Tag: nancy pelosi

Nancy Pelosi comes out strongly for… limiting federal court jurisdiction over the states?

This was considered a problem?

No, really: when asked a question about the debt ceiling/so-called “fiscal cliff” today Nancy Pelosi decided to respond by talking about how she was on the side of the Eleventh Amendment.  For those of you who need reminding, that’s the one that limits the ability of federal courts to permit private citizens in one state from suing other states as a whole (they can still sue private citizens in other states).

The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.

Anyway, this embrace of federalism by the House Minority Leader would be great – after all, I don’t particularly want, say, Californian eco-freaks suing Texas over its oil production; and probably neither do most of the people reading this – except that I don’t believe Nancy Pelosi for a second. She’d downright love to get that tool in the progressive toolbox, frankly. Continue reading Nancy Pelosi comes out strongly for… limiting federal court jurisdiction over the states?

Democrats keep leadership team that cost them the House in ’12.

Reports are in that Nancy Pelosi will stay on as House Minority Leader and Steve Israel as DCCC chair, despite the fact that neither could ever quite manage to translate a Democratic registration advantage of +6 in 2012 into more than… hold on; let me check… six House seats, net. At best.  Which is in its way a shame: I was personally planning to speed her way out the door by thanking Nancy for all her hard work in reauthorizing FISA under the very noses of the very progressives who urged her to stay on and…

Actually, I don’t know what Nancy Pelosi plans to do.  I know that this is the point in the script where the Democrats are supposed to come up with their Big Plan to take the House of Representatives back, but the last two years have pretty much demonstrated that the former Speaker doesn’t particular ability to overcome the obstacles associated with her fall from power.  She’s just been sort of… there.

Oh, well, not really my problem.

#RSRH I was really going to rip into this Nancy Pelosi House nonsense…

…until I realized that she was just going for shock value, in order to try to get back some relevance.  Seriously: if somebody is telling you that the Democrats are going to retake the House this year, you need to make him or her sit down and show you the races, show why the Democrat will win… and show you why all those races that the Republicans are scheduled to win aren’t relevant.

Look, I expect the Democrats to gain seats.  In the single digits, because they’re going to be offset by a bunch of lost seats, too.  Anybody thinks that’s wrong, they’re going to have to catalog the state of the 435 House races.  This can be done – see here, here, and here – but note that those guys are all more or less saying the same thing that I am.

#rsrh Politico: there are 18 CONFIRMED fools in the Democratic House Caucus.

Yes, yes, I know: the real number is much larger.  But note the use of the word confirmed: that term was not chosen at random.  Observe, from this story about incumbent House Democrats sensibly avoiding their dues to the DCCC, thus saving their precious campaign money to save their own seats:

As of June 30, 64 Democrats — around one-third of the entire caucus — hadn’t paid anything to the DCCC, according to a party document provided to POLITICO. Another 109 members had paid only a portion of what they owe in dues, which are calculated based on seniority and committee assignments.

There are 191 House Members. Subtract the 64 who haven’t paid any dues to the DCCC and 109 for those who have only paid a portion of them, that leaves 18 Members of Congress who have paid their dues in full. And, since it is reasonable to equate “anybody who throws money down the DCCC rat-hole while Nancy Pelosi is still House Minority Leader” with “fool” it then follows that AT LEAST eighteen members of the current Democratic House Caucus are self-confessed idiots.

That’s logic, that is.

Moe Lane

#rsrh Hey, just a reminder: Nancy Pelosi lied about waterboarding, and the Left let her.

Hardly a surprise on either score: after all, I’ve been telling people for years that Nancy Pelosi knew all about the waterboarding all along. So did Glenn Reynolds.  So did, in fact, did a lot of other people. So the news (via Mark Thiessen) that a new book is out claiming that then-House Intelligence Ranking Member Nancy Pelosi and then-House Intelligence chair Porter Goss were fully briefed by the CIA on waterboarding as an interrogation technique in 2002 is not a surprise.  If true, it’s very, very damning – the book is claiming that Pelosi declined to protest the waterboarding at all, while raising objections to another procedure (which implies that this old claim that she couldn’t protest is, well, another lie) – but not a surprise.

Interestingly, it may actually be more than a he-said, she-said moment here: Continue reading #rsrh Hey, just a reminder: Nancy Pelosi lied about waterboarding, and the Left let her.

Proposed ‘Pelosi Provision’ of the STOCK Act unveiled yesterday.

The STOCK Act – which is short for the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act; honestly, I wish that they’d stop coming up with cute names for these.  This particular one is not really obnoxious, but some of them have really reached for the acronym – started to get really pushed through last year, once it came out that Members of Congress, including then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, were profiting unduly from legal insider trading*.  I call it ‘legal’ not in the sense that there was nothing wrong with said insider trading; I call it ‘legal’ because Congress exempted itself from the rules that the rest of us have to follow. The distinction is important.  It’s perfectly legal for, say, Senator Dianne Feinstein to buy into a biostock company just before the company picks up a fat government subsidy check, even if she knew about it ahead of time.  That’s the problem.

Anyway, one of the more egregious things being done – again, involving then-Speaker Pelosi in at least one case – was the practice of offering Members of Congress a favorable position from which to buy into an IPO.  Pelosi in particular used this practice to buy into a Visa IPO, right before credit card legislation that hampered Visa got somehow sidetracked in Congress for a year; she ended up making a killing on the (again, ‘LEGAL’) deal.  And, naturally, the amendment that would ban this practice in the future has been named the ‘Pelosi Provision’ by Republicans.  By all accounts, the former Speaker is unhappy about this; I am uncertain whether or not that she is as unhappy about this as I am that the woman made several million unfortunately-legal dollars off of her former position to manipulate and delay legislation, but I somehow doubt it. Continue reading Proposed ‘Pelosi Provision’ of the STOCK Act unveiled yesterday.

#rsrh QotD, Those Danged Republicans Are EVERYWHERE edition.

Allahpundit of Hot Air, upon seeing the unique spin coming from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office over news that Madame-No-Longer-Speaker is thinking of retiring:

Pelosi’s spokesman denies it, calling it “wishful thinking on the part of a right-wing blog” even though the story’s based on a quote from, er, her own daughter.

Orginal story here. Honestly, it’s not entirely unlikely that Nancy Pelosi is just now discovering why most former Speakers resign after their falls from power; Washington DC can be a cruel place. Not that my sympathy is anything except detached, of course, given the amount of debt that this woman has dumped on my kids…

Ohio redistricting referendum fails to make the ballot. [UPDATED]

[UPDATE: I’ve had folks note that the original map is not quite the same as the final, approved map.  There’s been some tweaking of districts; not enough to particularly change any of the practical results found below, but enough to be noteworthy.  Fair enough.]

I was over at Larry Sabato’s site today* and I came across this report that an attempt to referendum the Ohio redistricting map has failed miserably. That means that [a map similiar to] the map proposed earlier will now take effect: to summarize, it’s expected to result in a 12R/4D map.  Two Republicans and two Democrats (one of whom is Dennis Kuchinich) will compete against each other in primaries; a D versus R race will take place under conditions favorable to the latter; and they carved out another majority-minority seat to keep the VRA happy.  I called this result ‘subtle’ at the time; I see no reason why I should change that adjective, unless it’s to replace it with ‘successful.’ Continue reading Ohio redistricting referendum fails to make the ballot. [UPDATED]

#rsrh Nancy Pelosi’s (Nancy WHO?) problems with disclosure.

So.  Roll Call notes this:

In May 2010, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi took to a podium in the Capitol to introduce a half-dozen economic experts she had convened for a meeting on how to jump-start the economy. The group had met for several hours with top Democratic leaders, and Pelosi invited them to speak publicly on their perspectives on economic growth.

What Pelosi did not mention is that one of the men in the group was her son’s boss and a partner with her husband in more than a half-dozen investments, including one that generated more than $100,000 in income for the Speaker’s family last year.

The problem here is not that what Pelosi did here was illegal.  The Roll Call article is right: it’s actually not.

Continue reading #rsrh Nancy Pelosi’s (Nancy WHO?) problems with disclosure.

Nancy Pelosi retreating from insinuations of new dirt on Newt Gingrich.

http://weaselzippers.us/2011/12/05/pelosi-on-second-thought-maybe-i-dont-have-any-dirt-on-gingrich/

For those who missed it:

Continue reading Nancy Pelosi retreating from insinuations of new dirt on Newt Gingrich.