November 15, 2018

The House Leadership Battle Is Going Great

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

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I’m very happy with the way the battle is going for Speaker of the House. I think the ideal outcome is (a) Nancy Pelosi wins, but (b) she has a hard enough time that it’s clear she needs to think about stepping down in 2020. So far, that’s how things are working out.

I want Pelosi as Speaker because, by a mile, she’s the best legislative tactician Democrats have right now. She’s probably one of the most effective Speakers in history, and Democrats are going to need her skill and experience over the next two years. What’s more, there are really no other plausible candidates to replace her.

However, she is 78 and she has been the Democratic leader for 15 years. This means the next two years really need to be about succession planning for a younger generation. I’m not even talking about Gen X here. I’m just talking about someone who was born after World War II.

So that’s what I’m after. An agreement to keep Pelosi on, but with enough of a rebellion that Pelosi and her team are forced to recognize that they won’t survive the next one. So far, that seems to be about what’s happening.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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