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| Pelosi |
“When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your
enemies and astound your friends” ― Mark Twain
It looks like Majority Whip James Clyburn has let the
political cat out of the bag. National Democrats have larded with ideological
pork a massive $1.8 trillion dollar rescue plan brought forth to mitigate Coronavirus,
stopping in its tracks a bill designed to stop the pandemic in its tracks.
“The Senate bill that Democrats stopped,” the New York Post notes, “would have
given nearly every American $1,200, with $500 for every child. It would have
allocated $250 billion for unemployment insurance, $350 for a small business
loan program, more than $100 billion to hospitals, $11 billion towards
vaccines, $4.5 more to the CDC, $20 billion to veterans’ healthcare, $12
billion for public education, another $10 billion to airports, and $5 billion
to FEMA.”
These are all measures Democrats, more loudly here in
Connecticut than elsewhere, have been clamoring for. Only last week New York
Governor Andrew Cuomo bestowed a once in a
lifetime compliment on the Democrat’s bête noir, President Donald Trump,
because Trump, after a phone call from Cuomo, had quickly sent aide to New
York, a Coronavirus hot spot. Cuomo tweeted, “the President is "fully
engaged on trying to help New York" and "very creative and energetic."
Never-Trumper Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar astounded her friends
and confounded her enemies by tossing a similar compliment Trump’s way. “Politics
aside,” Omar tweeted, “this [Trump’s response to the Coronavirus outbreak in
the US] is incredible and the right response in this critical time.” Governor
of Connecticut Ned Lamont is anxiously awaiting bailout cash from Trump. Lamont
needs the bailout because he has diminished the flow of revenue to his state by
closing down, through executive order, what he regards as “inessential”
businesses in his state, a locution that begs the question: inessential to
whom?
The Post has given us a pork inventory, along with a political
rational to justify the larding. “This is a tremendous opportunity to
restructure things to fit our vision,” said Clyburn, and so Democrat leaders
have restructured the mitigation bill; that is to say, they have added to the
clean bill provisions that a) will not pass, and b) damage the rescue effort,
perhaps irreparably, by delaying implementation of the rescue plan. The
Democrat’s justification may remind people of their Law of Opposition stated
with alarming brevity by Rham Emanuel: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” A
corollary to Rham’s Law, the first casualty of which is the “truth” mentioned
by Twain above, may be stated as briefly: If the crisis shows signs of
mitigation, unmitigated it.”
Democrat Speaker of the US House Nancy Pelosi’s 1,400 page pork pie is
full of indigestible ideological gristle. The sheer number of items in her bill
that have nothing to do with mitigating Coronavirus, according to a partial
listing in The Federalist, is mind-numbing. They include “’collective
bargaining… for federal
workers,’ a federal ‘study on
climate mitigation efforts,’ tax credits for wind and solar energy, and demands
that the airlines involved
buy carbon credits ‘to fully offset [their] annual carbon emissions.’” The bill
would enforce “’same day
[voter] registration,’
national early voting and ‘grants
for conducting’ election
audits.” Pelosi’s venture into an ideological loud cuckoo land legislates “’funding
standards for community newspapers’ retirement plans, cancels $10,000
off peoples’ college
debts, and forces a $15
minimum wage and permanent paid leave on aid recipients. It awards more than $33 million to the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ‘for
necessary expenses to
prevent, prepare for, and respond to Coronavirus,’ and
$35 million to
Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” in a craven effort, one
supposes, to corral the “art vote.”
Some left of center
news outlets suppose these absurd demands are designed to persuade Republicans
in the U.S. Senate to take seriously some of the more extravagant demands made
by U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer and Company, but the wrench Pelosi has thrown
into a humming bipartisan plan, awkwardly defended by U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, is more likely to prolong the healing process
foreshadowed by the commendatory remarks cited above by Cuomo and Omar. If time
is of the essence in combating Coronavirus, the essence of Pelosi’s political
slapstick comedy may be to prolong a reasonable mitigation of the virus in the
hope that nation’s economy, considerably invigorated by Trump’s economic
attentions, may flatline before the next national elections.
At some point,
Connecticut’s left of center media might want to ask the seven all-Democrat
members of the state’s U.S. Congressional delegation whether they approve of
Pelosi’s pork-filled, ideologically oriented, non-mitigation Coronavirus bill.
No one should hold his breath waiting for an answer to the question.
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