A band of Democratic National Committee superdelegates is staging a revolt against a Bernie Sanders-endorsed plan to reduce their influence in the presidential nominating process, mounting a longshot bid to block the measure when the DNC meets in Chicago next month.

The proposal, a priority of Sanders’ supporters since the Vermont senator‘s defeat in a bitterly contested 2016 primary, would prohibit superdelegates — who made up roughly 15 percent of the delegates during the 2016 convention — from voting on the first presidential nominating ballot at a contested national convention.

But even as the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee moved forward with the proposal Wednesday, superdelegates outside of Washington were beginning to organize opposition ahead of the August vote by the full DNC in Chicago.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who accused Perez of flinching in the face of criticism of the superdelegate process, called the proposal a “craven capitulation to what [Perez] describes as a perception of elitism.”

Connolly, like other opponents of the plan, argued that “disenfranchising the elected leadership of the party” would disconnect elected leaders from the party’s presidential ticket, ultimately weakening its prospects in 2020.

“I also believe the timing is wretched,” Connolly said. “We’re in the midst of the battle of our lives to win back the majority of our House, and to schedule this vote with this recommendation that came out of nowhere … is to me just wretched timing and political malpractice.”

LAKE GENEVA, Wis. — On Friday, CNN reported that Randy Bryce, the Democratic union organizer running for Congress in Wisconsin’s 1st District, had been arrested for marijuana possession in 1991 and driving under the influence of alcohol in 1998.

Bryce owned up to the arrests, and told CNN that he had grown and changed over the past 20 years. But the timing was brutal: Bryce was 48 hours away from debating Cathy Myers, a school board member in Paul D. Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, who is also seeking the Democratic nomination for the retiring House speaker’s seat. When they met, in front of 200 voters in a high school auditorium, it took Myers just 30 seconds to go on the attack.

“We’re not going to hold Trump accountable with viral tweets and poll-tested one-liners,” said Myers, sitting at the other end of a long table from a poker-faced Bryce. “We have to elect someone that is not going to be able to win, but to serve.”

The Democratic primary in Ryan’s southeast Wisconsin district, which has been reliably Republican since the party’s 1994 landslide, has quietly become one of the most bitter in the country. Bryce entered the race last June with a viral video ad that made him a left-wing sensation, memorably described as a candidate who had been “genetically engineered from Bruce Springsteen songs.” Myers declared her own candidacy a few days later, and did not become a left-wing sensation.

Executing this launch sequence would tax the powers of any politician. Pelosi’s task is made more difficult by the ideological divides roiling her own party, and by a GOP that has made her the face of its attacks on Democratic candidates. Pelosi is unique among current congressional leaders in being weaponized against her team – she’s been featured in more than 16,000 attack ad airings through May. “We haven’t seen the Republican leaders singled out in this sort of way,” says Erika Franklin Fowler, a director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads.

Pelosi is one of the most powerful women in global politics. She gets credit for securing passage of much of the legislation in the Obama legacy, including the Recovery Act, Wall Street reform and especially the Affordable Care Act. “Nancy Pelosi has been one of the most transformational figures in the modern Democratic Party,” says Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez. Pelosi also spearheaded the takeover of the House a dozen years ago in 2006 – an achievement that has become fodder for her critics. “Leader Pelosi has talked about how we need to do what we did in 2006,” says Rep. Seth Moulton, an ambitious Massachusetts Democrat who argues for a “new generation” of House leadership. “I mean, we barely had iPhones in 2006 – it was a different world.”

But for all the talk about Nancy Pelosi, less time has been spent actually listening to her. Rolling Stone sat down with Pelosi for an hour on a May evening in Des Moines, Iowa, where she was raising money for the local Democratic Party. At the fundraiser, standing before a wall-sized American flag, Pelosi sought to flatten the difference between President Trump and GOP candidates. “He’s their guy,” she says of Trump. “Make no mistake: This election, it’s not – well it’s about him in certain respects, we can’t ignore that – but it’s about them.”