House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to be going out of her way not simply to distance herself from but to disparage the more progressive members of her own caucus, recently throwing shade on Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley for their refusal to support recent legislation funding Trump’s detention-concentration camps. Paul Waldman, in his recent Post column, “Why is Nancy Pelosi doing this?,” rightly points out that Pelosi’s antagonism towards these four, and what they represent, seems unnecessary and indeed counter-productive to the goal of enhancing Democratic political power:

Pelosi’s majority depends more on what happens in the presidential race than anything else. In 2016, the correlation between presidential votes and House votes was a near-perfect .97, higher than it had ever been before. That’s the reality of our polarized electorate, where every race is nationalized.

To put it simply, if the Democrat wins in 2020, Democrats will hold their House majority, too. If Trump wins, they might lose it. What Pelosi can do at this point to make that election turn out the way she wants is to marshal every tool available to her to damage Trump.

It’s hard to blame more liberal Democrats for thinking she’s doing less than she could. And whatever you think about impeachment or any particular piece of legislation, at a minimum Pelosi could treat the activist base with a little less contempt.