Nancy's first day

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) defended her vacation to Hawaii during the government shutdown, taking a jab at President Trump on the day she is set to be elected House Speaker.

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In an interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie on "Today," Pelosi said [...] she would have been easily able to return to Washington if necessary.

“The president may not know this, but Hawaii is part of the United States of America, maybe he doesn’t realize that,” she said. “That’s why he said Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States when he was born in Hawaii.”

“Hawaii has airports and airlines and telephones, so the communication is good,” she said.

  The Hill

And he won't dare respond.

The 116th Congress convenes today, with Democrats taking a majority in the House amid a partial government shutdown that enters its 13th day.

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Lawmakers will vote today to make Pelosi the Speaker of the House for a second time, making her the first and only woman to hold that position.

  The Hill

I guess we're not allowing for a Trump-like surprise vote on this.

One of the first things Pelosi will do as Speaker is bring two spending bills to the floor for a vote. The Democratic legislation would fully fund the government, but will not include the money Trump wants for the border wall, effectively rendering it dead-on-arrival.

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In an interview that will air this morning on NBC’s “Today,” Pelosi will tell Savannah Guthrie that Democrats will not budge on money for the border wall.

Guthrie: “Are you willing to come up and give him some of this money for the wall?”

Pelosi: “No.”

Guthrie: “Because apparently that's the sticking point.”

Pelosi: “No, no. Nothing for the wall.”

I wonder if Nancy will remind her that the Democrats already voted once to give Trump money for the wall, but he wouldn't approve the DACA guarantees as a trade.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that his chamber will not take up the legislation, calling it a “total non-starter.”

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McConnell said he’s hopeful the two sides can reach a deal, but that it might take “weeks.”

While Congress has largely been out of town for the 13 days of the shutdown, pressure will grow if the impasse continues.

And it doesn't seem like a well-supported idea for Mitch to refuse to even bring a House approved bill to a vote. ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi (D Calif.) in an interview that aired on Thursday said that she believes it is an "open discussion" on whether special counsel Robert Mueller could seek an indictment of President Trump.

"I think that that is an open discussion," Pelosi said on NBC's "Today." "I think that is an open discussion in terms of the law."

  The Hill

Way to scare Old Lardass, Nance.

“He was used to serving with a Republican Congress, House and Senate that was a rubber stamp to him. That won't be the case,” Pelosi told USA Today. "Oversight of government by the Congress is our responsibility."

Pelosi and other Democrats have laid out a host of areas where they intend to conduct oversight or investigations. Top Democrats have in recent months said they plan to look into the president's finances, his daughter Ivanka's use of private email and his foreign policy decisions.

Pelosi told USA Today that she does not intend to seek grounds for impeachment unless it's "clearly bipartisan."

“The facts will indicate a path and I don't think we should impeach a president for any political reason, but I don't think we can ignore any behavior that requires attention and that was all based on the facts," Pelosi told USA Today.

  The Hill

There is ample reason to impeach Trump, from his obstruction of justice (criminal reasons) to his lack of fitness for office (25th Amendment), but after listening to wiser heads on the case, I agree that it would not do to impeach him in the house without bipartisan agreement and Mitch McConnell in control of the Senate.

As for Ivanka's use of private email, I hope that being in the top three reported here was simply a choice by the reporter, because it's way down the list of things that need to be investigated. It's there. But to start out with something like that would be sure to make MAGAheads, and perhaps all Republicans, dig in even deeper.

Top progressive lawmakers Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said this week they will vote against bylaws to govern the 116th Congress, a challenge to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the likely next Speaker.

They are objecting to the inclusion of what's known as a pay-as-you-go budgetary rule, which requires that legislation be deficit neutral, meaning any costs would need to be offset with new revenue or cuts elsewhere.

  The Hill

"It is terrible economics. The austerians were wrong about the Great Recession and Great Depression. At some point, politicians need to learn from mistakes and read economic history," Khanna tweeted on Wednesday.

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Yeah, that was almost as dumb an idea as Trump's "for every new regulation we make, we have to drop two old ones." (BTW, according to the Washington Examiner, it was 16 for 1 as of July 2017.)

But the two failed to convince other progressives in Congress to vote against the package, a good early sign for Pelosi, who will have to work to keep an ideologically fractured caucus together.

House Democratic leaders adopted pay-go rules the last time they were in power, and Pelosi and incoming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) indicated months ago that they planned to adopt pay-go rules again if Democrats won control of the House in the midterm elections.

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Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill shot back, arguing pay-go would be an improvement from current GOP rules, which he called "CUTGO," that prohibit tax increases from being used to pay for legislation.

Without a pay-go rule in the House, he said, the White House budget office would be required by law to offset deficits from new legislation by cutting certain mandatory spending, such as Medicare.

"We must replace CUTGO to allow Democrats to designate appropriate offsets (including revenue increases). A vote AGAINST the Democratic Rules package is a vote to let Mick Mulvaney make across the board cuts, unilaterally reversing Democratic initiatives and funding increases," he wrote, referencing the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The pay-go rule would not block deficit-producing legislation from going forward, but it would create a legislative roadblock.

Ideologically, it's probably something that sounds "responsible" to conservatives, so it's probably inevitable.

Eighteen Democrats would need to vote against the rules package on Jan. 3 to sink it. A failure to pass the rules package would be a significant setback for Pelosi on the same day she's expect to reclaim the Speaker's gavel.

That, too, and at this point, the Dems can't afford to be fractured.

Progressives got a win during the negotiations over the rules package when leadership agreed not to include a proposal to require a three-fifths supermajority for legislation that would raise taxes on lower-and middle-class families.

That's a progressive win?

Khanna, the first vice chair of the CPC in the new Congress, told The Hill later on Wednesday that he is sticking to his decision to vote against the rules package.

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Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who challenged Pelosi for the House Minority Leader position in 2016, hadn’t decided Wednesday evening how he would vote on the rules package but said that pay-go was a “no go” for him.

“We have too many investments to make to rebuild the middle class and make us globally competitive,” he said in a statement. “Critical investments in education, infrastructure, and health care should not be held hostage to budgetary constraints that Republicans have never respected anyhow.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the only Senate member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, chimed in as well.

“At a time when climate change threatens our planet, when our infrastructure is crumbling, when 30 million people have no health insurance, I'm concerned that the concept of PAYGO will make it harder for Congress to address the many crises facing our working families,” he tweeted Wednesday, though he did not specify whether he was referring to the proposed House rule, an existing Senate rule, or the 2010 law that requires mandatory cuts.

Some budget experts said concern over the rule was overblown precisely because the House rules could be waived for high-profile bills.

In other words, it's meaningless?

Khanna said a waiver to the pay-go rule may require a House vote.

"We should not give Republicans a talking point every time we ask for a waiver," he told The Hill. "We need to reject the entire frame of the austerity school of economics. We need to argue that our policies are pro-growth."

That sounds like the only advantage, and it's for the Republicans.

"In a prior life, I spent plenty of time trying to make a House PAYGO rule have teeth and consequences," Zach Moller, who previously worked as a senior policy analyst at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, wrote in response to Khanna. "This PAYGO rule, as proposed, is not that. Progressives should not lose a minute of sleep over it."

Another reason Congress is full of bullshit. Why are they making rules that have no teeth?

Anyway, new Congress. Let the bullshit resume!