Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election, the close of the 111th congress punctuates Nancy Pelosi’s tenure as, arguably, the worst Speaker of the House in the history of the United States. No other Speaker has eroded American competitiveness as thoroughly, practiced such a vile and bitter partisanship where friends and allies in Unions and other left-wing causes were rewarded at the expense of others, all while deliberately encouraging Americans to become increasingly dependent upon government.
What a sad spectacle.
Repairing the damage should be the first task of the 112th Congress, and the first order of business is to stop the madness of unrestricted spending. Speaker Pelosi has boasted of the $5 trillion increase in the national debt and the punitive, legislative warfare that she championed through Congress that has squandered our treasury and left us the greatest debtor nation on earth. Restoring some level of fiscal sanity will not be easy, but it is the most urgent task. Fiscal discipline will require a line-by-line review of the budget, a practice that elected officials love to discuss but rarely execute.
Americans cannot continue the Pelosi madness of borrowing money from China to redistribute to union activists and favorite left wing causes. Nor can our nation, once again, extend unemployment benefits for additional years after making payments for the already mandated two years.
Another of Speaker Pelosi’s damaging legacies is the coarsening of our politics. We can no longer afford the incivility that has become the norm in political discourse. During her tenure, Pelosi has overseen multiple pieces of legislation shoved through the House using arm twisting, veiled threats and “bribes” that take the form of political pork. The various pieces of legislation involve tens of thousands of pages of gibberish which neither the Speaker, nor many who allegedly drafted the legislation, has read.
Small businesses have endured their own special hell as a result of Pelosi’s complete lack of understanding of what it takes to create the kinds of jobs that grow the economy. Pelosi, with no business experience to fall back upon, has not allowed her colossal ignorance to stand in the way of making intrusive, destructive, confiscatory policies that have crushed small businesses across the nation. This, too, will take time to repair.
Perhaps most egregious of all, Nancy Pelosi has opened a Pandora’s box of double-speak, often achieving a level of incoherence, that has masked her hostile intent and determination to effect a wealth transfer from those who have worked hardest to those who have hardly worked at all. Prudent Americans that were careful to live within their means, buy houses that they could actually afford, and save their own money have been punished for these sins during Speaker Pelosi’s term.
Instead, an elaborate wealth redistribution system has been established to confiscate money from the hard-working to reward many that were most irresponsible. In Pelosi’s world, it’s okay to reward a homeowner who unwisely bought a house he knowingly could not afford and who then fails even to make interest payments for months on end. In Pelosi’s world, it’s okay to support bail outs for failed companies, especially those with huge union representation, by raising taxes on smaller companies. Pelosi has promoted mediocre Democrat statesmen from obscurity to prominence.
For example, Pelosi has followed her septuagenarian friend, Henry Waxman, down the rabbit hole into a wilderness where there are no limits to the amount of bureaucracy embraced by Congress and the Obama Administration. Waxman has proposed, and Pelosi endorsed, a system where all national issues and challenges are solved by an ever expanding amount of government oversight. Of course, according to this view, no amount of oversight, and no amount of cost for the oversight, is too much. Chaos and disruption to our energy production, power generation and healthcare delivery system were viewed as less consequential if the primary goal of inserting more governmental bureaucracy, oversight, and control over the private sector could be achieved.
Our nation now faces a dismal truth: Speaker Pelosi has been a disaster. Should Republicans take back the House, as is widely expected, a new and, let us hope more competent Speaker will assume responsibility for re-exerting American power, economic vitality, and civic health.
So it is time for goodbyes. Americans should wish Mrs. Pelosi well as she exits the national leadership. Her place in history, as the first female Speaker of the House, is secure. Unfortunately, Mrs. Pelosi will likely be recorded as the most irresponsible Speaker of the House that left the nation, in every way, worse off than when she first took over the gavel. It’s time for her to go.