Democrats nominate Pelosi as House speaker, reelect top aides
29 November 2018
In a clear demonstration that the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives will produce no significant shift in US capitalist politics, the House Democratic Caucus has reelected its three top leaders, 78-year-old Nancy Pelosi, 79-year-old Steny Hoyer and 78-year-old James Clyburn.
All three are indelibly associated with the right-wing record of the Democratic Party during its last period in control of the House of Representatives, from January 2007 to January 2011, when Pelosi was House speaker, Hoyer was majority leader and Clyburn was majority whip.
BLOG: WAR PROFITEER SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN IS A MAJOR DONOR TO ALL OF PELOSI'S CAMPAIGNS. IT DOES NOT MATTER WHO IS PRESIDENT, THEY ALL SERVE THE SAME PAYMASTERS ON WALL STREET.
During the first two years, with George W.
Bush in the White House, Pelosi and her two
top aides blocked any effort to impeach Bush
for the lies that paved the way for the war in
Iraq, while supporting full funding of the
murderous US military interventions in both
Iraq and Afghanistan. Pelosi has adopted a
similar stance in relation to a possible
impeachment of Donald Trump, whose
assault on the Constitution is even more
flagrant than that of Bush.
During the next two-year period, under the
Obama administration, the Pelosi-Hoyer-
Clyburn leadership spearheaded passage of
the reactionary Affordable Care Act, whose
purpose was to shift the cost of health care
from corporations and the government onto
the backs of working people; pushed through
the Dodd-Frank legislation, which gave a slap
on the wrist to the Wall Street criminals who
caused the 2008 financial crash; and lavishly
funded the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
under Obama’s leadership, and the
expansion of drone warfare throughout the
Middle East and North Africa.
The Democrats were swept out of power in the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections, in large measure because of popular disappointment with the failure of the Obama administration to provide any serious remedy for the economic slump that followed the 2008 Wall Street crash. Obama and the Democrats bailed out Wall Street but pushed through wage cuts for auto workers and other sections of the working class.
After eight years in the minority, the Democrats recaptured a House majority in the November 6 elections. They were the entirely undeserving beneficiaries of the broad popular hostility to the Trump administration and the Republicans, which under the US political system can find no electoral expression except in a vote for the other half of the two-party duopoly, in this case, the equally right-wing and pro-corporate Democrats.
Wednesday’s caucus vote follows several weeks of maneuvering and horse-trading by the Democratic leadership, mainly involving small groups of representatives whose perspective and program is generally more right-wing than Pelosi’s. These include the Blue Dogs, a group of several dozen Democrats committed to fiscal austerity; the Problem-Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group of 12 Democrats and 12 Republicans; and an informal “stop Pelosi” group spearheaded by Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, an Iraq War military officer, and Kathleen Rice, a former prosecutor from Long Island.
Pelosi met with Moulton, Rice and Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, who ran against her in 2016 but declined to do so this year, just before the House Democratic caucus meeting. Moulton said afterwards that they pressed Pelosi to outline a “transition” in leadership—i.e., to announce that this would be her last term as Democratic leader—but she declined to do so.
By contrast, Pelosi had the full and unreserved support of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, the two newly elected representatives who claim membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as other candidates hailed by the pseudo-left because of their racial or gender identities: Ayanna Pressley of Boston (the first African-American representative from Boston), Sharon Davids of Kansas City (the first Native American lesbian representative), Ilhan Omar of Minneapolis (along with Tlaib, the first Muslim woman representative), and so on.
In the caucus vote Wednesday, Pelosi prevailed easily, 203–32. The 32 votes against her were only half the 63 votes won by Ryan two years ago, when he challenged Pelosi for reelection as minority leader.
Pelosi was compelled to negotiate with the right-wing caucuses only because the speaker, unlike the majority leader or minority leader, is chosen by all 435 members of the House of Representatives, requiring 218 votes for election. The 203 votes she received in the caucus ballot was 15 votes short of the 218 she will need in January, when the new House session begins.
Many of those voting against Pelosi Wednesday had pledged to oppose her for speaker during their election campaigns, mainly to appease right-wing criticism of Pelosi’s supposed liberalism.
In an effort to secure the necessary votes for January, Pelosi crafted a cynical process for the caucus vote, allowing representatives to cast “no” votes against her even though she was the only candidate nominated, so they could cite the caucus vote as proof that they had honored their campaign promise.
Although the vote was supposedly by secret ballot, representatives who so desired were even encouraged to take selfies with their “no” votes so they could prove in future electoral campaigns that they had opposed Pelosi, even after they cast a vote for Pelosi in January, when the vote really counts.
As Politico wrote, summing up the cynical maneuvering: “The unusual move allows members from swing districts who ran on a platform of opposing Pelosi to say they did so when they return home. In fact, Pelosi allies have actually encouraged some members-elect to oppose her in caucus so they can tell constituents they tried to push her out of the job—and then back her during the more critical Jan. 3 floor vote to officially become speaker.”
For all other leadership positions no such elaborate pretenses were required, since a simple majority of the caucus decided the winner. Accordingly, for the other two top positions where there was only one candidate, House majority leader and House majority whip, Hoyer and Clyburn were elected by acclamation.
The lesser positions in the Democratic leadership were filled in part by acclamation and in part by contests. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, who headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which oversaw the vetting and nomination of Democratic candidates—mainly to promote the most right-wing candidates, particularly those with a military-intelligence background—won the position of assistant majority leader, effectively the number four leadership position, without opposition.
In the contest for chairman of the Democratic Caucus, the number five position, Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, New York, defeated Barbara Lee of Oakland, California, by 123–113. This was billed as a largely generational contest, since Jeffries is 48 and Lee, 72, and without political significance, since both are members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus. However, Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force after the 9/11 attacks, which Bush cited as the legal basis for his invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. She also voted against the USA Patriot Act.
Pelosi coopted potential opponents by creating several new lower-level leadership positions for which they could run, including the assistant majority leader position set aside for Luján, and various subordinate positions on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Voting for these offices continued into Wednesday evening and perhaps into Thursday.
In another significant initiative, Michigan Representative-elect Elissa Slotkin, one of the two former CIA operatives elected as Democrats on November 6, drafted a letter to Pelosi on behalf of the incoming freshman class, which numbers 62 newly elected Democrats, asking the Democratic leadership to setaside positions on the powerful Appropriations, Rules, Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Financial Services committees for new members. Slotkin also asked for two freshmen to be seated on the Steering and Policy Committee, which decides on committee assignments and sets legislative strategy.
THE CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY
The Democrat
Party’s secret agenda for wider open borders, more welfare for invading
illegals, more jobs and free anything they illegally vote for…. All to destroy
the two-party system and build the GLOBALISTS’ DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR WIDER OPEN
BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/11/frontpage-hidden-agenda-of-pueblo-sin.html
Demonstrably and
irrefutably the Democrat Party became the party whose principle objective is to
thoroughly transform the nature of the American electorate by means of open
borders and the mass, unchecked importation of illiterate third world peasants
who will vote in overwhelming numbers for Democrats and their La Raza welfare
state. FRONTPAGE MAG
GENERAL MOTORS DUMPS
THOUSANDS OF WORKERS AND CLOSES PLANTS
- Stockholders celebrate!
"It identifies socialism with proposals
for mild social reform such as “Medicare for all,” raised and increasingly
abandoned by a section of the Democratic Party. It cites Milton Friedman
and Margaret Thatcher to promote the virtues of “economic freedom,” i.e.,
the unrestrained operation of the capitalist market, and to denounce all
social reforms, business regulations, tax increases or anything else that
impinges on the oligarchy’s self-enrichment."
“The yearly income of a typical US household
dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007
and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal
Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documentsa
sharp decline in working class living standards and a
further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the
super-rich.”
"The American phenomenon of
record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the
very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive
investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class
living standards are driven down by entrenched
unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of
a broader global process."
"A defining expression of this crisis is
the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a
narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in
order to further enrich itself."
BEL AIR MAXINE WATERS AND HER CRACK ALLEY
CONSTITUENTS
WALL STREET BANKSTERS AND THEIR BOUGHT
DEMOCRAT POLS PREPARE FOR THE NEXT WAVE OF BOTTOMLESS NO-STRING BANKSTER
BAILOUTS…
Will this one finish off the American economy?
Considering her record and documented
history of poor ethical and moral fitness, it’s outrageous that Maxine Waters
is up for chair of the ultra-powerful House Financial Services Committee, which
has jurisdiction over the country’s banking system, economy, housing, and
insurance.
"Wall Street billionaires
are pushing a new
plan to swipe the profits of Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac from
U.S. taxpayers–and in the
process revive the system of privatized-profits
and
public-risk that contributed to the severity
of the Great Financial
Crisis."
The Moelis plan stands out as
a strikingly bold grab for control of the companies and their profits. It calls
for the dividend payments to the Treasury to cease so that the companies can
rebuild capital. Shockingly, it also calls for the cancellation of the senior
preferred stock altogether–with no
compensation for the past risk and future profits currently
due to taxpayers. It is as if a company proposed to do a stock buyback by
proposing to cancel its shares rather than purchasing them for cash.
So
will Maxine Waters be the crusading financial protector of our 401k plans and
save America from the next financial bubble? Well, there will certainly be lots
of harassment and shakedowns. But don't count on her steering us clear of Wall
Street excesses. If history is any guide, Mad Maxine will be way too busy
raising money from the people she is now in charge of regulating. Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at The
Heritage Foundation
Waters,
who represents some of Los Angeles’ poorest inner-city neighborhoods, has also
helped family members make more than $1 million through business ventures with companies and causes
that she has helped, according to her hometown newspaper. While she and her
relatives get richer (she lives in a $4.5 million Los Angeles mansion), her constituents get poorer.
JUDICIAL WATCH
VIVA LA RAZA
SUPREMACY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS, CHAIN MIGRATION, NO LEGAL NEED APPLY and
BILLIONS IN WELFARE TO KEEP THEM CRAWLING OVER OUR BORDERS???
DEMOCRAT PARTY
CORRUPTION
"This is how they
will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who
orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress
will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of
migrants. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must
endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members,
drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt
for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
THE
INVASION SPONSORED BY THE DEMOCRAT PARTY
Congressional
Democrats are apparently fine with catch-and-release policies because they see
the likely electoral benefits. According to Customs and Border Protection
(CPB), of the 94,285 Central American family units apprehended last year, 99
percent of them remain in the country today. CPB also reports that 98 percent
of the 31,754 unaccompanied minors from the Northern Triangle of Central
America remain in the country. CAL THOMAS
THE (REALITY) OF THE GLOBALIST
DEMOCRAT PARTY AS IT SERVES THE RICH:
Anti-Semitic, open borders for
cheaper labor and funded by criminal banksters… and these pols are making vast
fortunes sucking the blood of America!
We must not let them cheat their
way to power over the rest of us. Their ongoing vote fraud must be
stopped and the Democrats need to take a look at themselves and at what they
have become. It's not a pretty picture. What they have become threatens
to destroy the greatest nation on the planet and they are doing it on
purpose. They have nothing but contempt for the US as founded and
for those of us who love this country. PATRICIA McCARTHY – AMERICAN THINKER
“Then we suffered the rattling election of
Barack Obama, whose active membership in a white-, Jewish-, and America-hating
church was well known to the electorate. His close personal
relationship with the likes of his adored Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Louis
Farrakhan was no secret. Obama was open about his goals. He
told us he was out to "fundamentally transform America" and the
world.” ALAN BERGSTEIN
“There is a deep racist and anti-Semitic disease in the leadership of
the Democrats. As Senator Cory Booker brings his hatred for the Jewish State to
the Senate, he should be asked whether he agrees with his hero, “The only good
Zionist is a dead Zionist we must take a lesson from Hitler”. DANIEL GREENFIELD
DIANNE FEINSTEIN’S FIRES:
This is what crony capitalism gives you!
"In fact, the destruction has
again exposed the criminal indifference and negligence of the ruling class and
both its political parties, Democrat and Republican. Social infrastructure,
including fire departments, have been starved of funds for decades as trillions
of dollars have been funneled into the bank accounts of the rich."
WHY DID THE FIRST LADY OF CORRUPTION and AMERICA’S
GREATEST WAR PROFITEER SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN and her cronies
PACIFIC GAS & ELECTRIC BURN DOWN MEXIFORNIA?
CALIFORNIA
BURNS …. Again!
The Mexican
welfare state under the weight of corruption and staggering cost of the LA RAZA
welfare state on their legals’ backs!
"In
fact, the destruction has again exposed the criminal indifference and
negligence of the ruling class and both its political parties, Democrat and
Republican. Social infrastructure, including fire departments, have been
starved of funds for decades as trillions of dollars have been funneled into
the bank accounts of the rich."
“Democrats Move Towards
‘Oligarchical Socialism,’ Says
Forecaster Joel Kotkin.”
ELECTION DAY: THE CLEAR-CUT CHOICE AMERICANS FACE
The stark contrast between the two parties.
November 2, 2018
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
This year’s midterm election offers the starkest contrast between the two parties in recent memory, making the choice of which to vote for obvious. We have reached a critical point in the long-developing transformation of our country from a democratic republic to the concentrated power and “soft despotism” of a technocratic elite. This year’s vote will determine whether Donald Trump’s pushback against that transformation will continue, or whether it will stall.
Democrats, of course, have been the main engine of that transformation. For over a century their politics and policies have relentlessly shifted further and further toward the progressive left. They have embraced and institutionalized the doctrines of technocracy based on a rejection of the Constitutional order and its philosophical assumptions that common sense, practical experience, virtue, and traditional wisdom are sufficient to make people capable of self-rule.
Democrats also rejected the Founders’ deep-seated fear of concentrated and centralized power, a lesson taught on every page of political history for 2500 years: No amount of technical training or knowledge can change a flawed human nature and its permanent vulnerability to the lust for power that always ends in tyranny. Hence the Founders’ separation and dispersal of power among the sovereign states and the three branches of the federal government. Protected by divided powers, the liberty of self-reliant and self-governing citizens became the bulwark against the self-aggrandizement of power by elites, and the tyranny that follows.
The more the Democrat Party moved toward progressive technocracy, the more it abandoned ordered liberty as the most important reason for government to exist in the first place. Instead it endorsed the grand narrative of modernity: The inevitable progress and improvement of people and society, based on “human sciences” presumably as successful as physics and mathematics at effecting improving changes, would create the brave new world that avoided the miseries and sufferings of the benighted past. Technological progress became the model for this dream, its success in the material world now to be achieved in the human, social, and political realm. Of course, such a regime required “experts” to be installed in the centralized bureaus and agencies of the federal government, and to be given the power over policy once the purview of the representatives elected by the sovereign people and accountable to them at the ballot box. Now divided and balanced power was scorned as an 18th century anachronism and systematically degraded.
Accelerating under Franklin D. Roosevelt, this ideological program relentlessly moved forward, bringing along many Republicans who accepted the inevitability of the technocratic, redistributive state, and found that the centralization of power and privilege served their own interests as well. They embraced the Democrats’ underlying technocratic assumptions, and ceded their legislative authority to the cadres of unelected, unaccountable federal workers, and to the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court, which now essentially legislate laws, enforce them, and determine their legitimacy.
Eventually, this bipartisan progressive paradigm provided the foundations of the “ruling center” in which Democrats set the bounds of acceptable policy and political discourse, and Republicans practice the “preemptive cringe” in the face of Democrat overreach. This dynamic is lauded as “bipartisanship,” the preferred method of progressive rule by political technicians, who see citizens as their wards and clients, and dismiss the Constitution’s separation and balancing of power and factions as inefficient “partisanship” that keep us from “solving problems.”
What accelerated this long-developing transformation of the political order and brought us to this momentous choice was Barack Obama. Exploiting our dysfunctional racial narrative of indelible white racism and guilt, Obama was twice elected on the hope of racial redemption on the cheap, and the promise of technocratic expertise and “science-based” government. All voters had to do was ignore his public record of leftist progressivism, and whites would be forgiven. Then the races could start coexisting like human beings in a world with “no white Americans, no black Americans,” rather than remain trapped in an eternal racial melodrama in which whites always have to pay.
But the Democrats’ true intensions soon became clear. Racial reconciliation was a pipe-dream, as Obama and his Attorney General interfered in racial conflicts and stoked the fires. Policies like Obamacare well beyond the progressive-lite center began to emerge. Crackpot ideas of the cultural left escaped from the universities and began an all-out assault on the Bill of Rights in service to an illiberal identity politics. Political correctness, imposed on the country and enforced by the technocratic federal overlords, grew ever more intrusive and totalitarian. Citizens who resisted their patronizing tutelage were insulted as “bitter clingers to guns and religion,” “deplorables,” or “wacko-birds,” as the Dems’ favorite conservative John McCain called them. Protesting the admission of nearly two million poorly vetted immigrants a year was decried as “xenophobia” and “racism.” Patriotism and national pride were demonized, and American sovereignty subordinated to the global technocratic elite and its “rules-based order” alleged to be superior to a toxic American exceptionalism.
But typical of all tyrants, the Democrats overreached. Obamacare, growth-killing regulations, and higher taxes at home; and a foreign policy of retreat, “leading from behind,” and apology for America’s sins abroad marked the progressives’ hubristic certainty that they could ride roughshod over the bipartisan consensus that at least had checked some of the left’s ambitions by reminding them––in 1968 1972, and 1980–– that the US remained a center-right country most of whose citizens self-identified as conservatives or moderates. The political success of “New Democrat” Bill Clinton followed his recognition of this truth, which he brilliantly exploited as a “Third Way” and more cynically, as “triangulation.”
The Dems’ arrogance at ignoring Clinton’s strategy during the Obama years was punished with the loss of the House and then the Senate, along with most of the state governments. A sluggish recovery and foreign policy debacles like Benghazi, the rise of ISIS, and the catastrophic Iran deal showed starkly the failure of the technocratic elite when its utopian delusions and ideological pretensions met the stern taskmaster of a world of hard, cruel men who respected only brutal force. The wages of progressive statism––more intrusive federal power, illiberal policies backed by executive fiat and the courts, the corruption of federal agencies by partisan interests, and a worsening of race relations–– had earlier fueled the Tea Party, which galvanized the discontent and helped the Republicans take the House in 2010.
Then came Donald Trump.
Trump launched an all-fronts assault on the bipartisan consensus. The establishment Republicans, who used the Tea Party for electoral gain but didn’t address the larger discontents it gave voice to, revealed with some exceptions their fealty to the social and cultural shibboleths that marked the elite apart from the middling classes and non-college educated working class of flyover country. In contrast, Trump spoke in the direct, earthy, and at times vulgar idiom that has been part of American folkways since the Republic’s beginning. His disdain both for totalitarian censorship by politically correct commissars, and for the illiberal neo-tribalism of identity politics, captured the citizens’ anger at the double-standards and hypocrisy of the holier-than-thou nomenklatura virtue-signaling as it grubbed for more privilege and power. The progressives helped stoke the anger even more with their eternal media savaging of the president that culminated in the still festering Russia collusion show-trial and the shameful slandering of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Equally important, on issues such as hyper-regulation of the economy, the relentlessly metastasizing federal bureaucracy, the addiction to high taxes, the excesses of activist federal courts, and the dysfunctions of our immigration policies, Trump expressed the common sense that many ordinary people used to understand just how much our government has failed the people.
And, so far, his policies have worked. Trump is reshaping the courts, appointing 84 federal judges, including two Supreme Court Justices, who promise to rein in for decades the judicial activism the progressives have relied on to implement their policy preference without having to face the voting citizens. On the economic front, wages and salaries have the highest year-to-year gain, 3.1%, in a decade. Economic growth has reached 3.5% this quarter, a rise that progressive economic savants had announced impossible. Unemployment is the lowest in decades, and more new jobs have been created than people available to fill them. Consumer confidence is at an 18-year high. Tax reform has put more money in people’s pockets. Repatriated corporate taxes have fueled investment in the domestic economy rather than abroad.
Finally, Trump has returned common sense to our foreign policy. He has backed out of multinational treaties like the Paris Climate Accords, and the disastrous agreement to bribe Iran into delaying for less than a decade its development of nuclear weapons. Both were manifestations of the long failure of the decrepit “rules-based international order” that served mainly the transnational global elites at the expense of national sovereignty and the people. He has moved our country closer to the traditional mission of foreign policy, which is to serve the interests and security of American citizens and put them first, not the interests of some fantasy “global community” or the “cosmopolitan” functionaries of transnational institutions. This credo of putting America first, and his full-throated expression of this sentiment has revived and celebrated the patriotism and national pride that progressives and Davos Man have long scorned and slandered as the nursery of fascism rather than of democratic freedom for distinct and diverse national identities.
On Tuesday we will face the choice: continue to push back against the progressive agenda to “fundamentally transform America,” or continue to feed the progressive Leviathan at the cost of our freedom, autonomy, sovereignty, and national identity of a people who have never been perfect, but have advanced and inspired prosperity and freedom more than any other country in history.
Common sense tells us the choice is obvious. Vote for freedom, and vote for America.
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