nancy pelosi is once again officially the speaker of the house. she received 220 votes. some of those who were not going to vote for her, some who led the opposition to her ended up voting for her. seth molten is one of them. you might have heard this and you might have been wondering if you heard it right. there was one vote for joe biden. former vice president joe biden. this came from new york democratic representative anthony brendesi. he voted for biden. you don t have to be a house representative to be speaker of the house. let s bring in our guest who are here with us from the white house. nbc news correspondent hans and k
and who s going to end up with a one room window in the basement because they stuck there. seth molten, the congressman who has been leading the effort behind the scenes, says he won t run for speaker himself, do you think this says more about him than it does about nancy pelosi? i think it does in this way. i think there are 330 million americans that are trying to figure out why the democrats just won the house and are having a problem about putting nancy pelosi in the speakership, and there are about 20 democrats are thinking she shouldn t be the speaker. for the existing members, a lot of it boils down to personal issues, grievance, even congressman higgins was talking about it wasn t just the policy, it was the way that it was quote unquote dealt with. so there was some personal level to that. i think with molten and tim ryan, the congressman from ohio, they re going to have to make a decision pretty quickly, and this is going to be hard for them over the next 40 days. the cau
careful pressure campaign. they ran a campaign saying they wouldn t vote for her, but she has been meeting with them one on one, and a lot of them have started to temper, i would say, their language in public. the people who signed that letter against her, it s led by seth molten who claims behind the scenes there is a sense that there s more opposition to her, but he s also not necessarily broadly liked, and a lot of the signers on that letter are white men, joe, and that s simply not the message the democrats took away from the midterms. yeah, and we ll talk to you next hour about whether this is always a fait accompli and those members who said they wouldn t support nancy pelosi, if the last week has been to figure out a way to make nancy pelosi
first female to regain the gavel. ed: there is a lot to unpack there start with the diversity question. conservatives have long criticized pelosi and other leaders for playing identity politics. i wonder when a democrat like seth molten said we need more women including women of color in congressional leadership. is that game of identity politics sort of boomeranging on the democratic leadership now. potentially that s going to be nancy pelosi has to deal with it this wrangling that she is already trying to do to get the speaker s gavel any indication what this next congress is going to look like she is in a lot of trouble. one thing that is really interesting, remember what we seen with the house freedom caucus and the difficulty of speaker ryan trying to keep republicans in line. nancy pelosi is going to have the same problem with the progressive caucus and estimates show they will have around 90 members this next congress. that is a very big voting block. for nancy pelosi try to e
stay with me. i want to bring in the congressional reporter for the washington post and our political analyst, ann mark preston, also senior political analyst. manu just mentioned marcia fudge and the name keeps coming up as a real challenger to pelosi. the ohio congresswoman spoke to cnn today pretty extensively. are you surprised that this anti-pelosi movement hasn t gone away? i mean, there s clearly a lot of people who really resent her. right. i mean, it s not surprising given that this has started with seth molten as the leader. also, a lot of the people that were campaigning to get the congress in this last election cycle did so promising to not vote for pelosi or they were wishy-washy on her or didn t want to bring it up because nobody was quite sure how she played out. as it turns out, she helped orchestrate a winning strategy for the democrats to win the majority back but she s been a