The Patriot Post® · Nancy Pelosi's Bizarre House Rules

If you thought House Democrats would, beginning with the seating of the 117th Congress, reflect back on the shellacking they took on November 3 and exercise a bit of humility going forward, well, you’d be wrong.

“Georgia voters,” begins The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman, “you can’t say Nancy Pelosi hasn’t warned you. The Speaker of the House is clarifying today that without a Republican Senate to serve as a check on her chamber, the 117th Congress is prepared to follow the fiscal blowout of 2020 with another historic surge in federal spending and debt. New House rules will eliminate one of the few modest institutional restraints on government budgets and further reduce the power of minority Republicans to impede the Pelosi agenda.”

The centerpiece of this brave new budgeting world is a resolution that allows the Democrats to grant “emergency” status to their pet priorities and thus move them forward posthaste. The new rule would give House Budget Chairman John Yarmuth (D-KY) the ability to “adjust” the cost estimates for any spending bills related to the coronavirus or to climate change “so that their budgetary impacts don’t count as increasing deficits under House rules,” explains CQ Roll Call. “In practice, the new section means legislation that fits within the two broad new categories doesn’t need to comply with appropriations limits affecting discretionary programs, or pay-as-you-go rules.”

In other words, “Shut up,” Speaker Pelosi will now explain to her Republican colleagues when they deign to debate such things as responsible government spending and the proper use of taxpayer dollars.

As the Journal’s Freeman notes, “The pile of publicly held U.S. Treasury debt is now larger than our entire economy and Washington’s unfunded entitlement promises are many times larger than that.”

But this is just the fiscal lunacy. The Party of Pelosi has also gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs regarding our language, having proposed to eliminate within House-written rules the use of pronouns and familial identities such as mother, father, brother, sister, chairman, and the like — to be replaced by gender-neutral terms that are more sensitive to the chamber’s “nonbinary” members.

As House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries put it, “From my standpoint, gender-neutral language is just consistent with an effort for the House, in the best tradition of the House, to reflect the gorgeous mosaic of the American people in the most sensitive fashion possible.”

That gorgeous mosaic must’ve also been on the mind of Missouri Democrat Representative Emanuel Cleaver, who marked the swearing-in of the new Congress with a bizarre prayer to “the monotheistic God, Brahma,” that ended not with “Amen” but with “Amen and awoman.” Nice move, Congressman.

Try as we might, we can’t make this stuff up.

It’ll be interesting to see just how far House Democrats will go toward enforcing these new rules of communication. Will the wokest among them interrupt their transgressing colleagues in mid-sentence? Will they shout down those who accidentally say “mom” or “dad” and launch into on-the-spot struggle sessions? We’ll soon find out.

Georgians, if your conscience forbade you from voting early for Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, now would be a good time to vote even once for a cooling saucer to be placed beneath that piping hot cup of House Democrat crazy tea.

Conservative economist Herbert Stein once said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” If things go badly in Georgia, we may well put Stein’s theory to the test.

At the same time, we may also test a theory put forward recently by Power Line’s John Hinderaker. “I have been wondering for a while,” he lamented, “whether Americans are simply too dumb to sustain a democracy.”

It’s actually a republic, not a democracy. But whatever.