President Barack Obama’s Washington-bashing could boomerang on his party in Congress if he’s not careful, House Democratic leaders have warned White House senior adviser David Axelrod.
The fear — raised by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, campaign chief Chris Van Hollen and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn in a closed-door meeting Thursday — is that Democrats have more to lose if anti-Washington sentiment is not directed at one party or the other.
Pelosi tells Obama to stop criticizing Congress and DC
“If the president is going to go out and talk about how Washington’s broken, he’s got to include a strong contrast with congressional Republicans, or else we’re going to get blamed for it,” one meeting participant said later.
But Axelrod gave no indication that he plans to alter the president’s course, sources told POLITICO. White House aides did not reply to requests for comment.
House leaders’ concerns over the president’s criticism of “Washington” or “Congress” rather than the GOP appear to reflect anxiety about the possibility that Obama’s positioning for the 2012 election may come at the expense of Democratic congressional seats this fall.
Read More: By JOHN BRESNAHAN & JONATHAN ALLEN, Politico
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, DC, Nancy PelosiCongress is poised to miss its April 15 deadline for finishing next year’s budget without even considering a draft in either chamber.
Unlike citizens’ tax-filing deadline, Congress’s mid-April benchmark is nonbinding. And members seem to be in no rush to get the process going.
A Budget? we don’t need no stinkin’ budget
Indeed, some Democratic insiders suspect that leaders will skip the budget process altogether this year — a way to avoid the political unpleasantness of voting on spending, deficits and taxes in an election year — or simply go through a few of the motions, without any real effort to complete the work.
Regan Lachapelle, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), would go only so far as saying that the budget “is on a list of things that are possible for this work period” — a reference to the window that opens when members roll back into town Monday and closes when they leave around Memorial Day.
Read More: By JONATHAN ALLEN, Politico
Tags: Barack Obama, Budget, Harry Reid, Nancy PelosiPresident Obama will soon propose a health care bill that will be "much smaller" than the House bill but "big enough" to put the country on a "path" toward health care reform, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday.
"In a matter of days, we will have a proposal," Pelosi said, pointing to Obama’s forthcoming bill.
Obama and Pelosi have a new bill coming out
"It will be a much smaller proposal than we had in the House bill because that’s where we can gain consensus. But it will be big enough to put us on a path of affordable, quality health care for all Americans that holds insurance companies accountable."
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama’s proposal likely will be introduced on Wednesday and will address both process and substance.
Gibbs said while he agrees for the most part with Pelosi that the plan will be well developed, it is unlikely to be written in legislative legalese. But he said the plan will have "a decent amount of overlap" with the proposals on the White House Web site now.
Read More: FOXNews
Tags: Barack Obama, Healthcare Bill, Nancy PelosiHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s increasingly public disagreements with President Barack Obama are a reflection of something deeper: the seething resentment some Democrats feel over what they see as cavalier treatment from a wounded White House.
Pelosi and Obama are at odds
For months, the California lawmaker has been pushing Obama hard in private while praising him in public. But now she’s being more open in her criticism, in part because she feels the White House was wrong — in the wake of the Democrats’ loss in Massachusetts — to push the Senate health care bill on the House when she knew there was no way it would pass.
Earlier this month, Pelosi criticized the president’s State of the Union call to exempt defense spending from a budget freeze. And in a White House meeting with leaders of both parties this week, she questioned the effectiveness of his plan to give small businesses tax breaks to hire workers.
“What you’re seeing now in public has been building in private,” said a top House Democratic official. “House members did their work — they did everything the president asked of them. And it gets stuck in the Senate. Or the Senate screws it up.”
Though Pelosi and other House Democrats have made it clear that they’re angry with the Senate, they’re also frustrated with the president, upset that he hasn’t come to terms with the problems of getting legislation through the upper chamber — or done enough to overcome them.
Read More: By MIKE ALLEN & PATRICK O’CONNOR, Politico
Tags: Barack Obama, Infighting, Nancy PelosiThe Obama administration’s efforts to find common ground with congressional Republicans ran into two pockets of resistance Tuesday: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader John Boehner.
Pelosi Rebuffs Obama’s Overtures
At a closed-door White House session, Pelosi expressed skepticism over an administration proposal to offer tax breaks to businesses that create new jobs. And Boehner urged President Barack Obama to abandon much of the Democrats’ current agenda on the ground that it’s killing jobs by creating uncertainty in the markets.
The White House session with congressional leaders was supposed to be a step toward bipartisanship, with a focus on jobs. But Pelosi made it clear that there’s disagreement, even among Democrats.
White House economic advisers Christina Romer and Larry Summers defended the administration’s proposal to give employers a $5,000 credit for each new worker they hire as well as help with Social Security taxes.
Pelosi countered that no one she’s consulted believes that the plan will actually lead to the creation of new jobs, sources said.
Read More: By MANU RAJU, Politico
Tags: Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Outreach EffortsThough reeling from a political body blow, House Democrats rejected the quickest fix to their health care dilemma Thursday and signaled that any agreement on President Barack Obama’s signature issue will come slowly, if at all.
The Scott Brown election has sent a message so clear even these three can’t ignore it
Democrats weighed a handful of difficult options as they continued to absorb Republican Scott Brown’s election to the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by Edward M. Kennedy. Several said Obama must forcefully help them find a way to avoid the humiliation of enacting no bill, and they urged him to do so quickly, to put the painful process behind them.
House leaders said they could not pass a Senate-approved bill, standing by itself, because of objections from liberals and moderates alike. Such a move could have settled the matter, because it would not have required further Senate action. Brown’s stunning victory restored the GOP’s power to block bills with Senate filibusters.
Democratic leaders weighed two main options, both problematic. The first would require congressional Democrats to muscle their way past stiff GOP objections despite warning signs from Massachusetts voters and worries about next November’s elections.
Read More: By CHARLES BABINGTON, AP
Tags: Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Healthcare reform, Nancy PelosiDespite the fact that it is as cold in Washington as it has ever been, the heat is rising over the news that congressional Democrats and the White House are planning to play "ping-pong" with America’s healthcare system.
Negotiating in secret is upsetting a lot of people
As reported Monday by a variety of blogs, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have spent the congressional recess trying to devise a plan that will allow them to get legislation through Congress to create a wholly revamped U.S. healthcare system in a way that minimizes the risk of the bill being stopped in either the House or Senate.
Typically, when the House and Senate pass different versions of the same legislation, a bi-cameral conference committee is conveyed, where senior members of the House and Senate negotiate on the language of a bill until both sides come up with something they can agree on. On healthcare, as many senior Democrats now concede, going to a conference committee would be equivalent to opening up the whole can of worms all over again, putting its final passage in jeopardy.
By playing "ping pong" with the bill, Pelosi and Reid hope to minimize the chance that any single change will provide the impetus for the bill’s defeat, something that is easily possible given how difficult it was to get the House and Senate to pass the bill in the first place.
Read More: By Peter Roff, US News & World Report
Tags: Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Negotiating in secret, ObamacareBy James Rowley, Bloomberg
Pelosi continues to push forward: come 2010 she will have no idea what hit her
Undeterred by Republican election triumphs in Virginia and New Jersey, Democratic leaders put the U.S. House on a path to vote as early as Saturday on the most sweeping overhaul of health-care policy in four decades.
The election of Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia won’t affect how the House proceeds on legislation to extend insurance to 36 million people and create a government- run program to compete with private insurers, lawmakers said.
Party leaders signaled they’re ready for the House to begin debating the legislation and vote on its final passage by filing a 42-page amendment that made last- minute changes to the bill. The filing last night triggered a 72-hour waiting period that Democrats pledged to give Republicans before a vote.
“We are on the verge of doing something great,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters today after meeting with lawmakers in Washington. “From my perspective, we won last night,” she said, pointing to Democratic wins in two House races to fill vacancies in California and New York.
Tags: Elections looming, Nancy Pelosi, Pushes Liberal Policies, Republican VictoriesSpeaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she’s prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that’s what it takes to pass ObamaCare, and little wonder.
The health bill she unwrapped last Thursday, which President Obama hailed as a "critical milestone," may well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced.
Pelosi puts forth the worst bill since the New Deal…
In a rational political world, this 1,990-page runaway train would have been derailed months ago. With spending and debt already at record peacetime levels, the bill creates a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.
Yet at this point, Democrats have dumped any pretense of genuine bipartisan "reform" and moved into the realm of pure power politics as they race against the unpopularity of their own agenda. The goal is to ram through whatever income-redistribution scheme they can claim to be "universal coverage." The result will be destructive on every level—for the health-care system, for the country’s fiscal condition, and ultimately for American freedom and prosperity.
Read More: WSJ Editorial Board
Tags: 1, 990 pages of bureacracy, Liberal Bill, Nancy PelosiHouse Democrats reached agreement Wednesday on key elements of a health care bill that would vastly alter America’s medical landscape, requiring virtually universal sign-ups and establishing a new government-run insurance option for millions.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned a formal announcement Thursday morning, but details were still being finalized, lawmakers and aides said. Officials said the legislation could be up for a vote on the House floor next week.
Pelosi pushes a more liberal version of Obamacare forward
The rollout would cap months of arduous negotiations to bridge differences between liberal and moderate Democrats and blend health care overhaul bills passed by three separate committees over the summer. The developments in the House came as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., tried to round up support among moderate Democrats for his bill, which includes a modified government insurance option that states could opt out of.
Reid met Thursday with Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who faces a potentially tough re-election next year.
Read More: By ERICA WERNER, AP
Tags: Liberal Bill, Nancy Pelosi, Obamacare, Public Option
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