Nancy Pelosi feels that she did so well over the last two years that she’s having a party! After the entire Republican Party ran on a “Fire Nancy Pelosi” theme and won more seats than any party since the Depression, it’s hard to imagine why Pelosi would be celebrating anything. The 111th Congress has done more to harm America than any in my lifetime. The Stimulus, Obamacare are just two examples of bills that were signed into law, but Pelosi’s House also passed “Cap and Trade.” And during her tenure presiding over the 110th Congress Pelosi passed “Card Check.” It’s no wonder Americans wanted Pelosi out of power! If you went to work and got all your coworkers angry at you every day for four years, then got fired, would you have a party to celebrate what a great job you’d done? I didn’t think so. Maybe Pelosi just wants to throw one more bash before she gets the jet taken away from her.
The president doesn’t seem to be in quite the same depth of denial over the GOP tidal wave that crashed on Washington on November 2nd. But he is certainly not changing his positions in the same way Bill Clinton had after a smaller defeat in 1994. Ruth Marcus writing at RealClearPolitics.com quotes the president as saying:
“What is absolutely true is that with all that stuff coming at folks fast and furious — a recovery package, what we had to do with respect to the banks, what we had to do with respect to the auto companies — I think people started looking at all this and it felt as if government was getting much more intrusive into people’s lives than they were accustomed to,” Obama said. “We thought it was necessary, but I’m sympathetic to folks who looked at it and said this is looking like potential overreach.”
Is he living on the same planet? “Potential overreach?” Americans have witnessed the greatest power grab by an American president and his administration since the days of FDR threatening to install additional Supreme Court justices to get the court to declare his programs constitutional. Marcus sums up the situation with Democrats by saying “It would be nice to see some recognition that what we have here is not only a failure to communicate. Democrats are making a big mistake if they think their problem was as simple as not enough talking.”
For their part, rank and file Democratic congressmen and the less liberal in the Democratic leadership are recognizing the electoral defeat better as the repudiation of the Obama/Reid/Pelosi agenda that it was. The Democrats are now opening up to the possibility of extending the Bush tax cuts, though they would like to restructure the tax code. That, of course, could mean many things, including VAT taxes, changes to tax brackets and all sorts of new redistributive “refundable” tax credits.
Moderate Senator Evan Bayh from Indiana proposed that, “For the next couple of years we need to err on the side of growth, not adding to the burdens of people who make the hiring and investing decisions, but after that we need to quickly pivot and begin reducing this debt.” This seems to suggest that spending cuts are off the table. That’s too bad.
GOPers Take Aim at Fed – Timothy Jones
This week saw two members of America’s GOP leadership take aim at the Federal Reserve. Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank and former Bush administration Deputy Secretary of State and U.S. Trade Representative came out in support of a return to the gold standard (thereby sideling much of the Fed’s inflation capability). And Sarah Palin directly confronted the Fed’s plan to pump $600 billion of new money into the economy. The more aggressive stance toward the Fed from the GOP establishment should be seen as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Congressman Ron Paul to highlight the problems at the Federal Reserve.
