CHUCK TODD: Tim Ryan, has some of this criticism of Nancy Pelosi been too harsh and too unfair?
REP. TIM RYAN: Well, what’s been unfair is that it’s not necessarily her fault. They spent, I would say, hundreds of millions of dollars against her. And as I said during the campaign, I’ve got enormous respect for Nancy Pelosi, I love Nancy Pelosi, she’s helped me throughout my career and she was a tremendous speaker. We’re talking about health care for everybody today because of the work that she has done.
So this is completely unfair. But the reality is the reality is that the fact that we have to go into 2018 with a leader who has been damaged. And the caucus, at the end of the day, has to make this decision. But let’s make no mistake about it. This is not about us having a family fight publicly. We’re going to have this discussion.
But the reality of it is, and why I get so worked up about things like this, is because if we’re not in power, Chuck, we can’t help anybody. This isn’t just a fight to have a fight. If Democrats aren’t in, we talk about the Republicans taking 25 million people’s health care away from them. But if the Democrats are in, we can talk about how we’re going to help them with their wages, their jobs, their economic security, their pensions, reducing their healthcare bill and their energy bills, and putting money in their pocket.
This is not just a fight that we just want to have. We’ve got to have these discussions because we owe it to our constituents. We owe it to the American people to put us in a position to be able to fight for them. Right now, we don’t control any of the levers of government as Senator Sanders said earlier. So we’ve got to win these elections and put ourselves in a good position to do it.