Pelosi: As Bad As It Gets!

Nancy Pelosi's Widening Power Grab

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
April 29, 2008

Congress: On the heels of a rules change that iced the Colombia free trade treaty, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is scrapping the appropriations process in a new war funding bill. Something new and anti-democratic is afoot.

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Whatever is driving her, Pelosi seems to be moving Congress toward a one-woman dictatorship, showing little or no concern for holding actual votes or building consensus on key issues as she manipulates Congress.

She's altering and contorting long-standing congressional rules to get her agenda through instead of trusting the voting process. This gives clout to special interests and makes her powerful as a political boss, but it undermines Congress as an institution, making voters the losers.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has bent Congress' rules almost beyond recognition in pursuing her pork-laden, special-interest House agenda.

Pelosi's latest move is to link a $108 billion supplemental bill for U.S. troops in Iraq to an extra $70 billion in pork spending in a tacked-on economic stimulus package. It's a bad idea, one that wouldn't make it through a congressional vote. So she's getting around that by changing the rules.

Instead of submitting the package to a subcommittee vote, moving it to a full committee, and allowing debate until consensus is reached, Pelosi's skipping the appropriations process altogether. This has been done only a few times in the last 20 years — mostly in times of national emergency, like 9/11 and Katrina.

Now, it's just business as usual with Pelosi in power.

Pelosi seems to have been emboldened by her success in halting Colombia's free-trade agreement this month — again, not through votes, but by changing house rules to end the 90-day requirement to schedule a vote.

This damages our alliance with Colombia. For what price? Like the Iraq bill, she's tying passage of Colombia free trade to the new pork spending she seeks. Winner: Big Labor. Loser: the private sector, which must pay $1 billion in tariffs.

This follows Pelosi's moves to halt development of new energy resources through drilling oil in Alaska and the outer continental shelf. She's engineered this through 13 obscuring maneuvers since 2005, which keep America's energy resources in the ground, while handing out subsidies to favored "alternative energy" programs, which she has cleverly packaged as resolving the energy shortage. Winners: environmental and alternative-energy lobbies. Losers: all of us, who must now pay more for energy and food.

Just as one thinks it couldn't get worse, it does. Pelosi has left America unprotected from terrorists by not permitting a vote on enhanced FISA rules that let federal officials listen in on terrorist phone calls. Winners: The trial lawyers, who benefit from lawsuits against communications companies. Losers: again, all of us, who are now more vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

Nothing new here — this has become Pelosi's style. Indeed, last year, she attempted to rewrite the House's 185-year-old rules to permit tax hikes without a vote. A pattern emerges of a person who no longer seems intent on observing the niceties of democracy.

But Americans should question a style of governing that eschews real democracy for endless pandering to special interests and power blocs. Democrats won Congress in 2006 promising to rid Congress of special interests in politics. But under Pelosi's string of rules changes, it's more beholden than ever.

Voters express a shocking cynicism about Congress, reflected in the 18% approval rating it gets in recent polls. There's little doubt Pelosi's move to keep Congress from voting on key issues so her special interest friends can rake in the cash is a part of the problem.

Voters may wonder: Just when will Pelosi start trusting the voters, Congress and the democratic process, and stop abusing her power?