Xtra News Community 2
March 30, 2024, 12:41:36 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Welcome to Xtra News Community 2 — please also join our XNC2-BACKUP-GROUP.
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links BITEBACK! XNC2-BACKUP-GROUP Staff List Login Register  

America's 2018 mid-term elections…

Pages: 1 2 [3]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: America's 2018 mid-term elections…  (Read 2820 times)
0 Members and 2 Guests are viewing this topic.
Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32233


Having fun in the hills!


« Reply #50 on: January 04, 2019, 06:10:28 pm »

Quote
So he definitely won't get legislation passed now the Democrats hold the majority in Congress

I think you make a big mistake

Republicans now hold a bigger majority in the Senate

and yes there will be fun and games
I'll get the popcorn out.


SNIGGER



from The Washington Post…

Speaker Pelosi will show Trump he's not the only one
with power in Washington


The president will learn that “government-by-tantrum” doesn't always work.

By EUGENE ROBINSON | 5:08PM EST — Thursday, January 03, 2018

Nancy Pelosi was elected and sworn in as Speaker of the House on January 3, and pledged to pursue transparency, truth and compromise in the 116th Congress. — Photograph: Matt McClain/The Washington Post.
Nancy Pelosi was elected and sworn in as Speaker of the House on January 3, and pledged to pursue transparency, truth and compromise
in the 116th Congress. — Photograph: Matt McClain/The Washington Post.


THE U.S. Capitol really was “the people's house” on Thursday. The sky may have been overcast and the temperature chilly, but still there was the feeling of dawn.

The new Congress was being sworn in, and the building was thronged with friends and family who came to fill the galleries. Because of the unprecedented diversity of the incoming House majority, the crowd looked more like America than in years past. Beginnings beget optimism. The day of ceremony was a welcome respite from the mean-spirited buffoonery found at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

To get to the Capitol, I drove and walked past other “people's houses” that were shuttered. The Smithsonian Institution — often called the greatest museum complex in the world — is closed because of a stupid and wholly unnecessary government shutdown, triggered by President Trump out of ignorance and pique. Trump closed about one-fourth of the government in an attempt to force taxpayers to waste billions of dollars pretending to build an unbuildable border wall that Trump promised would be paid for by Mexico.

“I will take the mantle of shutting down,” Trump promised in December. As trash piles up in our majestic national parks, border agents perform their dangerous work without pay and affected agencies run out of emergency funds, the mantle of shame is Trump's alone.

It is only fitting, after the past two years of bumbling dysfunction, that the new Democratic majority in the House — led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California) — debuts amid a crisis Republicans managed to create all by themselves.

Remember that Trump had GOP majorities in both chambers of Congress and still, somehow, managed to bluster and blunder his way into a shutdown. That's difficult to do. It's kind of like wearing both a belt and suspenders, and still having your pants fall down around your ankles.

One thing Pelosi brings, as she becomes speaker for the second time, is competence. That should be a reason for optimism, regardless of party affiliation or political views.


Representative Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California), surrounded by her grandchildren and other young relatives of lawmakers, raises her right hand as she is sworn in as House speaker Thursday on Capitol Hill. — Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.
Representative Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California), surrounded by her grandchildren and other young relatives of lawmakers, raises her right hand
as she is sworn in as House speaker Thursday on Capitol Hill. — Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.


During the past eight years, when John A. Boehner (Republican-Ohio) and Paul D. Ryan (Republican-Wisconsin) held the speaker's gavel, I often heard Pelosi express great exasperation — not just at their wrongheaded priorities but also at their failure to display skills she considered elementary. It sometimes falls to a speaker to pass legislation that many in the majority caucus do not like. In 2007, Pelosi needed approval of a bill funding the war in Iraq, which barely a handful of House Democrats supported. She got the bill through — and also gave her caucus the chance to go on the record as opposing the war.

Boehner and Ryan let themselves be tied in knots by the so-called Hastert rule — named after a former GOP speaker — under which they pledged not to bring legislation to the floor unless it had the support of a majority of the majority caucus. Pelosi knows the speaker's proper role is not to blindly obey consensus but to actively shape it.

She planned to begin by having the House pass a series of bills to reopen the government by funding most affected agencies through September — except the Department of Homeland Security, which would be funded only through to February 8. That would allow things to return to normal and provide a month for further debate about Trump's fanciful border wall.

“We have given the Republicans a chance to take ‘yes’ for an answer,” Pelosi said on Wednesday. But since when is Trump's GOP smart enough to do that?

I wish I could predict that Democratic control of the House will automatically make everything better. I can't. Despite now-Senator Mitt Romney's defiant op-ed in The Washington Post, the Republican Party remains essentially a zombielike servant of Trump. He keeps telling congressional Republicans to jump off cliffs, and they keep taking the plunge. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican-Kentucky) said this week that he will not even bring to the floor House-passed spending measures — that the Senate last month unanimously approved.

But for the first time, Trump will confront an opposition that has real power. All the frenzied tweeting in the world can't take back his self-proclaimed ownership of the “Trump shutdown,” as Pelosi calls it. How much garbage needs to pile up on the Mall before McConnell, who has made deals with Pelosi before, seeks a way out of the impasse? How many government paychecks and subsidy payments have to be missed?

Trump will learn that “government-by-tantrum” doesn't always work — and, more to the point, that he's not the only one in Washington with real power.


__________________________________________________________________________

Eugene Robinson writes a twice-a-week column on politics and culture for The Washington Post and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper's Style section. He started writing a column for the Op-Ed page in 2005. In 2009, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for “his eloquent columns on the 2008 presidential campaign that focus on the election of the first African-American president, showcasing graceful writing and grasp of the larger historic picture.” Robinson is the author of Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (2010), Last Dance in Havana (2004), and Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (1999). He lives with his wife and two sons in Arlington.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • VIDEO: Nancy Pelosi becomes House speaker

 • VIDEO: What Nancy Pelosi wants to accomplish as speaker

 • VIDEO: Pelosi: ‘We are diligent and persistent in trying to open up government’

 • House Democrats vote to reopen government and deny Trump wall money, defying veto threat

 • Pelosi reclaims speakership and secures place as most powerful woman in politics

 • Jennifer Rubin: The people's house: A new beginning

 • Jennifer Rubin: Speaker Pelosi should inspire Americans — and terrify Trump cronies

 • The weirdly quiet White House


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/speaker-pelosi-will-show-trump-hes-not-the-only-one-with-power-in-washington/2019/01/03/aedaf696-0f99-11e9-84fc-d58c33d6c8c7_story.html
Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 

Pages: 1 2 [3]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Open XNC2 Smileys
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum


Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy
Page created in 0.018 seconds with 14 queries.