NYC Letter: Leadership By Pelosi

Countdown 32 days to go

The media continues to spin Monday's failed bailout vote as a Republican debacle. Just for the record the Republicans are the minority party. Meanwhile, that the majority party, the Democrats, couldn't produce a party-line vote on a Democrat-crafted junk bill (H.R. 3997) is just a bemusing detail.

It wasn't just the Demo subalterns (for example here), the Demo House leadership voted against its party's own bill. Five chairs voted NO:

• The perpetually dazed John Conyers (D-MI, 14th), Chairman, House Judiciary Committee

• Collin Peterson (D-MN, 7th), Chairman, House Agriculture Committee

• Bob Filner (D-CA, 51st) Chairman, House Veterans Affairs Committee

• Bennie Thompson (D-MS, 2nd), Chairman, House Homeland Security Committee

• Gene Green (D-TX, 29th), Vice Chairman, Commerce Committee on Energy and Commerce; Acting Chairman, Committee on Standards of Official Conduct

Going into Monday's vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA, 8th) knew she could not, would not, maintain party discipline for a party-line vote on the Demo bailout legislation. Reluctant but willing Republican support would be crucial to passage.

NANCY PELOSI'S $700 BILLION FUCK-YOU
Was It Good For You? It Wasn't So Good For Her.

At 12:21P ET, Ms. Pelosi took the podium in the well of the House just before the bailout vote and disburdened her spleen.*

Madam Speaker, when was the last time anyone asked you for $700 billion?

This is an odd parliamentary locution where the speaker as a member addresses herself as the speaker who grants floor time to herself as a member.

It's a staggering figure. Many questions have a...arisen from that request and we have been hearing a very informed debate on all sides of this issue here today. I'm proud of the debate.

Seven hundred billion dollars. A staggering number, but only a part of the costs of the failed Bush economic policies to our country. Policies that were built on budget recklessness. When President Bush took office he inherited President Clinton's surpluses. Four years in a row, budget surpluses -- on a trajectory of $5.6 trillion in surplus. And with his reckless economy policies, within two years he had turned that around and now eight years later the foundation of that fiscal irresponsibility combined with an anything-goes economic policy has taken us to where we are today.

They claim to be free-market advocates when it's really an anything-goes mentality. No regulation. No supervision. No discipline. And if you fail, you will have a golden parachute and the taxpayer will bail you out. Those days are over. The party is over in that respect.

Democrats believe in a free market. We know that it can create jobs, it can create wealth, it can create many good things in our economy. But in this case, in its unbridled form as encouraged, supported by the Republicans -- some in the Republican Party, not all -- it has created not jobs, not capital, it has created chaos.

Let us overlook the leaden oratory, the disjunctive argument, the cartoonish economics, the reinvented history, the specious outrage, the greed buzzwords. Let us overlook that Mr. Bush took note that surpluses as Ms. Pelosi imagines them amounted to excessive and confiscatory taxation. Let us overlook that a Democratic Congress has exercised oversight for the past two years over the markets and institutions that have failed. Let us overlook all that.

The questions that remain are what exactly did Ms. Pelosi as leader of the House hope to gain? What did her speech add to the effort to pass this bill? [We slosh about in the Speaker's spleen.] At best nothing. At worst 12 Republican NOes.

NANCY PELOSI BLAMED FOR
WALL STREET BAILOUT DEFEAT

September 30, 2008 (Times Online) - It was perhaps the costliest ad lib in political history, 90 seconds of ill-judged, ill-timed bile that helped to kill off any hope of consensus on Capitol Hill.

That was the charge against Nancy Pelosi after Congress’s rejection of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan yesterday, a rejection that Republicans blamed directly on her aggressive and overtly partisan speech shortly before the vote.

John Boehner [R-OH, 8th], the Republican House Minority Leader, said that Ms Pelosi’s speech had "poisoned" the Republican caucus and "caused a number of members we thought we could get to go south" -- making the difference in a 228-205 vote. Mr. Boehner:

I do believe that we could have gotten there today, had it not been for the partisan speech that the Speaker gave on the floor of the House. We put everything we had into getting the vote to get there today.

The Democrats' hollow support all but guaranteed the vote on the hugely unpopular bill would fail. Ms. Pelosi's inflammatory speech was designed to produce exactly the result it did, making Republicans the goat.

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* Part two here.