On Thursday’s “MSNBC Live,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), who voted to re-elect Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as House Minority Leader, stated that a change in House Democratic leadership will happen “fairly soon,” and “we have no strategy, and we have no plan, but at least we have some proven leadership” to take the party forward, but a lack of younger leadership “will spell the demise of the Democratic caucus, if we’re not already permanently in a state of smallness.”
Cleaver said, “I think that many of us felt that it was not worth the cost that we would pay to change leaders at this politically perplexing time. I mean, look, we’re going to have the challenge of the century right now with the small minority of members we have here in the House, versus the Republican juggernaut in the House, and the Republican Senate and a Republican in the White House. So, I think that many people said, okay, look, we need to have a little more time before we flip over the leadership, and so — and I don’t think that that is going be something, you know, decades down the line. I think that’s something that’s going to happen fairly soon, in terms of elections.”
He added, “[I]f we had elected new leaders to come in, just think, they would have been elected yesterday, and we — they would have had hardly any time to do anything except move into a new office. At the present time, I’ve got to say, we have no strategy, and we have no plan, but at least we have some proven leadership that can, you know, take us into what’s going to be an new era. But think about this, we cannot have as our plan, to go to the floor for the next two years only to hit the ceiling. That’s not a plan. That’s not a strategy. And that would have been pretty much all we had — we would have had if we had changed leaders abruptly. I do think it is time for us to bring in younger people, in leadership. In fact, if we don’t, I think it will spell the demise of the Democratic caucus, if we’re not already permanently in a state of smallness.”
(h/t GOP War Room)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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