House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had never been so powerful as when she delivered President Trump his most crippling political blow with the culmination of the government shutdown in January of last year. Democrats had retaken the House in a grueling midterm election for Republicans, and Pelosi had effectively kneecapped whatever remained of Trump's dreams of passing any real immigration reform, let alone the wall, before the 2020 election.

A little over a year later, Pelosi decided to play partisan poker with the coronavirus crisis, attempting to blow up immediate cash relief negotiations in the hopes of passing her own Christmas list, including but not limited to:



A bailout for Postal Service debt

A mandate that airlines spend on carbon offsets

Required same-day voter registration

A federal $15 minimum wage

$35 million for the Kennedy Center

After invoking the ire of everyone from the entire Republican Party to the architect of the Green New Deal himself, Pelosi buckled and is now suddenly open to passing some iteration of the bill agreed upon by the Senate and the White House.

All of the humiliation raises the question, how did one of the most ruthlessly effective Democrats in the country turn into a feckless avatar of woke virtue-signaling? Easy: she succumbed to "the Squad."

With Pelosi's restoration to the speakership came the introduction of the absolute dregs of the Democratic Party. On the day she was inaugurated to Congress, Rashida Tlaib boasted that she would "impeach the motherf---er." That same day, Ilhan Omar took a selfie with Linda Sarsour, the Women's March chairwoman ousted from the group for her flagrant anti-Semitism, and prior to even joining Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had already stormed Pelosi's office protesting for the creation of a committee to pass the Green New Deal.

And thus, "the Squad" was born. Pelosi attempted to write them off, lampooning Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Dream" and claiming that "the Squad" was "like, five people." But whether she planned to or not, she handed the reins to them, dooming her speakership and the Democratic Party as a whole.

Critics may point to Pelosi's failure to stop Ocasio-Cortez bamboozling every Democratic front-runner except for eventual nominee Joe Biden from endorsing the Green New Deal as the tipping point, but as the bill's spectacular failure proved, that actually backfired on the potency of "the Squad." The true point of no return was Pelosi's dangerous tolerance for the flagrant anti-Semitism of Omar and Tlaib.

Omar, who already entered Congress with a long history of disastrous remarks about Jews, incited bipartisan outrage when she claimed AIPAC bought off Congress and insinuated American Jews had dual loyalty to Israel. After Omar doubled down on her remarks, both Democrats and Republicans made it clear that she ought to be condemned. What began as a congressional resolution denouncing anti-Semitism soon morphed into an "All Lives Matter" sham of a moral stand, culminating in a generic anti-hate resolution listing Jews seventh on a list of minorities, coming after "Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other people of color."

So Pelosi gave Omar a pass, the entire "Squad" took it. After the resolution, Omar took a victory lap, publicly celebrating that it was "the first time we have voted on a resolution condemning anti-Muslim bigotry in our nation's history," ignoring the fact that it was her anti-Semitism that instigated the resolution in the first place.

And thus, "the Squad" was emboldened: Tlaib renewed her calls for impeaching Trump even after Pelosi shut them down, Omar referred to 9/11 as "some people did something" while fundraising for the Hamas-linked CAIR, and Ocasio-Cortez openly waged war against party leadership, culminating in her chief of staff publicly accusing fellow Democrats of "enabl[ing] a racist system."

A year later, Pelosi has failed to achieve any meaningful legislation for her party. She impeached Trump only for him to reach his highest approval ratings ever, and now she's thoroughly debased herself during a national crisis. That's what happens when you hand control to thugs who can be described as sophomoric neophytes at best and actively anti-American actors at worst. Pelosi let herself become a political hostage, and she decided to play politics with the wrong bill.