Democrats, such as newly elected Rep. Conor Lamb, who won a special election in a Pennsylvania district carried by 20 points for President Trump, have largely done so by assuring voters they won't support Nancy Pelosi for the House Speaker.

Guess what: They're gonna get Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker no matter what they promise, because the latest out is that she's not going away. According to The Hill:

Democratic insurgents hoping to topple House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) lack a key ingredient in their master plan: a formidable challenger.

Pelosi’s detractors have argued for years that Democrats need an image overhaul by empowering newer members at the very top of the party. But they suffered a big setback when Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), thought by many to be Pelosi’s heir apparent, was unseated himself in an astonishing primary defeat earlier this year.

Crowley's downfall has left Pelosi critics scrambling in search of another challenger bearing the requisite combination of experience, gravitas, popularity — and not least, interest — to take on Pelosi, a political juggernaut who's led the party for the past 15 years.

And these same Democrats going to do every crazy thing she makes them do, given the way she exerts political muscle. She'll pull Obamacare after Obamacare tactics on her fellow Democrats to make sure they vote exactly the way she wants, or else. If she's got something crazy on her mind, they're going to have to vote crazy, too. If she holds a vote to grant MS-13 amnesty or to forbid bonuses to workers because they are 'crumbs' that is the way they will ultimately vote, too, because she has the track record to prove it. She runs her House as the puppetmaster.

And the Democrats have no one to counter that.

The calls to get rid of her have been out there for sure. And Democrats have elected fresh blood from insurgent campaigns, they've got a few lightweight Sandersites, such as 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of absolutely no political heft, and several moderate Democrats fresh in from special elections, who repeatedly won them by saying they wouldn't support Pelosi. According to USA Today, candidates from South Carolina, Arizona, Indiana, and elsewhere have all promised voters they'd not support Pelosi as a means of winning votes. Yet even as they win on those assurances, the wicked witch of San Francisco is all there waiting to take their power and make it her own. These Democrat freshmen insurgents of various stripes have absolutely nothing to challenge her with as a result, they will do as they are told.

Which is why Republicans ought to at least try to make something of an issue of this as they battle for midterms. A Democratic Congress will be nothing but the same-old same-old that voters rejected in 2010, the year they threw Pelosi out with a 64% negative voter approval rating nationally, following her ram-through of Obamacare. Remember Bart Stupak?

A vote for any House Democrat is a vote for Pelosi. There won't be any second voices, give the way she runs things. No matter what he or she looks like or says, such Democrats will simply be more putty in Pelosi's hands. She's truly the thing that wouldn't go away.

Image credit: Donkey Hotey, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0