The STOCK Act – which is short for the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act; honestly, I wish that they’d stop coming up with cute names for these. This particular one is not really obnoxious, but some of them have really reached for the acronym – started to get really pushed through last year, once it came out that Members of Congress, including then-Speaker of | Read More »
[UPDATE: I've had folks note that the original map is not quite the same as the final, approved map. There's been some tweaking of districts; not enough to particularly change any of the practical results found below, but enough to be noteworthy. Fair enough.] I was over at Larry Sabato’s site today* and I came across this report that an attempt to referendum the Ohio | Read More »
For those who missed it: Last Friday Nancy Pelosi told Talking Points Memo that she had all sorts of investigative dirt available on current GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich. Specifically, “I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.” So… | Read More »
But before we get to the snark, let me correct both President Obama and The Hill, for the record: WE DID NOT HAVE A ‘DIVIDED’ HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES LAST YEAR. The tally was fluid, but was somewhere around 258 Democrats and 177 Republicans for most of the term of the 111th Congress; that works out to around 59% Democrats, 41% Republicans. If that is ‘divided,’ | Read More »
It’s looking increasingly likely that Senate Democrats are unwilling to die on the hill of opposition to 4 billion dollars’ worth of cuts in the short-term emergency funding bill to supplement the continuing resolution that the Republicans had to pass in lieu of a proper budget that the Democrats refused to even offer last year – yes, that’s a bit of a run-on sentence. It’s | Read More »
Give John Boehner that damn gavel, Nancy. You can watch it here. Moe Lane PS: Amusing factoid: despite having more members in her caucus for the 112th Congress than John Boehner did for the 111th, Nancy Pelosi got one less vote for Speaker in the 112th Congress than John Boehner did in the 111th. PPS: You can shut up any time now, Rep. Pelosi. These | Read More »
I’m not… appalled: this is minority-party business, and as such is not likely to interfere with the real business of the House anyway. But… wow. Just… wow. They’re going to short-circuit the looming Hoyer/Clyburn Minority Whip fight by giving Clyburn an extra-special new #3 position, just for him! No word on the duties, privileges, job description, or even the name of said position (I suggest | Read More »
In the process of genteelly begging soon-to-be-ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to not run for House Minority Leader, Joan Vennochi issued the usual flatteries about her: that Pelosi had fortitude, that the way the country turned against her was unfair, that Pelosi demonstrated a good grasp of how to wield power, and so forth. This is a remarkably common theme among the Left, these days: and I | Read More »
Odd, isn’t it? The GOP wins big last Tuesday night, and we – like adults – avoid unseemly celebrations about it. Given the almost double-digit unemployment, horrible economy, crushing debt load, and the rest of the Democratic legacy we’re inheriting, it seems… childish… to make the welkin ring*. But by God Nancy Pelosi’s going to have a party on Wednesday ‘honoring the accomplishments’ of the | Read More »
Bob Shrum, November 4, 2010: “Long after the midterm stories have faded, and the predictions of the President’s political demise prove as facile and false as they were with Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, history will accord Pelosi an unprecedented scale of achievement for a House Speaker.” Bob Shrum, September 30, 2010: “Democrats will hold the House and Senate. ” Shrum will no doubt mutter that he was | Read More »
Let me summarize this Dallas Morning News article about Lisa Blue: if your husband (Fred Baron) is a millionaire and multimillion-dollar Democratic Party fundraiser – John Edwards’ bagman, in fact – and also dying of bone marrow cancer, then you can not only get away with smuggling into the country experimental cancer medicine of dubious efficacy; you can get the Speaker of the House herself | Read More »
Erick has already covered the story of how Nancy Pelosi has Embraced The Crazy by claiming that the Right is sending people over to her local events to ask questions about the Ground Zero Mosque… but I could not resist putting those comments in, as they say, context. Look on the bright side: Embrace The Crazy is only Stage Two of Conspiracy Theory Thinking. She | Read More »
(Via Instapundit) It’s the little things that underscore the pettiness that’s infesting the Democratic party’s leadership these days: Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) wanted to fly 10 lawmakers down to the Gulf of Mexico to see the damage caused by BP’s gigantic oil spill first hand. House Democrats said no.
The House Rules Committee. People usually call this one of the most important House committees out there, which is in my opinion untrue: it simply is the most important House committee. The reason that I say that is because the Rules committee has ultimate control over how and in what way a bill is presented and debated; add that to its ability to dictate appropriate | Read More »
(Via neo-neocon, via Instapundit) Nancy Pelosi: ”It’s like the back of the refrigerator. You see all these wires and the rest,” said Pelosi. “All you need to know is, you open the door. The light goes on. You open this door, you go through a whole different path, in terms of access to quality, affordable healthcare for all Americans.” So, you know, never you worry | Read More »
Not a good time for Speaker Nancy Pelosi: The House ethics committee has found Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat, violated House rules by failing to properly disclose financial details of trips to the Caribbean, senior congressional officials said Thursday. After several months of investigation, the ethics panel determined Mr. Rangel didn’t inform the ethics committee of the corporate source of | Read More »
When Hot Air and the Daily Beast are giving the same review – Republicans looked good, the President looked all right, other Democrats looked bad – you have to end up wondering whether the President actually minds. Jonah Goldberg fairly accurately sums up what Obama has to work with, after all: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi relied on the Democrats’ favorite rhetorical gambit: policy-by-anecdote. Invoking the | Read More »
Is it dead? Well, it certainly isn’t healthy: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that she does not have the votes needed to pass the Senate version of the health care bill. “I don’t see the votes for it at this time,” Pelosi told reporters in a briefing. If you’re wondering why Speaker Pelosi, who currently has something like a seventy vote majority in the | Read More »
I fiddled with cutting down this video… …of Speaker Pelosi admitting that she’s fine with sending people who don’t want to be insured to jail (H/T: Infidels are Cool); but I’m not all that happy with the results. Which is interesting, because I’m also not happy with the notion of throwing poor people into jail just because Speaker Pelosi wanted to raid taxpayer wallets and | Read More »
…at least, I would be if I was daft enough to take seriously Speaker Pelosi’s suggestion that you can take a 1,900 page bill and understand it in 72 hours. Fortunately, neither did the NRCC – which is why they’ve come up with this handy pacing clock. a page every two minutes, folks. Every page of which references/rescinds/alters a bunch of other laws, which probably | Read More »
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