House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif. speaks outside her office on Capitol Hill, Monday, March 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool)
For a while now, I have been working on this somewhat conspiracy-ish theory, and you all know what it is: That Nancy Pelosi is purposefully trying to sabotage her party in an effort to get them back for forcing her hand on the impeachment disaster.
I realize it sounds nuts, but she was already forced to promise she would step down from Speaker after 2022. If Trump wins this year, she will be the leader of an utterly broken and insane party, one that she lost control of back in 2019. It’s hard to imagine that the Democratic Party of 2020, with all its lunatic fringe, is one she wants to lead in the second half of the Trump era. So, with a bitter taste in her mouth after the 2019 negotiations with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others and the impeachment mess, maybe she is just trying to drag them as far down as she can.
That would certainly explain why, after a weekend of bipartisan negotiating and a near-consensus on a Wuhan virus stimulus package, she would fly back into Washington D.C. and blow the whole thing up. There are very few other reasons outside of being absolutely hammered over the past four days or losing her mind. The American people have been waiting on an economic answer to the COVID-19 turmoil, and she blew it up in very Wile E. Coyote fashion.
What’s even more bizarre is how the Democrats turned on a dime and acted as if the bill they agreed upon was suddenly a non-starter and then blamed the Republicans for trying to force through a corporate bailout they themselves helped to negotiate, and a corporate bailout not unlike the one Pelosi got her party to wholeheartedly endorse and pass after the financial crash over a decade ago.
As has been documented countless times, Schumer himself praised the bipartisan efforts one day and condemned the bill to death 24 hours later. Chris Murphy of Connecticut accused the Republicans of not allowing the Democrats to help craft the bill – despite the fact that the Democrats spent the entire weekend working with Republicans on the bill.
They all fell in line with her, which kind of hurts my theory that she is trying to destroy them all, but also speaks highly of just how mindlessly devoted to her they are (and maybe they’re just blinded by their devotion and can’t see she is Pied Pipering them to their doom).
I don’t like the idea of major corporate bailouts, and I don’t like the idea of leaving small businesses to suffer. There are better ways to figure out who gets how much and it doesn’t have to include 2018 tax returns or a $75,000 threshold. Hell, you don’t have to have one of those at all.
Personally, I am glad the debate is out in the open. It should be. As I wrote yesterday morning, this shouldn’t be one bill, but several smaller ones so we can get these things through faster. But, let’s not pretend the Republicans screwed this up. There was an agreement right up until Nancy Pelosi came back to Washington and then there was no agreement. This is on her and her party.
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