Personal favors, government corruption, and withholding aid. If the congressional relief bill headlines sound familiar, that’s because we spent the better part of the last year hearing the same phrases from Democrats who alleged President Donald Trump withheld aid from Ukraine to extrapolate favors, caught in the hellish hamster wheel of undoing the 2016 election with Democrats cast in the role of rodents on a spirited sprint to nowhere, and the mainstream media playing the part of the shrill spin machine.
Who could have predicted that a month and a half after the conclusion of the impeachment circus, wherein congressional Democrats and the media establishment lost their minds over a phone call between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, America would be reeling once again — this time from a global pandemic straight out of communist China? Not only that, who would have expected we’d be staring into the face of another quid pro quo? This time from none other than progressive icon Nancy Pelosi herself.
While Senate Democrats and Republicans have been working tirelessly to craft a bipartisan solution to bail out Americans and their businesses suddenly shuddered in a kneecapped economy, the Democratic House speaker waltzed in, promptly dismissed their efforts, and announced her intent to introduce her own relief bill.
Of course, with each passing day and even hour, thousands of businesses are closing, millions of employees are facing layoffs, and more and more people across the country are testing positive for the Wuhan coronavirus, so to say a legislative solution is time-sensitive is to wildly understate the urgency. The U.S. economy is in trouble.
Nancy Pelosi knows that. House Democrats know that. They also know that’s exactly what they want — anything to paint Trump in the worst possible light and stop the incumbent from achieving re-election in November. The booming economy and virtual full employment wouldn’t have fanned the flame of revolution, but a global pandemic with a helping of obstinance might do the trick. But Pelosi’s reticence to come together with both Senate Republicans and Democrats isn’t even the worst of the partisan slime.
Pelosi thought a global pandemic would be a good time to push through a laundry list of progressive pipe dreams. Instead of directing her efforts toward aiding ailing citizens, the House speaker’s 1,400-page bill proposal, which began circulating Monday, provides for non-COVID-19 frivolities such as “grants for conducting” election audits, as well as “same day [voter] registration” and access for early voting. It includes “collective bargaining … for federal workers,” a federal “study on climate mitigation efforts,” expanded solar and wind energy tax credits, and it demands that airlines “fully offset the annual carbon emissions … for domestic flights beginning in 2025” and give passengers information “regarding greenhouse gas emissions resulting from each individual flight.”
Don’t let it be lost on you, America, that the reason your small business isn’t yet getting relief yet is that House Democrats are more concerned with bailing out the U.S. Postal Service and giving $35 million to D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts than fighting for their constituents.
This is to say nothing of the bill’s woke identity politics aims such as “corporate board diversity” requirements and “pay equity” between men and women as well as white employees and minorities. The words “diverse” or “diversity” appear in the bill more than 60 times.
By holding Americans hostage unless she gets her carbon emission fantasies and postal bailouts, Nancy Pelosi is offering her own quid pro quo. You want relief for dying Americans, Mr. President? Fine, give me more minorities and women in board position. Otherwise, I’ll withhold the aid.
You give me what I want, I’ll give you what you want. Quid pro quo, plain and simple, or as Pelosi herself might say, “bribery.”
Back in fall 2019, when Pelosi first launched the Trump impeachment inquiry, the speaker said she didn’t want it to “take a long time because I don’t want it to be further divisive in the country. And that was one of the reasons I was reluctant to go down this path because I know it’s divisive. But then again, the president is divisive.” Pot, meet kettle.
Since Pelosi’s joke of a virus bill began circulating Monday, it appears she may now capitulate to growing pressures from exasperated Americans to advance the bipartisan legislation.
Worth noting that the changes to the Senate bill are minimal and could have easily occurred the same way without filibuster or House bill so what happened?
Dems realized trying to hold a relief bill hostage for special interests was backfiring and people were pissed. https://t.co/TeZ6xtTwgo
— AG (@AGHamilton29) March 24, 2020
But even if she folds and finally grants the aid Americans desperately need, under the Democrats’ self-righteous and asinine quid pro quo framework, Pelosi’s still guilty. After all, Trump never actually withheld aid from Ukraine either, and the House still impeached him.
“I can’t tell if he knows right from wrong,” Pelosi said of Trump’s July 17 phone call with the Ukrainian president. “He just done wrong.”
Do you know right from wrong, Madam Speaker?