just don’t add up to someone like Heath Shuler winning over Nancy Pelosi. It’s more or less a protest run.
And, you know, I mean, there are a lot of people in that vein who think, well, if she just lost, if we just lost our majority under her leadership, why should she still be the leader? And, again, she has been vilified by moderates. She has been run against in a lot of districts across the country, but not the places where there’s still Democrats in the seats.
Turns out Minority Leader Pelosi was key to the debt deal passing the house. Even with a deal in the bag to keep the US from default, Boehner, Cantor and friends hadn’t whipped any votes and were about to let the US default anyway…
The speaker, as it turned out, did not have enough Republican votes to pass the bill—only 174—and he had made no arrangement to guarantee its success. When there were minutes left for the vote, and it became apparent that Boehner would fall far short of the 216 votes necessary for passage, Pelosi’s Democrats began voting in favor of the measure. “We were not going to let it go down,” she told a small group of journalists on Wednesday morning.
[…]Yet when the final dramatic vote arrived, Pelosi was surprised that Boehner was so short of the magic 216. “When they didn’t come to us for votes,” Pelosi recalls, “we thought they had the votes on their own.”
But Boehner didn’t. So the Democrats, having waited to see how many Republicans would back the measure, started filling in the gap. Pelosi didn’t have to send any signal. Her Democrats, she says, are a “sophisticated” group, and they could see that without Democratic support the bill would fail.
via How Pelosi Saved Boehner’s You-Know-What | Mother Jones.
Pelosi is really working with the unbelievably inept.