Nancy Pelosi used to point her angry finger at Donald Trump, but she leaves him in the dust when it comes to busting norms, dividing Congress and causing mayhem. If anyone is to blame for the hyper-partisanship in Washington these days, it’s the spiteful House speaker.
She behaves more like a Mafia don waging a gang war than a dignified, fair and honest presiding officer, which is what the speaker’s role requires.
Pelosi abuses her power in ways that once were unthinkable. Her speakership has been the antithesis of Lincoln’s entreaty to "the better angels of our nature." Everyone in Congress — and, by extension, the nation — has been sullied by the spite and vitriol she has injected into the political sphere. There is no grace or Christian charity, just the barren wasteland of the zero-sum game, power for power’s sake.
It’s made all the worse by her increasingly frantic claims to be a "devout Catholic."
PELOSI INSISTS ON 'NO PARTISANSHIP' IN JAN. 6 COMMITTEE AFTER REJECTING 2 REPUBLICANS
The fact that all this venom is packaged in the shape of a small, elderly, expensively shod woman has bestowed upon her an element of deference her actions do not deserve. But last week there were a couple of signs that she’s finally worn out her welcome.
One was her game-playing over the Jan. 6 select committee, when she arbitrarily rejected two Republicans — Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana — from an already stacked panel.
She claimed "integrity" required her veto since the two Republicans had "made statements and taken actions that I think would impact the integrity of the committee."
Hah. This is a committee that includes such models of integrity as Adam "Steele Dossier" Schiff.
Pelosi is scared of Jordan and Banks, even though she has the majority. That’s the real reason. She is afraid they will bring to the committee, on behalf of the American people it is supposed to represent, the very reasonable question about her own culpability in the events of Jan. 6. Most obviously, what was her reason for leaving the Capitol Police outnumbered and unprotected?
Jordan and Banks wanted to ask why Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund’s request for the National Guard to buttress his troops was denied. Why were his repeated requests to the sergeant at arms — who answers directly to Pelosi — rebuffed?
We’re talking about repeated requests, from two days before the riots to hours after the Capitol was breached. Why did she blame Sund and force him to resign hours after the riot, and then lie the next day when she said he hadn’t bothered phoning her? It stinks.
"Nancy Pelosi is not interested in an investigation. She’s only interested in a narrative," Banks told "Fox News Sunday."
"Once you go up to the top of the flagpole of who is in charge of the Capitol Police … Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, has more control and authority and responsibility over the leadership of the Capitol Police than anyone else in the United States Capitol. So, she doesn’t want us to ask these questions because at the end of the day, she is ultimately responsible for the breakdown of security at the Capitol that happened on January 6th."
These are questions that would be asked by a bipartisan committee in search of the truth. But the truth to Pelosi is like a cross to a vampire.
Another question for the committee would be whether the shooting of Ashli Babbitt by a Capitol officer was justified. It also could examine the very real and documented inhumane treatment of Jan. 6 suspects who are not charged with violent offenses but who remain in jail without trial just down the hill from Congress, many in solitary confinement now for their seventh month.
But everyone knows Pelosi just wants to turn the commission into a third Trump impeachment stunt and make sure it stretches on into next year in the vain hope that it will distract midterm voters from the car crash that is the Biden presidency.
It’s all she’s got. Pelosi’s nasty antics almost cost the Democrats the House in November and she only retained the speakership by a thread, so, for her, it’s time for lifeboats overboard.
"Why are you allowing a lame-duck speaker to destroy this institution?" House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said last week when he properly withdrew all five Republicans he had nominated from the Pelosi committee.
Tit for tat, Sunday, Pelosi slyly anointed the anti-Trump patsy Adam Kinzinger to join his fellow pariah Liz Cheney as her pet Republicans.
Kinzinger "brings great patriotism to the Committee’s mission," she declared, abusing the word "patriotism" just like she did the word "integrity."
Kinzinger succumbed to the flattery: "Today, I was asked to serve on the bipartisan January 6th Select Committee, and I humbly accepted. When duty calls, I will always answer."
Such humility.
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It’s up to McCarthy now to give flesh to Freedom Caucus demands for "a privileged motion by July 31, 2021, to vacate the chair and end Nancy Pelosi’s authoritarian reign as speaker of the House."
Her "tenure is destroying the House of Representatives and our ability to faithfully represent the people we are here to serve," the Republicans wrote in a letter to McCarthy.
The move is no doubt doomed to fail, but it’s well worth the exercise, if only to hold Pelosi to account for her divisive reign.
The other sign that Pelosi is on the wane is the explosive reaction of her archbishop to her in-your-face pretense that she is a "devout Catholic" who also happens to be an abortion activist.
"As a devout Catholic and mother of five in six years, I feel that God blessed my husband and me with our beautiful family," Pelosi said last week in the same breath as asserting that taxpayer-funded abortions are a "priority"
"It’s an issue of fairness and justice for poorer women in our country … the right thing to do."
It’s enough to make you throw up.
But San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone saw right through the sophistry. "To use the smokescreen of abortion as an issue of health and fairness to poor women is the epitome of hypocrisy: What about the health of the baby being killed?" he told Catholic News Agency. "What about giving poor women real choice, so they are supported in choosing life?"
The real "devout Catholics" are the "people of faith who run pro-life crisis pregnancy clinics; they are the only ones who provide poor women life-giving alternatives to having their babies killed in their wombs."
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Catholics everywhere squirm at the ostentatious piety of Pelosi and her fellow apostate Joe Biden. If they must sin, can they at least keep religion out of it?
The real question is: Where’s the lightning bolt?
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