Please No

If I was playing $25,000 Pyramid right now, my response to this story as a clue would be "Things I Don't Ever Want To See In My Lifetime?"

Clyburn hasn’t aspired to be speaker, but House Democrats might find it hard to resist giving him the job, assuming that it’s theirs to give when Pelosi steps down. “I think Jim could be speaker if he wanted to,” said one Pelosi confidant, who noted that it would happen only if Hoyer were out of the equation. “How could the [Democratic] Caucus pass up making him the first black speaker?”

But another senior Democrat suggested that “the next speaker will not come from the ranks” of Hoyer and Clyburn. As the No. 4 man in the Democratic leadership, (Rahm) Emanuel would be next in line.

That's terrifying but probably accurate. As the campaign liaison, Rahm has chits in with a whole bunch of Democrats. How do you think Steny Hoyer got the Majority Leadership, incidentally? And he's the youngest member of the upper House leadership.

It's bad enough to see Hoyer in a position of power, but Emanuel is a destructive influence. His brand of center-right Democratic leadership has unquestionably given Congress its spectacularly bad approval ratings. He's itching to sell out the entire caucus on immigration, and his agenda is simply power aggrandizement over any manner of principle. He's a DLC holdover and exactly who we don't need with the Speaker's gavel at a time of rising progressivism.

There is a dual problem here. The Progressive Caucus in the House is actually bigger than the Blue Dog caucus, but they're consistently outworked. They all come from safe seats and they don't appear to have a lot of ambition, which is clearly what's necessary to rise through the ranks. So while a few liberal lions have committee chairs just because they've been there so long, by and large progressives in the House are silent backbenchers. We need more vibrant progressive leadership. If for no other reason than to stop the words "Speaker Emanuel" from ever coming together.