By • Newsweek
You wouldn’t know it from the way she’s being covered in most of the Washington media but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a woman with a lot of problems. Instead of in-depth coverage of the ideological divisions in her caucus and the political challenges to her leadership, she gets stuff like this, from Politico:
“Using strategies she’s honed over decades, the speaker has managed to keep a sprawling freshman class in line — and on her side — despite breaking with them on issues ranging from impeachment to the ‘Green New Deal.’”
What Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan wouldn’t have done for that kind of coverage when they were in charge! When they were in charge, the dissenters drove the narrative. Now that the Queen Bee of Capitol Hill is back in charge, things have turned on their head.
The reason for this is simple according to Rich Galen, a former top communications aide to House Speaker Newt Gingrich and a well-respected commentator.
“The advantage – the GREAT advantage – that Pelosi has, which Newt nor any following GOP Speaker has had is the adoration of the national press corps. They REALLY want her to succeed. Nevertheless, Pelosi has some of the same issues to deal with that Newt did: Mainly a huge freshman class that think they invented Democracy,” Galen says.
He doesn’t think she’s lost control of her conference – not yet anyway – but the she’s not breaking records for party unity. She’s already lost the vote on two motions to recommit – a parliamentary device often used to slow the progress of legislation through the House – and continues to show signs of fatigue, something that has some speculating quietly and anonymously that the job may be too much for her.
That’s a reach. Even at 78 Pelosi still shows she has command of the political skills learned at her father’s knee – he was once mayor of Baltimore, Maryland – and from various members of the Burton family whose accomplishments in California Democratic politics are still considered legendary.
Still, Pelosi did herself no favors when late last week she suggested impeachment of President Donald Trump might be off the table. By suggesting it wasn’t worth the effort she gave the proverbial “finger” to Democratic donors and activists from coast to coast who worked so hard in 2018 to win back control of the U.S. House for the Democrats precisely for the purpose of driving Trump from office.
Some may say that it’s not such a big deal. The activist wing of the party is likely harder to mollify, even as Pelosi and others work to keep them in line. Consider what the reaction would have been among the GOP faithful if, after using the repeal of Obamacare as the whip hand to drive voters to the polls in 2010 to win back control of the House for John Boehner and the Republicans, the measure was never even brought to the floor for a vote.
“Impeaching Trump is probably the one substantive matter that is non-negotiable for House Democrats,” says Mike Franc, a former GOP congressional leadership staffer and now head of the Washington office of the Hoover Institution.
“Pelosi can get away with dismissing the New Green Deal (because it is purely aspirational and agenda-setting rather than substantive) but not this. My guess is that she suffers for this sin, mostly with the Democratic base.”
For Pelosi, now and moving forward, the tail is wagging the dog. She may be the political leader and the nation’s most important elected Democrat, but she has little to say, at least so far, about what the party’s agenda will be. She faces, Franc says, “a substantive revolution” in the way policy is made on Capitol Hill, akin to what happened after the Democratic landslide of 1974 and the 1994 Republican Contract with America.
The large class of Democratic freshmen, which includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes and her fellow traveling socialists, do not seem, Franc says, committed to a set of real and substantive policy changes so much as they are interested in “using their platforms as Members to advance a new and socialistic state of mind in traditional and social media.”
If that gives AOC and others control of the agenda, what does that mean for the suburban seats Democrats took from the GOP in 2018 because voters either thought the Republican agenda was too extreme or because they wanted to send a message to Trump?
Extremism on the left, which is what AOC and her fellow Green New Dealers are offering, is no better in these districts than extremism on the right. These moderate members could get lost in the undertow if Pelosi can’t stop the drift to the left, but she can’t stay in power if she does.
Nancy Pelosi has a lot of problems – and they’re just beginning to surface.
By Jack Crowe • National Review
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced Tuesday that the Senate will vote on the Green New Deal resolution introduced last week by a coalition of progressive lawmakers vowing to eliminate all greenhouse-gas emissions within ten years, while simultaneously creating millions of jobs in a government-subsidized green-energy sector.
“I’ve noted with great interest the Green New Deal. And we’re going to be voting on that in the Senate. Give everybody an opportunity to go on record and see how they feel about the Green New Deal,” McConnell said with a sly smile during a Tuesday press conference.
The resolution, which was introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass.) on Friday, provides a sweeping list of climate-change- and social-justice-related measures including the refurbishing of every structure in the country with renewable-energy technology and the creation of millions of federally funded jobs in the green-energy sector. Continue reading
I am not generally a big fan of lame-duck sessions because such a large number of soon-to-be former senators and congressmen are voting on their way out the door. But Congress must do something about a looming multi-employer pension plan disaster or we could see very difficult economic times ahead.
Multi-employer pension plans have more than $600 billion of unfunded liabilities and are dangerously close to failing. Once these endangered plans fail, others will not be far behind. Additionally, state and local governments have about $6 trillion in unfunded pension promises. If these potential failures come to fruition, it could be a disaster far worse than the 2008 housing bust.
The White House understands the risks and has met with the chief players on Capitol Hill, encouraging them to work together to find a lasting solution. Continue reading
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made history as the youngest woman ever to be elected to the House of Representatives at 29, and she’s being hailed by the media as the de facto leader of the incoming House Democrat Freshman class. While her fans are excited at the prospect of a millennial socialist promising free stuff, what has gone glaringly overlooked is her striking lack of understanding of how the government, where she’s been elected to serve, actually works.
Someone get this woman a civics book.
In a painful-to-watch video Ocasio-Cortez called the three branches of government the three “chambers,” not the first time she’s been confused. In her world the three chambers of government are the House, Senate, and the Presidency.
I decided to ask my fifth grader if she knew what the three “chambers” of government were. Her response: “Do you mean branches?” Why yes, yes I do. And then she proceeded to name the legislative, executive and judicial branches. Continue reading
By Christopher Jacobs • The Federalist
Now they tell us! A Gallup poll, conducted last month to coincide with the midterm elections and released on Tuesday, demonstrated what I had posited for much of the summer: Individuals care more about rising health insurance premiums than coverage of pre-existing condition protections.
Of course, liberal think tanks and the media had no interest in promoting this narrative, posing misleading and one-sided polling questions to conclude that individuals liked Obamacare’s pre-existing condition “protections,” without simultaneously asking whether people liked the cost of those provisions.
Overwhelming Concern about Premiums
The Gallup survey asked the public whether it viewed each of four scenarios as a major concern for them. Among those: “Your health insurance plan will require you to pay higher premiums or a greater portion of medical expenses,” and “you or someone in your immediate family will be denied health insurance coverage for a pre-existing medical condition.” Continue reading
By Senator Ben Sasse (NE) • Wall Street Journal
Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of hating women, hating children, hating clean air, wanting dirty water. He’s been declared an existential threat to the nation. Alumni of Yale Law School, incensed that faculty members at his alma mater praised his selection, wrote a public letter to the school saying: “People will die if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed.”
It’s predictable now that every Supreme Court confirmation hearing will be a politicized circus. This is because Americans have accepted a bad new theory about how the three branches of government should work—and in particular about how the judiciary operates. Continue reading
By Conor Friedersdorf • The Atlantic
This is the story of John Brennan’s CIA spying on Congress and getting away with it.
Last March, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the CIA of spying on the Senate intelligence committee as it labored to finalize its report on the torture of prisoners. “I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution,” she said. “I have asked for an apology and a recognition that this CIA search of computers used by its oversight committee was inappropriate. I have received neither.”
CIA Director John Brennan denied the charge. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we’d do.” It would be months before his denial was publicly proved false. “An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program,” The New York Times reported. “The report by the agency’s inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers read the emails of the Senate investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information.”
A statement issued Thursday morning by a C.I.A. spokesman said that Continue reading
By Cameron Cawthorne • Washington Free Beacon
Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) on Wednesday praised President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee for having “all the right qualities.” But he stopped short of giving a full endorsement, saying he will listen to his constituents about their opinions of the nominee.
Manchin appeared on West Virginia MetroNews, a statewide radio station, where host Hoppy Kercheval asked him whether he was going to to support nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
“Do you have a lean today?” Kercheval asked.
“No, I don’t have a lean. I think he seems to be a very fine person of high Continue reading
By • Newsweek
By now a lot of professional Democrats—campaign consultants, party leaders and the like—are probably wishing they’d never heard the term “big, blue wave.” It set expectations so high for the next election that almost any outcome short of a total rout of the GOP will go into the record books as a disappointment.
If the parties fight to a draw—GOP ends up in control on both sides of the Capitol with a diminished majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and better numbers than it currently enjoys in the U.S. Senate, and the number of Republican governors and GOP-led state legislative chambers does not change appreciably (which is how things would probably turn out were the election held today)—then the Democrats will have been seen to have suffered a major defeat.
Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and other leading Democrats had hoped to nationalize the election by making it a referendum on President Donald Trump’s first two years in office. They may still get the opportunity to do that—Trump, as the events on the U.S. border with Mexico reminds us, is often his own worst enemy. Nevertheless, most of the news is good as the economy has roared back to life and Continue reading
By Heather Wilhelm • National Review
After a week of political chaos, endless dispatches of depressing news from the border, and widespread evidence of years of government incompetence, I have a proposal certain to unite citizens of all political stripes. Here it is: Let’s fire every single politician in Washington, D.C.
Admit it, friends: Deep down, you love this plan. In an ideal world, you might want to fire every single politician in Washington, D.C., right away — I personally have a few honorable and notable exceptions in mind, but it’s probably best to keep everyone on their toes — but we all know that’s not realistic. Fortunately, there’s an alternative idea that is at least somewhat realistic, despite naysayers from both parties: term limits.
We already have term limits for the president, of course, which I hope you find marvelous no matter who is in office. But what about Congress, that multi-headed beast with a 17 percent approval rating and an impressive penchant for getting almost nothing meaningful or important done? Continue reading
Government shutdowns are petty, but they're rarely as detrimental as pundits and politicians fear.
By • US News
For various reasons it’s become popular to threaten to shut down the federal government. Whether that goes back to the Reagan years when Democrats would run out the clock on the fiscal year to try and force spending increases the White House didn’t want or the years in which the tea party Republicans decided the American people would stand with them in closing the government to stop Obama initiatives, there are people in government who believe hanging the “Closed” sign on the Washington Monument is a political winner.
It isn’t. It makes everyone involved look petty and small. The American political process is by design deliberative. The founders designed a system that forced compromise between regions of the country, between politicians of dissimilar views and of competing interests at all levels of government. Pushing the government to close because there’s no money to run it is akin to taking one’s ball home from the playground because the other kids will not agree to play the game by the rules you want.
All that said, the government never really shuts down. The president is allowed far too much discretion to declare services essential, meaning all kinds of people get to stay on the job without pay, working away as usual processing government checks, funding grants, administering programs and doing all kinds of things that, while they might be the purpose for which people get up and go to work each day, would hardly be classified as “essential” in any kind of real emergency. Continue reading
By Mattie Duppler • National Review
There is now discussion of reviving earmarks: the practice, banned in the House of Representatives since 2010, of inserting funding for lawmakers’ pet projects into bills to secure their support. Earmarks epitomize the obsequious logrolling that makes Washington the most hated place in the nation (on earth?) — and their absence has proved crucial to the Republican effort to restrain government spending, one of the great untold success stories of the past eight years. That Republicans would even suggest earmarks should be restored reveals at best an unsophisticated grasp of spending mechanisms, and at worst a complete abandonment of the victories the party has scored in restraining Washington’s spendthrift instincts.
It is often forgotten what two years of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate augured for the size of government. Federal spending, which had generally held steady around 20 percent of GDP in the modern era, was projected to rise to more than 26 percent of GDP by 2020 after just two years of Democratic control.
House Republicans, driven to power by Americans who recoiled at this looming threat of unstable government growth, promised to turn this around. And they did: Through dogged spending cuts in bimonthly continuing resolutions, and then with the imposition of budget caps in the Budget Control Act in August of 2011, Republicans erased the spending legacy of the Pelosi- and Reid-led Congress, which only a few years earlier had been eyed wearily as the new normal. Today federal spending stands at about 21 percent of GDP.
By Michael Barone • National Review
The Republicans have passed their tax bill, without a single Democratic vote, despite low to dismal poll ratings. It’s reminiscent of the passage by Democrats, without a single Republican vote, of Obamacare in March 2010.
Democrats lost 63 seats and their House majority that fall. Republicans hope they won’t follow suit. They argue, accurately, that their bill will lower taxes for almost all taxpayers and that it will stimulate economic growth, which already has risen above the growth in the Obama years.
The effects of Obamacare, in contrast, were harder to model, and some backers’ claims — if you like your insurance, you can keep it — soon were revealed as glaringly untrue. We’ll see whether the greater simplicity of the tax bill makes a difference in political fallout.
One thing in common between the two bills is that voters have seemed congenitally skeptical about the claims of the party in power. Obamacare continued to be unpopular until, presto, Donald Trump took office and Republicans threatened repeal.
By Peter Roff • USNews
Serious people are starting to wonder if tax reform can pass, largely because they’re only talking to people inside Washington.
Instead they should talk to the American people. Most of them are hungry for it. A quarter of small business owners surveyed by CNBC/Survey Money said taxes were the most critical issue they currently face. Overall it’s their No. 1 concern and, since small business is the engine of growth in the U.S. economy, that’s an important consideration.
Things have improved since Election Day 2016, but the economy is still not growing like it needs to if we are to have hope of ever paying down the national debt, now equal to about one year’s U.S. GDP. Continue reading
By Matthew RJ Brodsky • National Review Online
Republicans have more or less coalesced into two primary political camps regarding the nuclear deal with Iran. Call them “the Fixers” and “the Walkers.” Both see the agreement as fundamentally flawed and would never have offered what the Obama administration gave away. They recognize the deal as both technically and structurally deficient, setting Iran on a patient path toward nuclear weapons while tying America’s hands until the Iranian nuclear program is industrial in scale, lethal in scope, and too costly and difficult to destroy from the outside.
While sharing the same objective vis-à-vis Iran, the two camps differ on the strategy for preventing such an outcome and thus favor divergent paths to reestablish American leverage. Their conflicting aims will become all the more pronounced once President Trump withholds his certification of the deal as a first step down one path or the other. Continue reading