White House budget director Mick Mulvaney on Sunday endorsed the idea of making Democrats vote for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) before the November midterm elections.

At a conference sponsored by the Weekly Standard, Fox News host Bret Baier asked Mulvaney what he thought of the idea of making Speaker Paul Ryan step down and make Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy the next speaker before the midterm election.

Mulvaney said:

I’ve talked with Kevin about this privately but not as much publicly. Wouldn’t it be great to force a Democrat running in a tight race to have to put up or shut up about voting for Nancy Pelosi eight weeks before an election? That’s a really, really good vote for us to force if we can figure out how to do it.

House Minority Leader Pelosi suggested in May that she intends to serve as the next Speaker if Democrats take the House after the November elections.

“We will win. I will run for speaker. I feel confident about it. And my members do, too,” Pelosi said.

Senior House Democrats, however, told reporters in March that if Democrats took the House in November, then Pelosi would not necessarily become Speaker.

Mike Allen of Axios wrote:

Top Democrats tell me that if they take back the House in November, a restoration of Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no longer guaranteed. In fact, some well-wired House Democrats predict she will be forced aside after the election and replaced by a younger, less divisive Dem.

Even in her home state of California, the San Jose Mercury News found that “only two” of the 34 Democrats running for Congress in competitive Republican-held seats in California publicly committed to voting for Pelosi as the next Speaker.

A February poll found that only 29 percent of Americans approve of Pelosi.

Pelosi suggested that if Democrats were to win the House, they will push to raise taxes, pass gun control legislation, and push for amnesty for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) illegal aliens.

“Certainly that will be among the things we will do right away,” the California Democrat said.