Nancy Pelosi: "You always start with a feather, until you get to the sledgehammer." [View all]

[Miles Archer]

The Pelosi Method

As Trump prepared to cave on the shutdown, Pelosi revealed how she stands up to an obstinate president.



https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/nancy-pelosi-won-shutdown-trump.html

n other words, after shutting down part of the government for 35 days, Trump secured zero dollars for his proposed border wall. Pelosi and Schumer, who refused to negotiate on the wall, had won the standoff. The only spin that Trump could come up with, in announcing the deal at the White House, was that he had successfully impressed the importance of physical barriers upon congressional Democrats, “dozens” of whom had reached out to him saying they were ready to deal on the wall. That may or may not be true. But he had to say something to save whatever face he could.

“He’s going to claim victory whatever” the outcome is, Pelosi had said at the roundtable. She pointed to a centerpiece of flowers on the conference table. “We could plant these flowers along the border, and [he’d say], ‘I got my wall.’ ”

It was Pelosi on Friday who actually got to claim credit for the victory. In another world, a Democratic leader might have grown antsy after a couple of weeks (or days) of the shutdown, delivered the president a chunk of his signature policy, and then watched, upon the next funding deadline, as the president chose to shut down the government again to get the next chunk. Instead, Pelosi trusted public opinion surveys that showed the president earning most of the blame for the shutdown, and waited for Republicans to break under the stress of an unsustainable position. It was a strategy born from experience, an experience that some House Democrats, in the days after the election, thought they didn’t really need or wasn’t worth the baggage.

Pelosi spent much of the shutdown waiting patiently for the president’s cave, but occasionally took to the offense. On Friday she explained how she thought through her plan to block Trump from delivering the State of the Union during a shutdown: “You always start with a feather, until you get to the sledgehammer.”