For John, BLUF: Style is important, but outcome is what counts. Nothing to see here; just move along.
Here is the sub-headline:
The Speaker’s willingness to get in the President’s face has made many a meme, but their conflict has more to say about our constitutional checks and balances.
From The New Yorker, by Dean Steve Coll (Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University), 7 February 2020.
Here is the lede plus one:
On January 23, 2017, Donald Trump’s fourth day as President, he met with congressional leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House. “You know, I won the popular vote,” he started off, and then repeated the calumny that Hillary Clinton had received three to five million illegal votes, owing to fraud. “That’s not true,” Nancy Pelosi replied, according to “A Very Stable Genius,” the recently published account of the Trump Presidency by the Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. “If we’re going to work together,” Pelosi said, “we have to stipulate to a certain set of facts.” Steve Bannon, then Trump’s chief strategist, who was in the room, whispered to colleagues, “She’s going to get us. Total assassin.”This reads like a puff piece for the new book, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America. As a puff piece it works well. However, it leaves me thinking that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not yet figured out how to work with President Trump to do the Peoples' Business.♠Pelosi did become one of Trump’s most unflinching adversaries, in part because she grasped early on that invitations to his White House are often just call sheets for unscripted television; her finger-jabbing readiness to get in Trump’s face has made her a recurring meme of the Democratic resistance. She offered her most vivid performance yet on February 4th, during the President’s third State of the Union address. As Trump spoke, Pelosi, wearing suffragist white, sat behind him in the high-backed chair reserved for the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and conspicuously shuffled and reshuffled a printed copy of the President’s speech. After he finished, she tore the text in half. Twitter blew up, as the Speaker had clearly intended; she explained that she had abandoned decorum because Trump’s speech “was a manifesto of mistruths.”
I am hoping that the President and Speaker, and the Senate Majority Leader, can work together to get us a budget and some immigration reform. That would be nice for the American People.
As for the question of checks and balances, they seem to be in place and in good condition. The founders don't seem to have been that enthusiastic about speed in government. Four years of gridlock probably does not mean the end of the Republic.
Regards — Cliff
♠ Not to say it is all on her, but she has been playing the role of "Adult in the Room."
No comments:
Post a Comment