Pelosi

by Molly Ball

And then Trump insulted her, attempting to undermine her very leadership position by implying she was hamstrung by her party’s divisions, saying, “Nancy is in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now.” At that, Pelosi drew on the experience of a lifetime of refusing to let men speak for her, interrupting them if necessary. “Mr. President,” she said icily, “please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats.”

Pelosi and Schumer had gotten Trump to take sole responsibility, on camera, for the tremendously unpopular action of shutting down the government. (“I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down,” he said.) They had told the president to his face that he was a liar and that even his own party didn’t want his stupid wall. Not for the first time, by asking the cameras to stay, Trump had humiliated no one but himself. When the meeting turned spectacle was over, Pelosi collected her coat, a knee-length rust-red overcoat with a funnel neck. She then strode out of the White House smiling and, smoothly, with both hands, affixed a pair of large, round tortoiseshell sunglasses to her face.

It wasn’t just that Pelosi looked cool walking out of that meeting. After two years of Trump running roughshod over every institution, norm and cherished ideal in America, he had come to seem unstoppable, even almighty. In a single interaction, Pelosi had stopped him cold—and it wouldn’t be the last time.

Gingrich slashed the House’s budgets for staff and other resources, a little-noticed change that gutted lawmakers’ ability to do their own analysis of important issues and put more bill-drafting power in the hands of outside actors such as think tanks and lobbyists. He shortened the House’s legislative schedule to just three working days a week so that members could spend more time campaigning and fund-raising—a change that reduced what the body could accomplish while giving members less time to form collaborative, bipartisan friendships. Further undermining collegiality, he urged Republican members to keep their homes and families in their districts rather than in Washington—closer to their constituents, but farther from one another. Under Gingrich, collegiality was discouraged.

Discourse and dysfunction was invented by Gingrich and perfected by the right wing Republicans and we've paid the terrible price ever since.

(Shutdowns aren’t just a harmless pause in the administration of government: they delay federal workers’ paychecks and the checks that beneficiaries of many federal programs depend on, disrupting families and costing the overall economy billions.) Many analysts fault Gingrich for the GOP’s devolution into a party devoted more to blocking Democrats at every turn than to advancing any positive agenda of its own.

Again this whole disfunction of congess had its roots and strong support from the right wing of tfhe GOP.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which handles disaster relief, responded sluggishly.

This is a highly inaccurate statement by the author. FEMA's ability to respomd was hampered by the total lack of preparedness of the State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans.

But at the time, journalists and political leaders largely took the Tea Partiers at their word, and both parties strained to show that they believed in cutting spending. This misunderstanding would prove consequential in the coming years, as Republicans kept trying to rein in spending and wondering why their base was not appeased—until Trump came along and gave them what they apparently really wanted: not spending cuts, but anger, nostalgia and racism.

The notion that the Tea Party supported reducing federal spending was just a placebo.

Rather than wake from its fever dream, the GOP only seemed to sink deeper into nihilism. House Republican investigators chased phony scandals involving a 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, and the botched 2010 “Fast and Furious” gun-trafficking investigation. They voted to hold the attorney general in contempt of Congress for only partially complying with investigators’ record requests, the first such charge against a sitting Cabinet member in history. House Republicans refused even to send negotiators to conference with the Senate on funding legislation, for fear that such talks might lead to a compromise.

Nothing has changed with Republicans today.

The meeting was a sign of things to come. In a single stroke, the president had shown himself to be an insecure, narcissistic liar who lived in an alternate reality, as well as someone who believed that only white people were truly American. His blustering, fact-free Twitter persona wasn’t a pretense or a performance: he really believed the twisted conspiracy theories he harvested from the dark corners of the internet. Pelosi almost felt sorry for him, and worried about the prospects for collaboration. How could you get anything done with someone so divorced from reality?

This absolutely says it all about Trump

For all their apparent unity on the issue, Republicans had a problem: they’d spent years promising to “repeal and replace” the ACA, but they’d never actually come up with a replacement. Pelosi and other liberals believed that was because Republicans didn’t actually want to fix the health care system—they really just wanted to pare back government programs and deregulate the insurance industry, but they didn’t dare say that publicly.

The republicans will never offer a plan thst will be satisfactory and acceptable to to americans

Desperate for a signature accomplishment, in December 2017 the GOP hurriedly rammed a tax bill through Congress. But while Paul Ryan and other fiscal conservatives had long dreamed of large-scale tax reform that would simplify the bloated and confusing tax code and allow ordinary Americans to file their taxes on a postcard, the bill they came up with did not come close to that goal. Instead, it gave a massive tax break to corporations and the wealthy while blowing a $1.5 trillion hole in the deficit.

The president who thought he could do anything had run up against the master of structural power. In the words of the talk show host Samantha Bee, “Dude, I know it’s driving you crazy that a woman turned you down, but this is the point in your life where you’re actually going to have to learn that no means no. There will be no grabbing this podium until Nancy is good and ready.”

Thid defines Nancy Pelosi and aTrimps totsl intransigence with women .

The president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway, a sycophant with a penchant for disingenuous spin, turned to Pelosi and said, “Respectfully, Madam Speaker, do you have a direct response to the president?” Pelosi said if she wanted to respond to the president, she’d do so directly, not to members of his staff.

Acuraye fescfription of Kellyanne Conway.