Poor Nancy Pelosi. She’s so blinded by her own power that she thinks that Republicans want advice from her.
The California Democrat and Speaker of the House is currently in the United Kingdom for this weekend’s G7 Heads of Parliament Conference. She appeared at the Cambridge Union for a moderated conversation where she urged her “Republican friends” to rescue their party by conforming to the Democrats’ agenda for America.
Pelosi spoke to the audience as though she were addressing the GOP directly, telling them that the Republicans have done “wonderful things for the country” in the past. But she chastised the party for allowing a “cult” to “hijack” its agenda.
One might think Pelosi was referring to the Trump administration – in fact, she probably thinks so too – but that’s not quite the case. Apparently, Pelosi thinks that the GOP’s cultish behavior stems from the fact that they’re not rolling over to let the Democrats have their way on every issue.
The speaker claimed that today’s Republicans want to “suppress the vote because they have no positive message to win” as she willfully buys the lie that efforts in states with GOP governors like Georgia and Texas make voting more difficult for minorities. She added that the GOP can only win by suppressing the vote, ignoring the gains that Republicans made at both the federal and state levels in 2020.
Pelosi then went on to accuse the GOP of disrespecting the “beautiful diversity” of this nation. The black, Hispanic, and Asian members of Congress who are serving in the Republican Party would most likely beg to differ, as would the growing number of minorities who have turned to the GOP in recent elections.
Of course, Pelosi’s answer to the Republicans’ efforts to make voting more secure and more readily available is the dreadful HR1, which she called an “agnostic” way of redistricting. She claimed that the bill “may not benefit Democrats” but would open up Republican districts to candidates “other than the ones that are in Congress now.” In other words, the best way to handle Republicans is to redistrict them out with bad legislation like HR1.
Another issue where Pelosi believes the cult has a hold on the GOP is gun control. Citing a statistic where some 80% of survey participants support universal background checks to buy guns, Pelosi wondered why Congress doesn’t support this kind of legislation. No doubt she would push gun control further down that slippery slope if she were to get her way on this one agenda item.
The Speaker mentioned other issues like climate change and abortion rights with no statistics to back her up and certainly no consensus that the majority of Americans support the draconian environmental measures and unfettered access to abortion that her party advocates.
The most precious bit of advice that Pelosi had to offer was that the GOP should “take back [their] party so that it’s more a reflection of Republicans in the country than an allegiance to the former president.” Here’s a news flash for the speaker: the days of the liberal Republican are over. Today’s GOP isn’t the party of Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, and William Weld; rather, the vast majority of Donald Trump’s policies fit within the mainstream of Republican thought.
No thank you, Nancy. For the most part, Republicans like their party the way it is, and they’re not open to advice from the people who are dead set on defeating it at every turn.