There is no greater mystery in politics right now than the continued employment of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chairperson of the Democratic National Committee. I can almost understand the continued employment of obvious anagram Reince Priebus on the other side; he's an amiable lapdog who will sit up, roll over, and yip obvious nonsense on command. And, besides, he's the emptiest suit in American politics, there not being an institutional Republican party worthy of the name any more. He can do very little harm and nobody listens to him anyway.

But DWS is quite another matter. Despite her constant presence in the nation's Green Rooms, I'm damned if I can see what she's accomplished as a national chairperson. (Priebus has accomplished Staying The Hell Out Of The Way, which is something.) She's presided over a catastrophic midterm election cycle that produced the worst Congress in the recent history of the Republic. And now, on at least two occasions in the past year, DWS has gone out of her way to break with the president on important foreign policy initiatives. First, she took a dive on the opening the president made with Cuba, because she is from Florida and very frightened. And now, it appears she has decided to play shenanigans with the Iran nuclear deal, both as a congresscritter and, worse, as DNC chairperson.

The deal has divided the party, to the point where the chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, has not made her position clear as yet. As the President heads into a veto battle with Congress on the issue, he needs every Democratic vote he can muster. But Jonathan Martin of The New York Times noted he couldn't get help from the party he leads. "The Obama-controlled DNC could not pass a resolution this weekend expressing support for President Obama's Iran deal," said Martin. "It's a bit of an embarrassment for the administration, seeing as how it's his party. He appointed Debbie Wasserman Schultz."

This is not the first time that she has put her parochial interests ahead of her party. Back in 2008, when she was running the DNC's "Red to Blue" project, she famously abstained from supporting three Democratic challengers to incumbent Republicans – the Diaz-Balart brothers and the ever-insufferable Ileana Ros-Lehtinen –friend to terrorists who blow up passenger jets – because she was friends with all three of them.

A day later, Wasserman Schultz and Ros-Lehtinen lavished compliments on each other at a Washington luncheon with Miami-Dade commissioners. "I can't say enough good things about Ileana Ros-Lehtinen; she has been my friend since I was first elected to office," Wasserman Schultz said, noting she relied on Ros-Lehtinen's advice to help balance the demands of elected office and motherhood.

Here's how DWS' good pal Ileana got launched in politics.

In 1989, securing Bosch's release was one of the cornerstones of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's congressional campaign in Miami. She praised Bosch as a hero and a patriot on exile radio stations and raised $265,000 for his legal defense fund. Her campaign manager was a political neophyte, but one who had the ear of the White House. His name was Jeb Bush.

And this is not to mention the long history that DWS has with the Fanjul family, the premier sugar dynasty in Florida, or her longtime support from the private prison industry. I mean, seriously, what has this person done to benefit the Democratic party since she took the job in 2011?

So there's a history there. But this latest fiasco is different by an order of magnitude. If DWS wants to oppose the Iran deal in her capacity as an otherwise insignificant member of the House minority, that's fine with me. But if, as it appears, as national chairman of the president's party, she actively campaigned against a measure designed to show the support of the president's party for a monumentally important White House policy initiative, then she should have been fired from that post yesterday. If Jonathan Martin is right, and Jennifer Granholm really is waiting in the wings, then I may throw a parade.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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