“We’re not doing short-term action, because if we do short-term action, they’re not going to do anything else,” she said of Republicans Friday afternoon during an interview in her office, after negotiators blew past their own deadline without a deal. “That’s it — like a sucker punch, you know — ‘Let us just do this little bit,’ and then you know what? We’ll never see them again.”…

Ms. Pelosi’s strategy carries substantial political risk and real collateral damage, at least in the short term. In holding out for a sweeping relief package, Democrats have swatted away Republican pleas to pass weeklong extensions of the expired $600-per-week in extra federal jobless pay that millions of Americans have relied upon, drawing Republican charges of obstruction…

“Up and until now, she has rationally assumed there was some self-interest on the part of Trump that would lead to a deal,” said former Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who joined Ms. Pelosi that day at the White House in 2008. “If, in fact, that turns out not to be the case, you have a whole new ballgame to think about.”