by CHQ Staff
One of the more interesting phenomena to manifest itself during the Democrats’ attempt to overthrow President Trump is how frequently Democrats engage in what one might call mirroring. When Democrats accuse Trump of say, “shredding the Constitution” or “undermining our democracy” you can be sure that is exactly what they themselves are doing.
The latest and one of the most astonishing examples of this is Speaker Pelosi’s little noticed decision to cancel the end-of-the-day Special Order speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives and the traditional five-minute speeches in the morning.
This follows the Democrats’ decision when they took over the House in January 2019 to pass a rule that allows members only one Special Order speaking slot per week.
Together, Pelosi’s actions effectively bar the Minority from speaking out against the biased and unfair impeachment process after the impeachment vote, said Debra Heine in an article for American Greatness.
No doubt Pelosi has taken these thuggish actions because she remembers how Newt Gingrich and his band of young conservatives used their time during “Special Orders” to dismantle a previous generation of Democrat leaders.
As Carl M. Cannon explained in a 2014 article for RealClearPolitics.com:
When Gingrich arrived in Washington, the longstanding practice of the House was to allow members to give lengthy speeches at the end of a legislative day on pet projects of their choosing. Usually, these “special orders,” as they were known, related to some trivial matter involving constituent service back home.
But Newt Gingrich’s pet project was to provoke a national debate about whether Republicans should be a permanent minority or Capitol Hill — and, well, to simply provoke Democrats. Robert Walker, a like-minded GOP congressman elected one term earlier than Gingrich, had started using special orders for a broader, more ideological purpose. Although the special orders were usually delivered to an empty House chamber, it wasn’t as though no one saw them. C-SPAN had started broadcasting, and hundreds of thousands of Americans could hear Walker and Gingrich and others make their case for conservatism.
At the end of a legislative day — one in which Republicans typically had little real say-so — Walker would say to one of his like-minded friends, “Let’s go do a couple of hours of special orders.” The Democrats noticed, and some were willing to meet the challenge by debating the Republican upstarts. “We’d been getting on their nerves,” Walker noted later.
Indeed, after a series of Special Order speeches in which they accused Democrats of being “blind to communism” Gingrich, Walker and the other Republican Young Guns got under the Democrats’ skin to the point that they finally provoked then-Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill to come to the floor to rebuke them.
“You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House, and challenged these people, and challenged their patriotism,” said Speaker O’Neill. “It is the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress.”
As Mr. Cannon noted in his article, O’Neill didn’t know it immediately — in fact, neither did Gingrich, who started to respond — but the Speaker had gone too far: He’d personally criticized a member in violation of House rules. Bob Walker and GOP Whip Rep. Trent Lott jumped to their feet and made a point of order: to “take down” O’Neill’s words.
This meant to strike them from the record, the first such rebuke of a Speaker since 1798. This was front-page news and led the nightly network news shows. Newt Gingrich was famous. And thanks to C-SPAN, nothing can really be stricken from the record: O’Neill’s outburst can be seen through this link.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX- 1), who had been scheduled to speak during the leadership hour on Thursday, told American Greatness that he had intended to talk about how the Democrats’ House Judiciary Committee had violated the rules in their rush to impeach President Trump.
According to the existing House rules, the Minority is supposed to be allowed to have their own witness hearing before an impeachment vote, but New York Democrat Chairman Jerrold Nadler (NY-10) denied them that right. Gohmert said that the majority could have voted to change the rules, but they didn’t even bother to do that much. They just straight-out violated the rules in their haste to impeach the President.
After the impeachment vote Wednesday night, Pelosi threw the whole impeachment process into confusion by refusing to say when or whether she would send the articles of impeachment to the Senate for a trial.
So, Gohmert also said he was going to point out the hypocrisy of Democrats who have been claiming that the rushed process was warranted because “time was of the essence.”
If impeaching the president was such an urgent matter, why isn’t the Speaker sending the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate, Gohmert wanted to ask on the House floor.
But, due to Pelosi’s decision to run the U.S. House of Representatives like some Banana Republic’s legislature Rep. Gohmert was deprived of the opportunity to put those questions to Speaker Pelosi and the Democrat majority.
As we’ve said in other columns, the impeachment of President Trump demonstrates why Democrats can never, ever again be trusted with control of the federal government. Speaker Pelosi’s thuggish totalitarianism in denying the House Minority its traditional rights to speak and call witnesses is just one more frightening example of what Democrat government would look like.
In response to this outrageous and unprecedented trampling on the Minority, we urge Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, House Freedom Caucus Leader Andy Biggs and other principled limited government constitutional conservatives to find some cameras (the Cannon Building Rotunda comes immediately to mind) to deliver their Special Orders or better yet simply go to the House Chambers and film their Special Orders with their cellphones. Of course doing so would be against the House Rules, but as the impeachment of President Trump has proven, when Democrats are in charge there really are no rules.
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Background Photo “Nancy Pelosi” by Nancy Pelosi.
History will credit her as being the engineer driving the Democratic freight train that is about to derail and crash into the chasm below.