Despite all the media attention for rookie US House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others?
The Speaker, Nancy Pelosi is in charge….
Of course she will be responsive to her caucus members….
But the new lawmakers will have to do what the old lawmakers have done….
learn the ropes and of course make the leaders ask for their votes…
The reality is that Pelosi grabbed the gavel on Thursday with a firm grip. The first two battles led by Ocasio-Cortez and her Instagramming army of rebels ran smack into Pelosi’s establishment fortress. When Ocasio-Cortez made waves by loudly demanding a new committee tasked with drafting a “Green New Deal,” Pelosi quietly brushed it aside last week, as if to say: Kids, brush up on your Schoolhouse Rock. Then after a meek surrender, Ocasio-Cortez, along with Rep. Ro Khanna, hastily tried to derail restoration of the so-called pay-as-you-go rule or “PAYGO”—a limitation on new spending without offsets that some on the left see as a threat to their big-ticket agenda—only to watch the chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus side with Pelosi and nip the rebellion in the bud.
The Green New Deal gambit is the more significant flop. Ocasio-Cortez led a campaign for a turbocharged climate change committee that would be required to produce a bill zeroing out fossil fuels in 10 years, along with a federal job guarantee to mitigate any economic shocks. She also insisted the committee have subpoena power and only include members of Congress who don’t accept contributions from donors in the fossil fuel industry.
None of Ocasio-Cortez’s demands were accepted. Instead, in the rules resolution for the new Congress, Pelosi created a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis tasked with proposing climate policy recommendations to existing committees, similar to the process that Pelosi established in her first stint as speaker. The person Pelosi tapped to be chair of the select committee, Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, made clear that the Green New Deal wouldn’t be the sole focus of the committee’s work, and that she could not insist that every member reject donations from the fossil fuel industry (though Castor did say she would stop accepting them.) Castor, who is not a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was likely picked because she has been the No. 2 Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and can be expected to respect that committee’s jurisdiction over climate policy….
Note….
Ocasio-Cortez DID vote for Pelosi for Speaker and was booed for doing so….
image of Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez….Syracuse.Com