December 28, 2022 Updated: December 31, 2022
U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi delivers remarks at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Oct. 31, 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Commentary
Although she will remain in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of
San Francisco steps down from her leadership post in January. She has headed
her party in either that job or as House Minority Leader when Republicans ruled
the roost for nearly 20 years. Her powerful position also let her advance
California’s interests. That could continue should Republicans make Rep. Kevin
McCarthy of Bakersfield, currently the Minority Leader, the new Speaker.
And in many ways, Pelosi is the epitome of California today:
Although from Baltimore originally, she fit right in with the state’s more
cosmopolitan culture. She’s politically and culturally liberal. She also possesses
the haughtiness San Francisco politicians commonly do—other examples being Gov.
Gavin Newsom, former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, and former Senate President
pro tempore John Burton.
Pelosi also ran the House with an iron fist, making sure
every member voted in lock step on the most important bills, such as the recent
ones on marriage, Ukraine funding, and the $1.7 trillion spending
bill. By contrast, McCarthy has so
little control over his own caucus, he might not even receive its nod to become
speaker, although that’s still most likely.
Pelosi’s two-decade tenure at the top brought with it debt
and disaster for America.
Record
Deficits and Debt
Let’s start with the annual budget, the most important thing
any legislative body does. “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in
the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with
amendments as on other Bills,” reads Article I, Section 7, Clause 1 of the U.S.
Constitution.
However, that latter clause actually allows the Senate
sometimes to become the main crafter of budget bills, then send them to the
House. That just happened with the $1.7 billion spending bill, which includes a
lot of tax elements. Still, that happens only with the permission of the House.
When she became Minority Leader on Jan. 3, 2003, U.S. debt
stood at $11 trillion. Since then, it soared to $31 trillion. Here’s a chart
from the U.S. Treasury Department. Notice the debt actually was starting to be
paid off in 2000-01, just before Pelosi rose to lead the Democrats.
Next, let’s look at the annual deficits. Again, notice we actually enjoyed a small surplus of $0.13 trillion in 2001.
When she took over as minority leader in 2003, there was a deficit, but a relatively modest one of $0.37 trillion.
Now look at the deficits of the last three years (each
fiscal ends on Sept. 30 of the indicated year):
·
2020 $3.13 trillion
·
2021 $2.17 trillion
·
2022 $1.38 trillion
Sure, COVID-19 hit in 2020. And President Trump signed off on the first two of those spending binges, while President Biden did on the last one. Yet Pelosi as Speaker drove all those bills into law, with no consideration for the future.
And it’s that wild spending that most economists say led to
the current inflation problem, to the subsequent increases in interest rates by
the Federal Reserve Board to cut economic activity, and to a recession
anticipated for next summer.
Immigration
The ongoing immigration crisis also exists because Pelosi
led a House majority that refused to protect the country’s borders. Over the
past two years, more than 4 million illegal aliens have poured into the
country, with almost no checks on their legal status or even their health. The
Pelosi Congress is complicit in this lawlessness.
Worse, the open border has let illicit fentanyl flow into
America, killing more than 100,000 people a year. According to a Dec. 8, 2022
report by the Congressional Research Service, “China Primer: Illicit Fentanyl and China’s
Role”:
In the years immediately prior to 2019, China was the primary
source of U.S.-bound illicit fentanyl, fentanyl-related substances, and
production equipment. PRC traffickers supplied fentanyl and fentanyl-related
substances directly to the United States via international mail and express
consignment operations. Trafficking patterns changed after the PRC imposed
class-wide controls over all fentanyl-related substances, effective May 2019.
Today, Mexican transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) are largely
responsible for the production of U.S.-consumed illicit fentanyl, using
PRC-sourced primary materials, including precursor chemicals that are not
internationally controlled (and are correspondingly legal to produce in and
export out of China). According to DEA assessments cited by the U.S.-China
Economic and Security Review Commission in 2021, PRC traffickers and money
launderers appear to have increased cooperation with Mexican cartels.
Obviously, not only Pelosi but Biden could do something
about this by securing our border and conducting a sensible foreign policy with
China. Surely, all those PRC products flowing through our ports and heading to
Walmart shelves provide sufficient leverage to stop the Beijing regime’s
profits from fentanyl.
Obamacare-Pelosicare
You could write a book on Pelosi’s faulty policies. But
let’s just go with one more: the 2010 Obamacare bill, which Pelosi rammed
through Congress. Time magazine reporter Molly Ball’s biography, “Pelosi,”
provides the details on how the bill actually was crafted mostly by the
Speaker, not the President.
It was a disaster from the beginning. A friend of mine got
stuck on it, paying high fees for almost no coverage. That’s an anecdote. But
Pacific Research Institute health analyst and President Sally Pipes wrote:
Nearly every major provision of the Affordable Care Act has
proven a failure. And yet, the Democrats’ approach to this failure of
government intervention into the healthcare marketplace is to promote yet more
government—whether through a new public health insurance option or outright
single-payer health care.
Take Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, arguably the reform’s
most consequential component. In an effort to increase coverage rates, the law
made all Americans at or below 138% of
the poverty level eligible for Medicaid. That
strategy has turned out to be an ineffective and expensive means of trying to
safeguard the health of Americans.
For starters, there’s compelling evidence that Medicaid
doesn’t do much to improve patient health. One famous study compared patients
in Oregon who had been randomly selected for Medicaid with a group of uninsured
Oregonians. The authors concluded that, after two years, “Medicaid coverage generated no significant
improvements in measured physical health outcomes” for enrolled patients as opposed to those with no
insurance at all.
In other words, Obamacare brought 17 million Americans into a health program that fails to improve health.
And it did so at astronomical cost to taxpayers.
Conclusion
Give Nancy Pelosi credit. Not many leaders of legislative
bodies possess the talent and the gumption to accomplish as much as she has.
Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson from the 1950s comes to mind, as
described in biographer Robert Caro’s “Master of the Senate”—essential reading for understanding American politics
today.
Another was Willie Brown back in the 1980s and early 1990s
when he was California’s Assembly Speaker. Indeed, Willie still is wielding
clout as the mentor of Newsom and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Part of this is because Democrats, much more than
Republicans, understand power in a Machiavellian sense. The Florentine’s advice
could be Pelosi’s motto: “Since it is difficult to join them together, it is
safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.”
Views expressed in this article
are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The
Epoch Times.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/pelosis-legacy-as-speaker-debt-and-disaster_4949895.html
We must add these in her legacy:
-Hatred and division
-Misunderstanding between: religion and “gender freedom”
-Trying to destroy the US constitution, especially freedom
of speech.
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