Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Why Shouldn’t Pelosi Try to Strong-Arm the Republicans? It Has Worked for Decades.

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
There has been a great deal of speculation as to why Nancy Pelosi was so anxious to rush her impeachment Schiff Show through Congress, but is now demanding that Mitch McConnell make the Senate’s process as unfair as hers was before she allows him to get the ball rolling. Many have even speculated that she is embarrassed by the whole thing and just wants it to go away before it completely kills the reelection hopes of too many Congressional Democrats. It is more probable, however, that she is demanding certainty that the Senate trial be “fair,” by which she means “viciously biased against the President,” because she knows that the Republicans are likely to give her everything she wants.
Pelosi has good reason to think that she can intimidate McConnell and other Senate Republican leaders into folding and transforming their impeachment proceedings into a Stalinist show trial that will suppress evidence exonerating the President, highlight the tendentious version of events that the House offered, and maybe even result in Trump’s removal from office. The Republicans have a pattern going back well over half a century of caving in to Democrat demands and doing their bidding. Pelosi has witnessed a great deal of this firsthand as she grew to be a multimillionaire on her modest Congresswoman’s salary. Why should she think it will be any different this time?
Republican kowtowing to Democrats goes back to the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt. After Democrats successfully blamed Republicans for the Great Depression and initiated the massive expansion of federal power that was the New Deal, the Republicans nominated for president not critics of Roosevelt’s big government measures, but me-too candidates who praised what FDR was doing: Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, and Thomas E. Dewey. Not surprisingly, each of these pale copies of the great New Dealer were trounced by the real thing.
Republicans who didn’t think a huge increase of federal control over the daily lives of Americans was a terrific idea had their best chance in 1952, when Republicans won the trifecta of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives for the first time since 1930. However, the new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, would not hear of this. He declared: “Should any party attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things....Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
Read the rest from Robert Spencer HERE.

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