The Democrat majority in the House of Representatives is paper-thin.  Most of the new Democrat members who have given Nancy Pelosi this soft majority come from congressional districts created by Republican legislatures to elect Republican House members to Congress.  Midterm elections nearly always go against the party controlling the White House.

What this means is that each of these new House members realizes that he will face a real problem with re-election in 2020 running as a freshman from a district gerrymandered to elect Republicans.  Only sensible, adroit, and thoughtful leadership can help these freshmen win re-election in 2020, but that is precisely what Nancy Pelosi cannot provide.

She is the most leftist speaker of the House in American history, and her whole life has been spent in extremely leftist regions – Baltimore, New York, San Francisco, and Washington – working almost exclusively in politics.  Moreover, Pelosi is very rich and has been rich so long that she has no empathy for working people.

The even bigger problem for Nancy is that she has told America that she and House Democrats now have the power for real change.  What that means is that she has taken responsibility for solving the nation's problems.  In fact, Speaker Pelosi has almost no power at all.

America, guided by leftists, has relegated Congress to a debating society.  Laws, meaning those rules and regulations with the force of law, are made by federal agencies, federal Cabinet officials delegated by Congress with the power to implement regulations, the president's executive orders, and federal court decisions.

If Congress itself has been reduced to irrelevance, then the House of Representatives has lost even more power than the Senate.  The Senate still confirms presidential appointments, especially to the federal bench, and – in theory – the Senate approves treaties proposed by the president.  (Treaties, alas, have been largely supplanted by agreements and orders by the president and foreign governments.)

So Speaker Pelosi and her narrow House majority can do nothing at all, really, except fail to pass bills the president might sign into laws.  But because statute-making has largely become superfluous, she will have the nominal authority as one of the leaders of the federal government, but she will have almost nothing at all to do.

As new House Democrats see that they can deliver absolutely nothing to their constituents after Nancy has promised the nation that she will use the House majority to do great things, these new House members will be put in a difficult position.

President Trump can probably peel away enough of these new Democrat House members who came from congressional districts that Trump carried comfortably in 2018 – a dozen or fewer would be more than enough – to pass some reforms over the protests of Speaker Pelosi and make her look like a clueless windbag tied to the coastal elites and indifferent to real America.  This would also allow President Trump to play the bipartisan card: "even though Democrats run the House of Representatives, I was able to bring together bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress to get things done for the American people."

Speaker Pelosi would be left stammering meaningless mishmash and parroting ancient leftist curses.  She will have proven to America that politics and not policy guides her actions and that the left-coast elites with oodles of cash are her real power base.  If Democrats lose the House in 2020, a real possibility, then there will almost certainly be a leadership fight not just for minority leader of the House, but for the other positions now held by ancient leftists addicted to power who have never done a day's work in their lives (or so it seems).

The fissures within the Democratic Party, which these days put only narrow-minded and decrepit old folks in leadership positions, may break wide open.  That would not be a bad thing.  Indeed, the two political parties are both anachronisms today, and either abandoning political parties or reforming them along more rational lines would be good for America. 

That is the last thing Nancy Pelosi would have wanted, but she may provide the catalyst for a true political revolution in America. 

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.