Pelosi lit into Obama’s budget director before meeting with the president. | Niko Duffy/POLITICO Pelosi's back at the table

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is back at the bargaining table — but it’s not yet clear whether she’s willing to make a deal.

Burned by President Barack Obama’s decision to keep her out of negotiations on last year’s tax deal and this spring’s budget bill, sources close to the California Democrat say she is torn between playing deal-maker on a debt limit increase and fully protecting the priorities of Democrats’ liberal base.


On Thursday, in advance of a Friday meeting with the president at the White House, Pelosi lit into Obama’s budget director, Jack Lew, in what is becoming a habit of sending sharp messages through his top aides. Pelosi sought to impress on Lew — and no doubt his bosses at the White House — that House Democrats expect to be consulted more now than on past deals and that the president can’t expect to win passage of a debt limit package without support from House Democrats.

“Don’t insult us,” she said as Lew tried to explain why House Democrats were cut out of the budget bill discussion earlier this year, according to one source who was in the room. “You guys don’t know how to count.” It was a replay of a similar jab Pelosi took at White House economic adviser Gene Sperling during a similar meeting before the budget bill deal was reached.

But while House Democrats’ nerves remain raw, they’re in a much better position now to flex their muscles. And Pelosi, once treated as irrelevant by Obama and Republican leaders in Congress, might just have the necessary clout to put a debt limit deal over the finish line.

It’s not even necessary for Pelosi to vote for a debt deal, it may be enough for her to simply release members of her caucus to make sure it goes through.

Last time around, it was all Boehner and Reid. But Pelosi and her lieutenants have had a front-row seat for these debt limit talks. She appointed Reps. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to represent House Democrats on a blue-ribbon deficit-reduction panel headed by Vice President Joe Biden, Pelosi’s getting private face time with the president, and she has been invited to group meetings with other congressional leaders.

But being in the room is becoming a bit of a double-edged sword for a leader who will anger a portion of her base with any deal she cuts.

“She’s not averse to a deal,” said one of her closest allies in the House. But, that lawmaker said Pelosi’s first priority has been to defend Democratic values — to push back against Medicare and Social Security cuts envisioned by some of the negotiators.

Another source described her as more evenly torn between the competing instincts to keep House Democrats in the legislative game by being part of the solution to the debt limit dilemma and using any leverage she has to prevent the erosion of programs that Democrats hold dear. If she’s successful, Pelosi will be able to pull the debate in her direction, winning concessions for Democrats, and help broker a deal. But that’s a tall order.

“They need votes,” Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) said of Pelosi’s new seat at the negotiating table. “The president’s going to need to get to 218. He’s going to have to cobble together the votes. It’s going to take cobbling together all levels of coalitions.”

For many Democrats, the term “deal” is becoming a synonym for mugging. Reports of White House interest in cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in order to get Republicans to agree to tax hikes — or other revenue-generating policies — brought a furious response from Democrats and left-leaning interest groups Thursday.

Pelosi has said publicly and privately that she won’t agree to any cuts in benefits, and that is becoming a mantra for House Democrats.

At a special meeting of House Democrats on Friday, Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said, “We will defend Medicare and go our own way from the White House if we have to,” according to a Democratic source.

Democratic Rep. Kathy Hochul, who recently won a special election in a competitive upstate New York district, told colleagues at a closed-door meeting Thursday that Republican efforts to overhaul Medicare helped push her to victory and that they shouldn’t give up the political issue by agreeing to cut the health insurance program for the elderly.

Obama has said that he wants an agreement that would provide enough room under the debt cap to make sure that the issue doesn’t arise again before the 2012 election and favors a go-for-broke $4 trillion package of spending cuts and increases in revenue that would likely require a major overhaul of the tax code at a later date.

It’s not clear whether Obama and congressional leaders can put together a bill that will win passage in the House and Senate, even though administration officials continue to warn that if no deal is done by Aug. 2, a deep economic recession could be triggered by a default on the nation’s debt.

Two Republican leaders, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia and Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, walked away from the Biden talks when they moved beyond the realm of spending cuts to tax increases. One senior House Republican told POLITICO that GOP leaders don’t yet have an idea of how many of their own troops will vote “no” on any increase of the debt limit.

That leaves open the question of how many votes Obama might need to get from Pelosi’s ranks — and whether that number will be more than the set of natural Democratic deal-makers, led by Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who are likely to back a bipartisan compromise.

One senior Democratic aide noted that despite protestations from other officials that Pelosi can be difficult to work with, “it was Cantor and Kyl that walked away.”

Now, Pelosi must decide what she wants to do with her seat at the table.