Jeffries called a Republican's cross-party endorsement 'partisan hack' in September, weighs 'next steps' for his own.

…(cont) It did not make it to November without complication. By late October, Haley Stevens was already drawing fire for warning she might sabotage the midterms to stop a progressive primary opponent she couldn't beat outright. Days later she made the warning literal: she endorsed Mike Rogers, the Michigan Democratic Party removed her from its ranks, Donald Trump invited her to switch parties on the spot, and a Democratic strategist compared her, on the record, to a used condom — all filed in an earlier edition, all still true today.

What's new is the paperwork. Jeffries told reporters the caucus will have a "discussion" about "next steps" for Stevens — the phrase a party reaches for when "discipline" sounds too much like the thing it is. The crossing is identical. Only the direction of the word has changed.

Down the hall, the money didn't wait for the discussion. Abdul El-Sayed's campaign says it took in $1.2 million in four hours, by the Hill's count; the Guardian puts the same windfall at $2.4 million, describing a haul that arrived Sunday.

"Partisan hack" is survived by "next steps," a vaguer heir with none of the bite and all of the discretion. It is preceded in death by consistency, which never filed the paperwork to begin with — penny-ante hogwash dressed up as principle, applied in one direction only.

In lieu of flowers, the caucus might try applying the same word to the same act twice in a row, regardless of which member commits it — just once, before the next cross-party endorsement, so the dictionary doesn't need updating every two months.