Congress, District 12: No Endorsement
Here’s what we wrote about Nancy Pelosi in our March 2020 voter guide, and not much has changed since then. If you’d like details on why we don’t support her, read on:
Nancy Pelosi is the incumbent, and also the Speaker of the House of Representatives. We go back and forth on whether to evaluate her from a local SF perspective or from a national perspective. While it’s rad that she’s birddogging Senator McConnell to expand voter registration and access and make Election Day a holiday, it’s a drag that she’s primarily focused on national politics and absent from SF’s needs. She’s been shamefully AWOL on the Hunters Point Shipyard radiation controversy. She eventually called for “oversight of the oversight of the oversight,” which is, uh… not very reassuring.
She’s the most powerful woman in Congress, and maybe the world. We give her props for holding that motley bunch of Democrats in line, but the closer we look at her record, the more pissed off we get about her representing our City:
- She pushed to strip out key provisions of a drug pricing bill.
- Her attacks on “the Squad” are hella problematic, empowering Trump and his goons’ death threats.
- Fox News loved her attack on the wildly popular Green New Deal.
- Insurance Execs loved her reassurance that they didn’t have to worry about Medicare for All.
- She’s supposed to be a master tactician, but:
- She got played by Republicans on procedural moves on an important gun control bill.
- She fell into McConell’s trap on Anti-BDS bill that pitted Zionists against pro-Palestinian Democrats.
- Her hands-off approach to impeachment and aggressive oversight of Trump enabled him and let him off the hook:
- She took way too long to go after Trump’s tax returns and other court battles that won’t be decided before the November 2020 election.
- She essentially dismissed E. Jean Carroll’s credible rape allegation against Trump. #metoo, Nancy?
- Her failure to have the House authorize the emoluments lawsuit about Trump profiting off of foreign governments just led to it getting thrown out in courts on a technicality.
We don’t claim to be experts in national politics. We get that it’s wicked complicated and nuanced and unavoidably icky, but damn, that’s a long list of nonsense that doesn’t represent our values.
While we appreciate the political stances of Pelosi’s challenger, Shahid Buttar, we at the League believe the personal is political. Given the various summer 2020 revelations about Buttar’s campaign management and personal conduct, he does not have our endorsement.
