[American Thinker] Saturday was National Popcorn Day, but I’ve been nibbling on popcorn all week as Nancy Pelosi learned a lesson about presidential power and the media was gut checked by the special prosecutor. I haven’t had this much fun since election night 2016.
While she might have thought otherwise, the power of the commander-in-chief is far greater than that of the speaker of the House, and the humiliating way this was brought home to the congressional equivalent of Maerose Prizzi (h/t Michael Walsh) was something. She anticipated that she and her posse of cronies and their families (reports of a ninety-some entourage in all) would hop a military plane for a free trip to Brussels, Afghanistan, and Egypt, doubtless with fawning media coverage, leaving the president to sit alone in the White House hoping fruitlessly they’d toddle in there to negotiate an end to the shutdown. Reports vary as to whether she was on the tarmac or on her way there when the president cancelled the flight as incompatible during a shutdown when federal workers were not being paid and illegal aliens were continuing to invade.
The president twisted the knife, suggesting she was free to fly commercial, which served as a reminder of the enormous tab she ran up on such flights the last time she was speaker. She thought she had the upper hand in this. She learned she certainly didn’t, and was last seen at Reagan Airport, with one aide and a single security agent, heading out of town to somewhere on a commercial flight. The president cancelled his own trip to Davos and required other similar travel on military airplanes be made only at the approval of the secretary of defense until there is a budget he can sign that provides for a secure border barrier.
This may well have been a tit-for-tat response to Pelosi’s claim that the president should postpone his State of the Union address because the House chambers in which such things normally occur could not provide adequate security, something the Secret Service decried as untrue. Nevertheless, nothing could have better revealed the speaker’s callous disregard for the unpaid government workers who vote overwhelmingly Democrat or for the others whose lives have been disrupted by the shutdown and the inadequate security at our southern border. Or the superior power of the commander-in-chief. |