Redstate

What was that phrase that they tried to link to the President, again? Oh, yes: "Miserable Failure."

By Moe Lane Posted in Archived — Comments (10) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

You had us, Nancy. You absolutely had us.

Your Party had gotten a bloated S-CHIP bill through the Senate with a veto-proof majority, and within spitting distance of one in the House. You had bipartisan support - reluctant support (they didn't like the bloat), but support nonetheless - and a favorable media presence. You knew that President Bush was going to veto the bill, but it wouldn't matter. All you had to do was get it overridden and hey presto! You'd have scored your first personal win against the President and the GOP. Simple. Straightforward. Arranging this sort of thing is what competent Speakers of the House do.

And you flubbed it. Which means that President George W Bush beat you.

Again.

Read on.

The truly astounding part of all of this was how simply you could have avoided it. As our own Bluey adeptly noted, you were told, point-blank, by Rep. Deborah Price that the Republicans that voted for this bill originally expected that people would sit down and come up with something that addressed both sides of the issue, not the petty political desires of your faction. We were well into the "haggling over the price" phase of the legislation; you tried for $50 billion extra and had already gone down to $35 billion, so let us not pretend that you could not have gone down further. A compromise of $15 to $20 billion would have easily kept the bill's current supporters and sliced off enough opponents to overturn the veto. Plus, you'd have given the President a stinging defeat on a domestic policy. Plus, you'd have looked like the reasonable one in this dispute.

But you didn't do any of that - you raised, we called, and you had garbage in your hand. So now you have to go back to the drawing board, only this time you have to deal with Republican legislators who will treat $35 billion extra as pie-in-the-sky, not the best compromise that they can find. Let me tell you a secret: S-CHIP will be funded for somewhere between $10 and $20 billion dollars extra. Well, not a secret as much as my rule-of-thumb guess. It'll pass, too. The President will make a show of being bothered by the increased spending, but will in the end sign it, because after all someone has to be the reasonable one in this dispute. And you'll have to fight to get whatever crumbs of credit that can be salvaged from this mistake of yours. Just like all the other times, really.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, do both the country and the Republican Party a favor, will you? Don't ever change.

Moe

PS: You will notice that nowhere do I request that you do something about this... person. To do so would be to imply that you would recognize the offensive nature of his remarks, or indeed care about them if you did. Then again, there is now some question about whether you would be able to do anything at all, no?