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Susan Sarandon Calls for Nancy Pelosi to be Unseated in Congress — and It Doesn’t Go Very Well

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Actress and activist Susan Sarandon hit back at 2020 Democrat Pete Buttigieg for claiming that front-runner Bernie Sanders could undermine down-ballot Democrats if he is the party’s nominee in November.

After Sanders’s overwhelming win in the Nevada caucuses Saturday night, Buttigieg took aim at the Vermont senator in a speech to supporters, slamming his campaign as an “inflexible, ideological revolution.” The former South Bend, Indiana, mayor portrayed Sanders as the opposite of a unity candidate and claimed a ticket with him at the top could weaken the party as a whole.

According to Buttigieg, Sanders would hurt down-ballot Democrats and could cost the party its majority in the House of Representatives.

“I believe the only way to truly deliver any of the progressive changes we care about is to be a nominee who actually gives a damn about the effect you are having, from the top of the ticket, on those crucial, frontline House and Senate Democrats running to win, who we need to win, to make sure our agenda is more than just words on a page,” he said.

“Senator Sanders is ignoring, dismissing, or even attacking the very Democrats we absolutely must send to Capitol Hill in order to keep Nancy Pelosi as speaker, in order to support judges who respect privacy and democracy, and in order to send Mitch McConnell into retirement,” he added.

In addition to making the remarks before his Nevada crowd, Buttigieg also tweeted out excerpts from his speech. Sarandon, who has endorsed Sanders for the second election cycle in a row, took issue with his claim that nominating her candidate of choice would come at the cost of losing leaders in the party.

“We’re not looking to keep Pelosi because there’s a progressive running against her who supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal among other things,” she fired back along with a link to the website of democratic socialist Shahid Buttar, who has launched a primary challenge against Pelosi for her House seat.

Sanders’s clear front-runner status has put the Democratic Party at a crossroads with some beginning to normalize the Vermont senator and his ideology while others sound the alarm and call for a more centrist nominee. After wins in New Hampshire and Nevada and a solid showing in Iowa, Sanders will head into Super Tuesday, when more than a third of delegates will be up for grabs, in a strong position.

Twitter didn’t take too well to Sarandon’s tweet:

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