Democrat Leaders Hold Midnight Meeting, Freeze GOP out of “Stimulus” Negotiations
Jeff Emanuel at Red State reports More and more Pelosi "Lies", this is as far a cry as you can get from Bi-Partisan Shipemocrat Leaders Hold Midnight Meeting, Freeze GOP out of “Stimulus” Negotiations.
I would like "to come as close as you can in the political reality to a bipartisan management of the House," said Nancy Pelosi in 2006. "I'm a big believer in bipartisanship on so many issues. You can't address [most issues] and do it in a partisan way. They are too big, they involve too many people, and they involve too much money, private and public money. You've got to do it in a way that has legitimacy."
This morning, a very senior contact within the House GOP informed me that Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Harry Reid (D-NV) met at length last night to put together the House/Senate conference report on the “stimulus” package. Only Democratic conference committee members were informed of the meeting and permitted to attend.
The purpose behind the meeting was apparently to produce a conference report on the over $800 billion borrow-and-spend bill that was entirely free of Republican input, and that could be presented no later than this afternoon in preparation for House and Senate floor action tomorrow.
Ironically, the Democrat-heavy House yesterday voted unanimously in favor of a GOP-sponsored resolution stating that the bill should be made subject to a 48 hour review period by the public before it was finally passed by Congress — something that seems very unlikely to happen, given Democrats’ actions over the last twelve hours.
In a post here on RedState, Congressman Tom Price (R-GA), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, confirmed reports of the Democrats’ midnight meeting. “Negotiations have already begun under the dark of night,” wrote Price this morning. “In closed room somewhere in the Capitol Building last night, Congressional Democrats and Obama administration officials met with no Republicans present.”
Price continued:
The “stimulus” package passed the House with zero GOP votes (and 11 Democrats voting against), and the Senate with three GOP votes, as Sens. Specter (R-PA), Collins (R-ME), and Snowe (R-ME) gave the nearly $1T package the votes it needed to reach the conference in the first place.
Now that the cuts made in their compromise package are being put back into the bill during midnight meetings that the minority is being entirely excluded from, the best thing the GOP as a whole can do is to vote unanimously against this bill in both houses — and the best thing beyond that for Specter, Snowe, and Collins to do would be to apologize to their fellow Republicans and to the American people for being so naive as to negotiate the resuscitation of this bill when it was on life support in their chamber, only to have every cut they negotiated out of it put right back in by a Democrat majority that never had any more intention of living up to its “compromise” agreements than it did of living up to its own rhetoric about “bipartisanship.”
I would like "to come as close as you can in the political reality to a bipartisan management of the House," said Nancy Pelosi in 2006. "I'm a big believer in bipartisanship on so many issues. You can't address [most issues] and do it in a partisan way. They are too big, they involve too many people, and they involve too much money, private and public money. You've got to do it in a way that has legitimacy."
This morning, a very senior contact within the House GOP informed me that Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Harry Reid (D-NV) met at length last night to put together the House/Senate conference report on the “stimulus” package. Only Democratic conference committee members were informed of the meeting and permitted to attend.
The purpose behind the meeting was apparently to produce a conference report on the over $800 billion borrow-and-spend bill that was entirely free of Republican input, and that could be presented no later than this afternoon in preparation for House and Senate floor action tomorrow.
Ironically, the Democrat-heavy House yesterday voted unanimously in favor of a GOP-sponsored resolution stating that the bill should be made subject to a 48 hour review period by the public before it was finally passed by Congress — something that seems very unlikely to happen, given Democrats’ actions over the last twelve hours.
In a post here on RedState, Congressman Tom Price (R-GA), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, confirmed reports of the Democrats’ midnight meeting. “Negotiations have already begun under the dark of night,” wrote Price this morning. “In closed room somewhere in the Capitol Building last night, Congressional Democrats and Obama administration officials met with no Republicans present.”
Price continued:
Rules for the conference committee dictate that there must be an open hearing for negotiations, but that hearing is controlled entirely by the majority party. It is the prerogative of congressional Democrats as to whether the hearing will be an honest and open forum or instead a dog and pony show while real negotiations take place in a smoke-filled backroom.House Democrats haven’t been shy about voicing their intent to use the conference to re-insert a large portion of the spending taken out of the Senate’s compromise bill, which was passed due to support from three Republicans who, apparently and inexplicably, thought Reps. Pelosi and Hoyer (D-MD) would be content to allow pet pork programs to remain on the cutting room floor when presented with the opportunity to reinsert them in conference.
With a trillion dollars of taxpayer money currently at stake, it is critical to provide the American people a full and complete understanding of how it is going to be spent.
The “stimulus” package passed the House with zero GOP votes (and 11 Democrats voting against), and the Senate with three GOP votes, as Sens. Specter (R-PA), Collins (R-ME), and Snowe (R-ME) gave the nearly $1T package the votes it needed to reach the conference in the first place.
Now that the cuts made in their compromise package are being put back into the bill during midnight meetings that the minority is being entirely excluded from, the best thing the GOP as a whole can do is to vote unanimously against this bill in both houses — and the best thing beyond that for Specter, Snowe, and Collins to do would be to apologize to their fellow Republicans and to the American people for being so naive as to negotiate the resuscitation of this bill when it was on life support in their chamber, only to have every cut they negotiated out of it put right back in by a Democrat majority that never had any more intention of living up to its “compromise” agreements than it did of living up to its own rhetoric about “bipartisanship.”
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