It's only a short exchange, and the camera work is shaky, but this video and these remarks by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi are being quoted quite a bit on various blogs this week.
Following her program at The Commonwealth Club, in which she and Club president Dr. Gloria Duffy had a wide-ranging conversation on everything from the health-care reform bill to nuclear strategy and from education to cutting the deficit, she held a press conference. At the end of the press conference, she was asked by local gay rights advocate Bill Wilson about the prospects for ending the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy of discrimination in the military (thanks to aka William for the link):
Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, visited The Commonwealth Club of California and was in conversation with Club President/CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy. A crowd of about 450 in the Mark Hopkins Hotel ballroom in San Francisco listened to Pelosi discuss the challenges of getting a health-care reform bill through Congress, upcoming priorities for Congress (including financial sector regulation, immigration reform, the deficit, and more), and the possibilities of bipartisan cooperation in the hyper-polarized nation's capital (she thinks it's possible on an issue-by-issue basis).
Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-California) returns to her home town and to The Commonwealth Club audiences to discuss the recent passage of the controversial and historic health-care reform bill.
San Francisco's Pelosi is in her second term as speaker of the House. President Obama has lauded her as "an extraordinary leader for the American people"; and following the passage of the Affordable Health Care for America Act, England's Guardian observed that "Pelosi is being heralded as the most powerful woman in American history and the most powerful speaker of the House of Representatives in a century."
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Torture allegations may be a defining accusation of the Bush administration by history's standard, but that does not mean it cannot plague Democrats, too, as U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is finding out and as the president is working to avoid. For a nation starting to come to terms with "enhanced interrogation techniques" and possible new photos of prisoner humiliation and mistreatment and the whole issue of torture and who's responsible, this is a time where some people are asking, At what point does the new government's cautious approach and the American people's earlier disinterest make it complicit in allowing torture to have occurred in the first place?
Just this week, Michael Kinsley wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post charging Americans with collusion in the awful deeds: "If you're going to punish people for condoning torture, you'd better include the American citizenry itself." Salon's Gary Kamiya similarly wrote, "How would these people react to an investigation of those Bush officials who planned and authorized the very deeds that they themselves supported?"
It may seem a tenuous argument at best to charge 56 million voters with complicity when they did not choose to re-elect George W. Bush in 2004 based solely on whether or not he approved waterboarding. But it might help to note that these facts were known before Americans went to the polls. Jacob Weisberg, in an article for Newsweek, lays out what we knew earlier than 2004. Various media outlets had already published reports of illegal extradition of suspected terrorists to CIA "black sites" in foreign countries, and knowledge of the excessive waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed along with photos from Abu Ghraib were widely written scandals.
Weisberg also does a fine job of recreating the atmosphere of fear fed by the Bush administration's warnings about the consequences of insufficient vigilence during those years. New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks remarked about it today and believes Pelosi should own up to participating in that atmosphere of uncertainty: "Why can’t she just tell the obvious truth? She was influenced by the climate of the time. In retrospect, she wishes she had raised her voice in protest." In an appearance at the Commonwealth Club of California last month, Pelosi did not mention the already simmering issues of torture.
After President Barack Obama choose this week to withhold the release of new photos of detainee abuse of terrorist suspects (taken as early as 2004), this issue looms as an issue for which Obama has taken ownership. In so doing, he raised the ire of the ACLU. The president's rationale of protecting the troops and avoiding to inflame the anger of the Muslim world is similar to the policy of the previous administration.
Today, Pelosi publicly charged the CIA and the Bush administration for misleading her about waterboarding, attempting to deflect Republican claims this week that she knew about the situation. "To the contrary ... we were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used," CBS quotes her as telling reporters today in reference to a 2002 briefing she had with CIA officials.
Since another terrorist attack on U.S. soil has not materialized, this is a political issue of high energy but it's difficult to discern in terms of real impact. But a lot of Americans are concerned about who knew what when, what the real story is about the United States' involvement in torture, its effectiveness or ineffectiveness, and the consequences for U.S. soldiers, America's moral standing, and the rest of the world.
ACLU chief Anthony Romero makes no mystery of where he stands, as he told The Commonwealth Club April 30th. The video is below:
With an eye toward quelling the populist anger roiling across the nation, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi today called for the creation of a commission to root out the causes of Wall Street's meltdown patterned after an obscure Depression-era committee.
In San Francisco to speak about her book encouraging the rise of women in society at a gathering for the Commonwealth Club of California, Pelosi said Americans are angry with the economy and bonuses given to AIG, and at least 75 percent of them want an investigation into the missteps that led to this recession.
"That's what we would do with this commission, is to make sure it does not happen again," she said.
Pelosi spoke with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner this morning about the plan to emulate the Pecora Commission created in 1932. That commission, named after Deputy District Attorney of New York County Ferdinand Pecora, followed two failured attempts but ultimately benefited by Franklin Roosevelt's election to the presidency. The commission's findings led to the Securities Act of 1933 and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission – itself alleged by many to have been lax in regulating Wall Street (with Bernard Madoff's infamous Ponzi scheme being the poster boy for this age).
“Some people can tell you one piece of it. Others can tell you another piece of it. It's really hard to know. Do you understand it?” Pelosi asked rhetorically. “We need a clearer understanding of how we got here.”
Pelosi is not the first politician to allude to the Pecora Commission in recent weeks. Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan called for a new iteration of the committee along with the resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking. Many believe its repeal in 1999 was the impetus for banks and investment firms like Citigroup and Travelers to merge and allow the subprime credit markets to run rampant. (Wells Fargo Chairman Dick Kovacevich gave the banks' side of the deregulation story in a speech to The Commonwealth Club in 2008. Click here to view video.) A New York Timeseditorial last month also called for a Pecora-like commission to be created.
Besides making news with her call for a Wall Street investigation, Pelosi had a full schedule. Earlier in the day, appearing on the local Fox affiliate KTVU, Pelosi characterized an upswing of “Tea Party” tax protests as window dressing for elite conservative interests that mainly wanted lower taxes, mocking them as “Astroturf” or fake “grassroots.”
The Speaker also drew upon her personal biography to encourage woman to continue reaching for more positions of power. Her book, Know Your Power: A Message to American Daughters urges women to get involved in all aspects of community service. Pelosi is the daughter of the Baltimore establishment and said she found politics both exciting and distasteful. “It taught me I didn't want to be a part of it,” she said.
While raising five children with husband Paul Pelosi – who incidentally spent the speech doting over their newest grandchildr – she slowly became immersed in Bay Area politics with her big break occurring in 1976 when she secured Maryland for a youthful Jerry Brown in the Democratic presidential primaries. Pelosi joked, though, that the then-governor of California had a problem with saying, “thank you,” but he nonetheless found time to praise her for delivering Maryland to his campaign.
Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the third person in the line of succession in the federal government, spoke to The Commonwealth Club of California this afternoon about appreciating and using power in one's personal and professional lives.
Pelosi, in conversation with Commonwealth Club President and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy (at right in photo above), discussed her steady rise to political prominence from a San Francisco housewife and mother to the leader of her party in Congress (and the highest-ranking woman in American politics). She said she wrote her book, Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters, partly to get out of having to explain her history to everyone who asks but also to encourage more women to get involved in leadership positions, and of course to inspire girls to aim high when making life plans.
Pelosi concluded the discussion by praising her interviewer, noting the prominent role in American policy and public thought that Duffy has played, both at The Commonwealth Club and earlier at the Defense Department.
In 2007, Duffy wrote about getting to know Pelosi back in 1985 when the two of them were part of a bipartisan fact-finding mission to Nicaragua, where they met with Sandinistas and Contras and others. You can read a PDF of the article, "Dedicated Woman" (January 2007) here.
E.J. Dionne's column in today's Washington Post sheds a quite divergent view of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. It should be noted that Dionne is somewhat liberal and the idea of Pelosi as someone moving the country toward so-called "San Francisco liberalism" is a right-wing talking point. Nonetheless, the profile illuminates a possible congressional road map for the rest of the year.
Pelosi, in the article, lauded Republicans for voting with their convictions. The speaker is in a seemingly conciliatory mood as Congress heads into recess. It also helps that she will spend Easter at her Bay Area home before visiting the Commonwealth Club next Wednesday.
Pelosi told Dionne, "'The priority, of course, is to pass health care,' Pelosi said without blinking." The American Prospect's Ezra Klein notes in his blog that this is the first indication Pelosi sees health-care reform as a top priority over cap-and-trade.
To my knowledge, Pelosi hasn't said that before. More to the point, she's not signaled it. At a recent Maria Leavey breakfast, she implied just the opposite, and many folks I've spoken to on the Hill have suggested that her priority was energy rather than health care.
To reverse that specific perception, Pelosi seemed to be giving Dionne a lesson on congressional parliamentary procedure by saying she could muster 51 percent of the votes on health care under the rules of "reconciliation" where committees receive technical instructions on where and how funding will be budgeted. In effect, it's a promise that health care will be legislated but without specifics. Under the procedure, a bill only needs a simple majority, whereas a bill without reconciliation needs a more problematic 60 votes in the Senate. Pelosi also referred to the diversity of the party that also has the support of some coal-producing states. She showed Dionne a statue of a coal miner in her office given to her by a West Virginia congressman.
Dionne also mentions the recent relaxing of Republican attacks against Pelosi. With President Obama's post-election popularity too strong to spar with, Republicans targeted Pelosi without abandon. An article on Politico from last November claimed that the tactic has failed every time it has been utilized: "It didn’t work in 2006, and it’s not working this year, yet many Republicans continue to use Pelosi power as the ultimate threat to American governance."
Presumably, with a bit less than 100 days of the Obama presidency to work with, Republicans are turning their criticism toward the White House. Karl Rove ironically believes Obama is more divisive than President Bush (according to today's Wall Street Journal).
Despite the constant attacks on her leadership, Pelosi has proven to be a speaker unfazed thus far. Whether Pelosi can help th president push through Democratic-themed legislation like health-care reform is unclear, but it shows that it takes more pieces of the puzzle to assemble than one might think.
Will we see a replay of the 1970s-era Church Commission? What would that do for our political landscape?
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told Salon that some type of truth commission seeking to highlight Bush administration actions torture and other war crimes is imminent. According to the story, Whitehouse responded in effusive terms to a question of whether the public knows much about the past eight years. Here's how the reporter described his response: "His eyes grew large and he nodded slowly. 'Stay on this,' he said. 'This is going to be big.'"
In the current edition of Time, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee of which Whitehouse is a part, called for a truth commission modeled in part by the Church Commission of the early 1970s, which uncovered illegal surveillance methods by the CIA and FBI. In light of a divided electorate, Leahy believes Americans need to know the truth, saying, "Rather than vengeance, we need an impartial pursuit of what actually happened and a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past."
Sen. Frank Church, whose commission ultimately led to the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), spoke in similar terms during a speech at The Commonwealth Club in 1975:
[Intelligence agencies] must function in the most delicate of all realms: mandated to maintain security without impairing freedom. if they engage in wrong-doing, it is not a casual matter that can be safely swept under the rug....
If we fail to restore a proper regard for the common good within the framework of the law, then creeping anarchy will gradually replace the rule of law altogether. In its wake will surely come the repressive measures that frightened people will then find preferable. There can be no successful preservation of liberty outside the law.
Since 2006, when the Democrats gained a majority in Congress, many liberals have criticized Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for failing to push for congressional hearings of alleged indiscretion or for impeachment of President Bush. Last week, Pelosi told Rolling Stone she believes senior Bush administration officials could be prosecuted: "The American people deserve answers."
But today Pelosi sounded less enamored with Leahy's proposal, because of the possible inclusion of immunity. In an interview today with Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, the speaker said, "What I have some concern about, though, is it has immunity. And I think that some of the issues involved here, like the services part, politicizing of the Justice Department, and the rest, they have criminal ramifications, and I don't think we should be giving them immunity."
Regardless of the political merry-go-round, it appears that some sort of hearings into the misdeeds of the Bush administration are squarely on the radar of Democrats.
Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says he has no qualms with President-elect Barack Obama's stimulus plan – and that could be a problem in itself.
After eight years of tax cuts under President Bush, some Democrats – especially Northeastern liberals like Sen. John Kerry and Rep. Barney Frank – think that giving tax breaks to businesses and middle-class families will not create long-term job growth. Scott Lehigh, writing in the Boston Globe's op-ed page, thinks tax cuts make little sense and wonders whether they exist in Obama's plan as a carrot to Republicans.
Democrats are also leery about heaping more debt on the books. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the deficit will reach $1.2 trillion in 2009, not including Obama's stimulus plan. Some in Washington also believe the total stimulus price tag will ultimately reach closer to $1 trillion. Obama's preliminary estimate is around $775 billion.
With 11 days until inauguration day, Obama, like President Franklin D. Roosevelt 76 years ago, will be afforded a brief honeymoon period in Washington and this is the impetus for the presidential feel of yesterday's speech at George Mason University.
Former labor secretary under President Clinton, Robert Reich, believes the government stimulus should reach upwards of $900 billion spread over two years and urges for it to be done quickly. "Without federal action, next year could be even worse," Reich told congressmen at a forum discussing the stimulus bill in Washington.
Reich will discuss the economic prospects of the country at The Commonwealth Club of California next Wednesday when he gives a special forecast for the economy in 2009.
On his blog, Reich urges Congress to spend without caution of overextending itself.
As the buyer of last resort, the federal government must respond if that cycle is to be reversed. In my judgment, this will require a stimulus of about 6 and a half percent of gross domestic product, or a total of some $900 billion, spread over two years. That’s my estimate for the shortfall in private demand. But the federal government should stand ready to spend larger sums if necessary to get the economy back on track toward full capacity. The danger is not that the government will do too much; the danger is that it will do too little, too late.
Reich agrees with Obama's plan to upgrade the nation's infrastructure as does Paul Krugman, but some disagree with the basic Keynesian approach. Larry Kudlow at the National Review mocks Obama's progressive pedigree by saying his stimulus plan is somewhat Reaganesque. "Nobody really believes infrastructure spending will end the recession or create permanent new jobs. However, it’s interesting just how much the Obama plan has changed since the election," he wrote.
Here lies the problem facing Washington: in the shadow of a clumsily rolled out $700 billion bailout for the financial sector where many do not know where the money went and fewer gained any stimulus from the investment, how will what many people see as a chronically ineffective legislative branch deal decisively with the economy? Obama wants a bill ready to sign from Congress by Feb. 13. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is already pushing to extend the deadline. Meanwhile, unemployment reaches 7.2 percent and the prospect of this year being somewhat better than the last decreases.
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