Nancy Pelosi Joins Knives Out: Chuck Schumer Edition

Slay, qween

Mar 19, 2025

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered a sharp critique of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday, suggesting he had forfeited a crucial bargaining chip by allowing a vote on Republicans’ government funding bill.
“I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” Pelosi told reporters during a news conference at a children’s hospital in San Francisco. “I think that’s what happened the other day.”
Pelosi — who spoke during an event to oppose House Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid — said she still supports Schumer, her longtime ally who’s come under fire from within his own party in recent days over his decision to allow the GOP’s bill to avert a government shutdown through last Friday.
But Pelosi, in response to a question, suggested that if Schumer hadn’t cleared the way, it would have given Democrats more leverage to fight proposed cuts to Medicaid and other social safety-net programs.
“We could have, in my view, perhaps, gotten them to agree to a third way,” Pelosi said. She said a potential outcome could have been a bipartisan continuing resolution to delay a shutdown for up to four weeks while negotiations continued.
She added, “They may not have agreed to it, but at least the public would have seen they’re not agreeing to it — and that then they would have been shutting (the) government down.”

More from Mediaite: Gayle King Tells Chuck Schumer to His Face: "People in His Own Party Are Saying You Gots to Go" And here’s that cringe inducing appearance on The View:

Trump Faces New Kinds of Lawfare

Politico: Mike Johnson’s New Headache: A Judge Impeachment Push

Hard-right House Republicans have a new project — impeaching federal judges who have questioned President Donald Trump’s powers — and it’s quickly turning into the latest headache for Speaker Mike Johnson.
The push to remove jurists who have sought to halt Trump’s firings of federal employees, access to sensitive government systems and deportations of alleged foreign gang members has virtually no chance of succeeding, given the 67-vote requirement in the Senate for removal.
But it is nonetheless quickly turning into a major distraction for House GOP leaders after Trump himself called on social media Tuesday for the Washington-based judge who ordered the grounding of some deportation flights to be “IMPEACHED!!!” It threatens to sap political capital and antagonize key GOP blocs just as Johnson is hoping to put Trump’s sweeping domestic policy agenda into overdrive.
Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas, a conservative hard-liner, quickly followed through on Trump’s call, filing a measure to remove U.S. District Judge James Boasberg for seeking to “prioritize political gain over the duty of impartiality owed to the public.”
Impeachment proceedings, even when they don’t involve presidents, can be time- and resource-intensive affairs. Boasberg, who was nominated by President Barack Obama, is the fourth federal trial judge this year to be targeted with an impeachment filing from a congressional Republican after ruling against the Trump administration. But his is the first to draw backing from Trump.
Publicly, key GOP leaders are not closing the door on potential impeachments.
“Everything is on the table,” said Russell Dye, a spokesperson for House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who would oversee impeachment proceedings. A Johnson spokesperson said judges “with political agendas pose a significant threat” and that the speaker “looks forward to working with the Judiciary Committee as they review all available options under the Constitution to address this urgent matter.”
But privately there is dread inside Johnson’s leadership circle about the prospect of having to pursue messy, certain-to-fail impeachments that could ultimately backfire on the GOP’s razor-thin majority.
“It’s never going to happen,” said a senior House Republican aide. “There aren’t the votes.”

Another Perfect Call?

Owen Matthews:

Welcome to the first episode of the latest season of Putin’s Theater of Fugazi – the longest-running drama in global geopolitics. The first takeaway from yesterday’s nearly two-hour phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin seems, at first glance, like a positive one. Putin conceded, in principle, strong support for a ceasefire. And in practice, he conceded its first element: a moratorium on strikes on energy infrastructure, issuing orders immediately after the call to halt imminent attacks.
Fundamentally, though, Putin is merely playing the role of a willing participant in the peace process. In reality, Tuesday’s Trump-Putin phone call simply raised the curtain on what promises to be a long and masterful display of stalling tactics.
Was the moratorium on striking energy infrastructure the first step toward peace? In one sense, yes. Russia has spent years pounding Ukraine’s electrical substations, power plants, gas pipelines and transformer stations – crippling the country’s industry, periodically paralyzing its rail network and plunging millions of civilians into cold and darkness. Ukraine, for its part, has scored some of the war’s few significant counterstrikes by developing long-range drones capable of blowing up oil refineries, gasoline storage units, and oil terminals deep inside Russia. A partial ceasefire in the air will spare Ukraine further damage to its critical infrastructure and allow the country to begin rebuilding its shattered power grid.
But Russia is the real winner. As early as February 2024, Russia imposed a six-month ban on the export of refined petroleum products due to repeated Ukrainian attacks on its refineries. In just the past few days, Ukrainian strikes have sent giant fireballs billowing over Astrakhan, Krasnodar, Samara and the Moscow oil refinery, which supplies 50 percent of the capital’s gasoline. Yes, it was the Ukrainians who first proposed a limited ceasefire in the skies. But a ceasefire that prevents Kyiv from continuing one of its few strategically successful tactics while allowing Russia free rein to strike non-energy targets in Ukraine is cold comfort.
Here, Putin’s cold cunning is on full display. By lifting the phrase “30-day ceasefire” from the original proposal and transplanting it into a framework that benefits the Kremlin while disadvantaging Kyiv, Putin allowed Trump to claim a victory while, in reality, securing one for himself.
“We agreed to an immediate ceasefire on all energy and infrastructure,” Trump wrote on social media. “With an understanding that we will be working quickly to have a complete ceasefire and, ultimately, an END to this very horrible war between Russia and Ukraine.” Even as Trump posted those words, Iranian-made Russian drones rained down on central Kyiv and Sumy – just not on energy infrastructure.

Is PPO Blocking Perfectly MAGA People?

Cockburn:

While President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dead set on slashing government jobs via the Department of Government Efficiency, some in the GOP are frustrated that PPO is rejecting political appointees with apparently sterling MAGA credentials. They feel that PPO is flexing its muscles over both agency heads and Republican senators.
Both groups have made requests for specific hires only to see their chosen candidates rejected by PPO, oftentimes with virtually no explanation, multiple high-level spurned applicants told Cockburn. One rejected candidate, for instance, had served as a close aide to a newly appointed cabinet official in their previous post for several years.
There has been plenty of coverage about the loyalty tests that would-be political staffers have to pass prior to getting a job in the second Trump administration. Less has been written about who is making those decisions.
Multiple RNC veterans claimed to Cockburn that, at the Department of Defense, for example, Nick Solheim was “running… transition stuff” from the outside. Solheim co-founded American Moment, a nonprofit which has helped so-called “New Right” Republicans get jobs in the second Trump administration; Solheim’s American Moment co-founder, Saurabh Sharma, is an official in PPO. Within the DoD itself, Dan Caldwell is reported to have a key role in personnel selections, despite his close ties to Kochworld – which Trump has declared to be on a blacklist. Solheim declined to comment.
The Trump White House pushed back on the gripes of the rejected applicants. “Every single appointee in this administration is hired at the pleasure of one person – President Donald J. Trump,” said White House spokesperson Liz Huston. “Never before in history has an administration hired such a huge number of qualified, capable and America First patriots in such little time. We’ve broken records by selecting over 2,000 appointees in less than two months including incredible MAGA warriors like Russ Vought, Tom Homan, Sean Parnell, Harmeet Dhillon, Kash Patel, Kari Lake, Brent Bozell and Jay Bhattacharya.
“Unfortunately not everyone who comes recommended meets the criteria to join the administration.”