The grip on the speaker’s gavel has never been more tenuous for Nancy Pelosi.

We all know what she assumed would happen. She thought that she would have a commanding majority in the House, building on her 2018 wins, in order to either make life miserable for President Trump or life easier for a President Biden.

However, Nancy Pelosi proved to be a less-than-accurate Nostradamus, as her House majority shrunk to only ten seats (if all the current totals in the very tight elections survive any recounts or court challenges, plus one outstanding race in New York that still won’t declare a winner), and possibly only nine if Representative Marcia Fudge of Ohio is confirmed as HUD Secretary in a Biden cabinet (though her vote totals indicate that the seat is a solidly blue one).

And this has Pelosi in a bit of a panic. You see, even though she ran unopposed for Speaker of the House among the Democrats (likely mostly because she implied that it would be her last term – Pelosi is 80 years old, after all) and won the support of her caucus when it was just the Democrats, there could be some defections when it comes time for a full House vote. Especially among the Squad and their new social justice Squaddie groupies in the House, plus some outspoken moderate Democrats like Elissa Slotkin. After all, when she was elected as Speaker after the 2018 election, 15 Democrats did NOT vote for her. She had the votes to spare then. She doesn’t have 15 votes to spare now, with a majority of only ten seats. And since voting must be done in-person (proxy voting due to COVID will not be allowed, per the Democrats’ own rules unless things get changed for the next Congressional session – which will be decided on AFTER the vote for Speaker), Pelosi is running on quite a thin margin between angry moderates who see her intransigence as the reason they got smacked around in the 2020 election, and angry radicals who want MOAR SOCIALISM that Pelosi won’t give them in order to hold her caucus together and not make problems right out of the gate for Biden.

And if Pelosi loses enough of her base, either due to “no” or “present” votes, or COVID quarantines with no proxy vote allowed, what happens then?

Hello Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). HA HA HA HA HA!

Wouldn’t that just be a super-ironic kick in the rear end to the Democrats? After all of Nancy Pelosi’s machinations to make sure that Biden won the election, even holding up COVID relief and walking away with a smaller deal than she was originally offered…

… to then see her majority get whittled down to a bare margin, and then if she actually ended up NOT getting enough votes to remain as Speaker of the House, and an incoming Biden administration was forced to deal with a Republican Speaker and a fractured Democrat caucus in the House?

There would not be enough popcorn in the world to supply all of us who would enjoy that spectacle, especially during a State of the Union address.

The vote for Speaker goes down on January 3rd. The clock is ticking on Democrats getting back into town, not having COVID, and then voting for Pelosi. Two days later, it will be election runoff day in Georgia. Brace yourselves, because 2021 is going to come in with quite a bang, regardless of the outcome. Even if Pelosi hangs on to the Speaker’s gavel, her position is so incredibly weak that she is going to have her hands full holding the Democrats together in the House. Which means she’s not going to be much help to old Grandpa Joe and his rambling plans. Oh darn.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click