AMAC Exclusive – By Shane Harris
House Democrats met in Philadelphia Thursday for their first in-person retreat in three years. However, the event started late and was nearly canceled before it even began, thanks to a full-blown revolt from rank-and-file Democrats that threatened to derail negotiations over a spending package just hours before government funding expired. This latest fiasco underscores just how completely, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has lost control of her party and encapsulates the disarray that has characterized congressional proceedings generally since Democrats took control last January.
With government funding set to expire Friday night, Democrat House leadership finally released a $1.5 trillion omnibus spending package around 1:30 am Wednesday morning. Pelosi then scheduled a vote on the package later that same morning, meaning that lawmakers would only have a few hours to review the 2,700-page bill before being expected to vote on it.
Soon, however, it wasn’t just the expedited timeline that was giving Pelosi trouble and causing grumblings even within her own party. As part of the package, the Biden administration had requested $22 billion in additional COVID relief money, a number which was eventually pared down to $15 billion. However, after Democrats passed $1.9 trillion of COVID spending last March on a purely party-line vote, Republicans demanded a full accounting of where the funds already appropriated by Congress had gone – likely to highlight that many states still have tens of billions in left-over funds from previous rounds of spending.
As a result, Democrat and Republican leadership in the House and Senate agreed to offset part of the new spending by taking back unclaimed state and local COVID aid and redistributing it with the new package.
However, in an embarrassing setback, it soon became clear that Pelosi failed to get buy-in from her own party for the move and faced an all-out revolt. Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN) called it “completely unacceptable,” and one Democrat House leader estimated that 70 percent of rank-and-file Democrats were upset by the deal.
Pelosi was ultimately forced to strip the COVID funding from the bill and promised to bring it up as a stand-alone measure without the offsets next week – after which it will face a tough road to passage in the Senate.
While House Democrats have washed their hands of the matter and rushed off to their retreat, the entire incident serves as just the latest example of Democratic incompetence and underscores a disturbing trend that has become apparent since January of 2021: Not only are Democrats fixated on implementing extreme progressive policies, they appear wholly incapable of performing the basic functions of government.
While Pelosi has had no problem this Congress passing a slew of radical bills like mass amnesty for illegal immigrants, a federal takeover of elections, and multiple attempts to effectively defund the police that stood little chance of passing the 60-vote hurdle in the Senate, she struggled to hold her caucus together on actual necessary items like the infrastructure bill. When that bill finally was passed after several tries, it had been stripped of many actual hard infrastructure projects and was chock-full of progressive spending priorities that had nothing to do with repairing America’s aging roads and bridges.
Over in the Senate, Chuck Schumer was handed an admittedly tough situation with a 50-50 split, but has committed a number of unforced errors that have also undermined his party’s credibility when it comes to governing. For example, he apparently failed to mention to anyone in his party – including Nancy Pelosi – his secret deal with Joe Manchin to cap new spending at $1.5 trillion. It was thus altogether unsurprising when Manchin later killed Biden’s $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” plan.
President Joe Biden and his team, meanwhile, have failed to provide any sort of leadership for elected Democrats, and have in many cases been even more inept than Congress. After all, it was the Biden team who pushed the ill-fated COVID relief plan on Pelosi in the first place, and then failed to come to her aid when it imploded. Biden was also the one who pushed many of the disastrous policies (against warnings from even other Democrats) that have led to spiraling inflation and soaring gas prices.
Then, of course, there was the Afghanistan disaster, which likely played a role in emboldening the Russians to attempt the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. That has, in turn, resulted in an embarrassing mix-up on a fighter jet deal with NATO ally Poland, the failure to coordinate with other Western nations on Russia sanctions, and a general undermining of the American position in the world.
In addition to all of that, the Biden foreign policy team appears to be at this very moment selling out American interests to return to an even worse Iran nuclear deal, and just a few months ago caused an international incident that led France to recall its ambassador after the White House botched the diplomacy of a submarine deal with Australia. The list goes on.
So as House Democrats gather in Philadelphia this weekend, they have more than a few problems to sort out. While the growing number of crises upending the lives of ordinary Americans are no doubt the main cause of Democrats’ sinking poll numbers, it may also be that Americans see in the Democrats a party that simply cannot effectively run the government or even their own party. That does not bode well for Democrats’ electoral prospects this fall and gives Republicans another opening to make the case to voters that it’s time for a change in Washington.