‘Unfortunately, the speaker tries to make everything political…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After leading a dubious effort to impeach the president, tearing up the State of the Union address and attempting to torpedo an emergency economic stimulus bill with a raft of radical leftist wish-list items, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has hardly proven herself to be anything more than a partisan hack.
Yet somehow the leftist media is aghast and mystified that President Donald Trump no longer was interested in engaging with the Democratic congressional leader.
During recent negotiations on the Wuhan virus relief package, the White House instead dispatched Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to handle the task. It was unclear what Mnuchin did to deserve it.
“At this time, the president does not see it as productive to [personally] negotiate directly with Nancy Pelosi,” a senior administration official reportedly told the Daily Beast. “For now, it’s best for her to deal directly with Sec. Mnuchin and others in the administration.”
Heeding the Left’s call to ramp-up its attack-dog questioning during Trump’s daily briefings, a reporter on Monday took note, asking when was the last time he and Pelosi had spoken.
“Well, it’s—it’s been a little while,” Trump replied.
CNN quickly devoted its resources to ascertaining just how long the silence had lasted. Shockingly, they reported that Trump and Pelosi had spoken as recently as five months ago, at the height of the impeachment feeding-frenzy.
The two pointedly did not appear to be on friendly terms during the State of the Union address in January. The last attempt at détente, CNN discovered, was an October meeting about Trump’s proposed withdrawal from Syria.
During the meeting, Pelosi walked out and sought to smear Trump as having a “meltdown” while allegedly leaking sensitive details of the discussion. Trump, in turn, called Pelosi a “third-rate politician.”
“She had no intention of listening or contributing to an important meeting on national security issues,” recalled White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, according to CNN’s account.
“While Democratic leadership chose to storm out and get in front of the cameras to whine, everyone else in the meeting chose to stay in the room and work on behalf of this country,” Grisham said.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy echoed the sentiment, saying he’d observed it before.
“Unfortunately, the speaker tries to make everything political. Her own statements weren’t productive,” McCarthy said. “To storm out of the meeting, which I’ve watched time before during other crises, is really not the ability, or the style of how a speaker should carry herself.”
Leftist propaganda mouthpiece the Daily Beast led the charge in spinning the latest Trump vs. Pelosi talking point as early as March 11.
On the very day that most were reeling over the World Health Organization’s pandemic declaration, which has resulted escalating unemployment as the world struggles to contain the health crisis, the Daily Beast celebrated by trumpeting the notion that Trump might have to encounter his congressional nemesis face-to-face.
“All of official Washington has come to an agreement that swift, bold action is needed to counteract the dramatic economic impact of the coronavirus’ spread,” it wrote.
“But negotiations around such a package have been complicated by the fact that President Donald Trump can’t stand the idea of negotiating one-on-one with his chief counterpart, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi,” it continued. “Indeed, he suspects that she would use the moment to try to humiliate him.”
Those concerns were doubtlessly justified, given Pelosi’s past attempts to prioritize just that, plodding forward with impeachment (after first trying to delay it for leverage) and diverting the nation’s attention during the crucial early months when the coronavirus outbreak in China first became widely known.
But Trump’s refusal to engage the San Francisco liberal while he labored to tackle the crisis at hand, has paid off, with 60 percent public approval in his handling of it during daily press briefings.
Pelosi, meanwhile, signaled a possible intent to derail the stimulus bill. According to the Washington Examiner, her more-than-1,000-page counter-offer included among its pork byproducts:
- A bailout for Postal Service debt
- A mandate that airlines spend on carbon offsets
- Required same-day voter registration
- A federal $15 minimum wage
- $35 million for the Kennedy Center
The bill that the Senate eventually passed is believed to have scuttled many of these demands, although losing valuable time.
Nonetheless, concerns lingered just before the passage Wednesday over a drafting that would have paid essential members of the workforce more to file unemployment than to remain employed.
The House is due to consider the bill on Friday using a unanimous consent procedure to avoid forcing it to reconvene.