Category Archives: Pelosi
Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been, In a Russian Golden Shower?
The right leaning New York Post, Townhall, and left leaning Nation editor and publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel, writing in the Washington Post, have something in common. They all compare the senate Democrats’ obsession with Russians to McCarthyism of 50 years ago. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
It’s fitting and proper that a comedian got the ball rolling for the Jeff Sessions act in this Russian circus. Senator Al Franken based a question to Senator Sessions on a bogus story in Buzzfeed about a Russian dossier on Donald Trump. It claims Trump hired prostitutes to pee on a bed Barack and Michelle had slept on in a Russian hotel.
Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?
Franken asked the senator what he would do if there’s any evidence of contact with Russians in the course of the Trump campaign. Sessions replied, “Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.” You can roll the tape here on Politifact.
Then, as night follows day, two meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak surfaced. One was in Sessions’ senate office. The other was a group introduction at the RNC in Cleveland. Senator Sessions says those meetings were in the course of his role as a senator and didn’t involve the Trump campaign.
Senator Claire McCaskill insisted that sort of thing just isn’t done. But her twitter account says otherwise.
Nancy Pelosi House
Nancy Pelosi won 134 votes to Tim Ryan’s 68 to hang on as House Minority Leader. Ryan is taking credit for giving her a scare. But winning 68% of the vote sounds like a landslide to me.
Maybe they should demand that Jill Stein do a recount.
Nancy Pelosi
And maybe Nancy Pelosi should give the Democratic party a scare. Under her leadership they lost 63 House seats in 2010 and 13 more in the 2014 midterms.
Republicans now own “the White House, and the Senate, and the House, and 33 governorships and 68 (of 98) state legislative chambers.”
Obama Trade Secret
Nancy Pelosi led the president’s own party in defeating a key part of his free trade legislation on Friday. The deal would have provided money and training for workers displaced by the Trans Pacific Partnership – Obama Trade.
Republicans Boehner and Ryan are switch hitting for the president on Obama Trade. They want “fast track” authority which would allow him to negotiate in secret with Asian governments. The House would then vote up or down on the final trade deal with no amendments.
The bill itself is so secret congressmen are only allowed to see it in a basement reading room. One page at a time. With no notes leaving the room. Some notes must have left the room because details of the bill are being made public by Wikileaks.
Stupid Voters
The administration whose foreign policy is “don’t do stupid shit” thinks we’re stupid.
Here’s why.
The United States Supreme Court has agreed to decide King v Burwell. The case is about the survival of ObamaCare. The plaintiff says the Affordable Care Act only permits subsidies on state run health care exchanges. The IRS allows subsidies on federal exchanges as well. Without subsidies ObamaCare is no more.
The reason the law was written that way was to create an incentive for states to set up exchanges say law professors Jonathan Adler and Jonathan Turley. Apparently it wasn’t incentive enough because only 16 states set up exchanges.
The administration argument (not surprisingly) is that the law doesn’t mean what it says. The intention of those who wrote it was to offer subsidies on all exchanges. And good intentions are everything.
Enter one more Jonathan, MIT egghead Jonathan Gruber. He’s the architect of the law and he says the plain wording is just a type-o. His intent was indeed for federal exchanges to offer subsidies.
Unfortunately for Gruber a video emerged in which he claimed that if a state doesn’t set up an exchange not only will its citizens not receive subsidies, they, as taxpayers, will have to pay for other people’s subsidies on other state exchanges.
Gruber, wearing his egg on his face, called that a speak-o.
Stupid is as Stupid does
But that’s not all. More videos have surfaced starring Professor Gruber. One of his most memorable lines is that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage”. He says that if voters understood that healthy people would be paying for healthcare for sick people they would oppose the bill, because they’re stupid.
Ron Fournier of National Journal and an ObamaCare supporter now says the law was built on a foundation of lies.
Progressives believe in government by experts. Gruber is an expert. For him, telling the truth would have been nice but he’d rather “have the law than not”. Jonah Goldberg wrote a great book called Liberal Fascism. Gruber fits the bill.
You may be wondering who was the crack investigative reporter who dug up these videos. It was some guy in his basement. He’s an investment adviser named Rich Weinstein. David Weigel has a great story in Bloomberg about him.
Supine Senate
The Supreme Court came to the rescue of the Supine Senate with a 9-0 ruling against President Obama. Unable to get confirmation for three appointees to the NLRB, King Barack simply declared the Senate in recess. He then made recess appointments which don’t require senate approval.
Justice Breyer stated the obvious in the majority opinion. Namely, Congress, as an equal branch of government, “is in session when it says it is”. Constitutional Scholar Jonathan Turley called the ruling a shot across the bow for the president’s go it alone strategy.
Supine Senate
Kimberly Strassel says it came to this because “Congressional Democrats watch supinely as the president treads on their powers.”
West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd —onetime Senate majority leader and fierce defender of congressional power—would have laid down on train tracks to protest Mr. Obama’s recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess.
“Having been supine for years in the face of these encroachments, Congress is stirring”, says Dr. Krauthammer in a column titled Government by Fiat.
The Republican House is preparing a novel approach to acquiring legal standing before the courts to challenge these gross executive usurpations. Nancy Pelosi, reflecting the narrowness of both her partisanship and her vision, dismisses this as a “subterfuge.”
She won’t be saying that on the day Democrats lose the White House. Then, cheered on by a suddenly inflamed media, the Democrats will no doubt express horror at such constitutional overreach.
