Briahna Joy Gray, former press secretary for the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said Wednesday that progressives in the House have “actual power” to force a floor vote on Medicare for All, including by potentially refusing to back another term for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Gray, who will appear in a #ForcetheVote virtual town hall event Wednesday evening, explained during an interview on Hill.TV’s “Rising” said that a vote on a Medicare for All plan may be more likely than it has been in recent years amid resistance from Pelosi and other moderate Democrats.
“This isn’t a question of how many people can we convince to get on board with this,” Gray said. “Right now, today, a very small number of progressives have the power to choose not to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker and, in doing so, make it so that Nancy Pelosi, a woman who has been really held up by the left as an obstacle to a lot of the substantive goals, policy goals that it has, can be no longer in that position of power.”
Gray added that another option for progressives in the House could be to commit to voting for Pelosi for another term as Speaker “under certain conditions.”
“Principally, that she bring Medicare for All to a floor vote so that we can have a lengthy discussion in the middle of a global pandemic about the failures of our employer-based healthcare system,” the co-host of the Bad Faith podcast and contributing editor for Current Affairs magazine added.
The House is set to vote on the Speaker for the next Congress on Sunday.
Watch part of Gray’s interview above.
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