Nancy Pelosi Quotes
“If we don’t get our way, we will shut the Government down.” You and that attitude is a luxury this country cannot afford.
The government was reopened when the more rational Republicans combined with the Democrats and voted the appropriations necessary to reopen the government.
Nancy Pelosi, U. S. Congresswoman (Democrat, CA), Speaker of the House i, Addressing the Tea Party and the other Republicans who threatened and then actually did shut the government down, Debate, House of Representatives
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The Republicans had, in the view of most Americans at the time, refused to pass the legislation to provide money for the government to function unless President Obama would cancel the Health Care Reform that was his major legislative achievement of his first term, and passed over the objections of most Republicans who claimed it was unconstitutional. Then the Supreme Court upheld the Constitutionality of Obamacare, and the Tea Party Republicans pressured the regular republicans to shut down the entire government until the President relented and cancelled his own legislation. The American people resented this unprecedented of interfering with the Constitutional methods by which laws are passed, and after over a week of taxpayer additional costs for less service, the regular Republicans made a deal with the Democrats and produced a majority to reopen the Government.
The Republicans who had control of the House of Representatives were reaching the end of the fiscal year and had not yet passed a budget nor expanded the debt ceiling so the government would have to shut down in a few days and a little later America could not pay any of its bills. They had a very strong position if they willing to blackmail the Democratically controlled Senate and the Democratic President. But the last time the Republicans had ever tried this before was the Republican House when Gingrich was speaker and they shut down the government for almost 3 weeks. It cost the Republicans the next election’s majority in the House. President Obama decided that he would not set a precedent of negotiating with a house of Congress that was threatening to shut down the government or threatening not to pay the nation’s bills which Congress had already authorized the purchase of.
The congressman was reacting to a group staging a protest on the bridges connecting Washington DC with Virginia, thereby stopping traffic.
At the time many of the Republicans wanted to solve the deficit by cutting non-defense and non-homeland security spending only and was opposed to any increase of taxes or any closing of tax loopholes despite the fact that taxes were at the lowest rate that they had been since before the Second World War. The Democrats wanted to increase taxes for the most wealthy Americans by repealing the tax cuts for the wealthy that the George W. Bush administration passed. They were willing to cut spending for the military but did not want to cut services for poor and middle class people—especially Medicare and Medicaid. The public was calling for a compromise and some Republican leaders said that they would agree to cutting a little less than they had originally insisted upon, but would not budget on repealing the tax cuts for the wealthy or in closing tax loopholes for corporations. This triggered the Clinton’s statement. While this quotation was an accurate description for Republican behavior at the time, historically it was not typical of Republicans before that time when the Republican and Democrat view of compromise
In 2007 the Republicans, who were in the minority, began to use the filibuster to a degree that it had never been used. Within the single year of 2007 Republican’s filibustered 62 times, doubling the highest rate that had occurred before. A small minority of senators were able to block legislation that easily passed the House and was supported by the majority of senators and in some cases supported by the overwhelming majority of the American Public.
Nancy Patricia Pelosi is an American politician serving as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives since 2019, and previously from 2007 to 2011. She has served as a U.S. representative from California since 1987. A member of the Democratic Party, Pelosi is the only woman in U.S. history to serve as speaker. She is second in the presidential line of succession, after vice president Kamala Harris. She is the dean of California's Congressional delegation.
