Tag: Nancy Pelosi

To prepare for this pandemic, our liberal and conservative leaders failed us

To prepare for this pandemic, our liberal and conservative leaders failed us

A lot of liberals won’t like this post. Please don’t read it if you are a liberal because you will get mad. It hurts when facts smack you in the face, so you should avoid doing that. This article points out that liberals completely failed to help the US prepare for a pandemic.

To be fair, conservatives shouldn’t read this post either because that same brick wall of facts is going to hit you in the face as well. Don’t read it as conservatives haven’t prioritized preparing for a pandemic either.

This is an article from 2009. It is from NPR, so no one is going to say it right-wing bias. Conservatives will say that it is MSM, but the facts on the ground have proven this article to be very accurate. 

Here is another article by Sheri Fink that covers the various studies in 2006-2009 about how woefully prepared the US is in handling a pandemic.

In 2007 and 2006, the country did studies that showed that during a pandemic, NYC would be short 15,000 ventilators, and 150K people could die. Sound familiar? There were probably studies since the publication of these articles. So did Bush or Obama do anything? Not much, and I will suggest they did zero. Trump didn’t come into office with any insight and initiative to fix this known problem, so he is just as guilty as Bush and Obama.

There has been a total lack of leadership by Bush, Obama, and Trump on this issue.

And Governor Cuomo? Nope. He didn’t fight for it either—more lack of leadership.

And neither did Pelosi, Reid, McConnell, Ryan, Boehner, Schumer, or any other leader of our Congress. A complete lack of leadership for a situation that everyone knew would eventually happen.

BTW, the current candidates for POTUS in 2020: Biden, Sanders, and Trump – nope. None of them did anything when they were in positions that could have influenced this.

All of our government leaders failed us on both sides of the aisle. They taxed the hell out of us. They whined and complained about other stupid shit. They gave incentives for solar energy, oil production, buying stuff on the internet, buying health insurance, fighting bad guys in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Syria. But prepare the country for a pandemic? Nope. 

They all said, “Hopefully, that pandemic will happen when I am not in office, and the next person can worry about that.” Guess what, we are the next person. We are now worrying about it, and our bickering Federal government messed up big time.

The Federal government is really only good at two things

  1. the infrastructure that hundreds of thousands or millions of people rely on
  2. the defense of our country and people.

To be honest, the government isn’t all that good at those two things, but it is the only entity that can do them. The government shouldn’t be doing other things. It should focus on doing those two things and do them as well as possible, giving the inefficiencies of an organization that has no competition.

It is woefully incapable of doing anything else well. In just about every case other than the two cited, private industry that competes with others will do a better job. Will the private sector screw something up? Absolutely! But then that private enterprise will be displaced by a competitor that will perform better. 

Pandemic relief falls into both categories. It is the defense of our people, and it is the infrastructure to support that defense. We did both poorly for pandemic relief, and it is now costing us dearly.

What is the solution? Throw the bums out. Every damn one of them. They failed us. They screwed up. They should be rewarded with losing their jobs.

We need politicians that are focused on just doing the two things that only the federal government can do. We need politicians to look at a bill and say, “Is this something that ONLY the federal government can do and therefore is in the above two categories?” If the answer to that question is NO, then the politicians need to vote it down. If the answer to that question is YES, then the politicians need to approve it and give it the appropriate funding and oversight that it is done as well as possible.

Header Photo by Parentingupstream (Pixabay)
Congressman threatens federal prosecution for voicing opinion

Congressman threatens federal prosecution for voicing opinion

Whatever you read today, spend 10 minutes and read this story of a concerned citizen calling his Congressman to try to influence his vote on the upcoming health care legislation.  While the blogger tried to connect his congressman to Speaker Pelosi, I am not sure he effectively makes the case. What the story does point out is how little the comments and opinions of every day constituents affect the opinion of elected representatives.

I think that President Andrew Jackson is spinning in his grave.

Is this a Constitutional crisis of epic proportions?

Is this a Constitutional crisis of epic proportions?

I don’t know about you but I remember my federal government classes in high school (and grade school for that matter).  I even remember a cute little commercial by School House Rocks talking about how a bill becomes a law. Under the U.S. Constitution a bill has to pass both the House and Senate to become law. Until this week, that is, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi is moving to merely “deem” that the House has passed the Senate health-care bill and then send it to President Barack Hussein Obama to sign anyway.

Under the “reconciliation” process, the House is supposed to approve the Senate’s Christmas Eve bill and then use “sidecar” amendments to fix the things it doesn’t like. Those amendments would then go to the Senate under rules that would let Democrats pass them while avoiding the ordinary 60-vote threshold for passing major legislation. This alone is an abuse of traditional Senate process but is not truly unconstitutional as it is only Senate “rules” and not constitutional law.

But Pelosi fears she lacks the votes in the House to pass an identical Senate bill, even with the promise of these reconciliation fixes. House Members hate the thought of going on record voting for Harry Reid’s Cornhusker kickback and other special-interest bribes that Reid added to get this mess through the Senate, as well as the new tax on high-cost insurance plans that Big Labor hates.

So at the request of Pelosi, New York Democrat Louise Slaughter, the chair of the House Rules Committee, may insert what’s known as a “self-executing rule.”  Under this procedural ruse, the House would then vote only once on the reconciliation corrections, but not on the underlying Senate bill. If those reconciliation corrections pass, the self-executing rule would say that the Senate bill is presumptively approved by the House—even without a formal up-or-down vote on the actual words of the Senate bill.

Democrats would then send the Senate bill to President Obama for his signature even as they claimed to oppose the same Senate bill. They would be declaring themselves to be for and against the Senate bill in the same vote. Even John Kerry never went that far with his Iraq war flip-flops!

This two-votes-in-one gambit is a brazen affront to the plain language of the Constitution, which is intended to require democratic accountability. Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution says that in order for a “Bill” to “become a Law,” it “shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate.” This is why the House and Senate typically have a conference committee to work out differences in what each body passes.

If Congress can now decide that the House can vote for one bill and the Senate can vote for another, and the final result can be some arbitrary hybrid, then we have abandoned one of Madison’s core checks and balances. As long as one party is in power in both houses and the Executive branch then legislation can simply be rammed through by the party leadership.

We have entered a political wonderland, where the rules are whatever Democrats say they are. Mrs. Pelosi and the White House are resorting to these abuses because their bill is so unpopular that a majority even of their own party doesn’t want to vote for it. Fence-sitting Members are being threatened with primary challengers, a withdrawal of union support and of course ostracism.

Democrats are, literally, consuming their own majority for the sake of imposing new taxes, regulations and entitlements that the public has roundly rejected but that they believe will be the crowning achievement of the welfare state. They are also leaving behind a procedural bloody trail that will fuel public fury and make such a vast change of law seem illegitimate to millions of Americans.

The concoction has become so toxic that even Mrs. Pelosi isn’t bothering to defend the merits anymore, saying instead last week that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Or rather, “deeming” to have passed it.