Pelosi: GOP doesn’t believe in governance
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that Congressional Republicans don’t believe in governance or science.
“They’re off the chart,” Pelosi said during a question portion following her remarks at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “They don’t believe in governance. They don’t believe in science and they don’t believe in Barack Obama. They have a trifecta going about being opposed to everything that’s proposed.”
Pelosi said that Democrats would be able to win white, working-class voters by making an aggressive economic pitch in 2016.
{mosads}”Guns, God and gays — a lot of that is diminishing,” Pelosi said. “If you have a strong economic agenda that gives hope to people that they can get good-paying jobs — and give them that confidence — that’s the winning argument.”
She criticized the Democratic Party for failing to give voters a reason to show up at the polls during November’s midterm elections, in which Republicans took back control of Congress.
“Public sentiment is everything. You have to give people a reason to register and a reason to vote. They didn’t see that reason,” Pelosi said. “Shame on us for not making that clear.”
Pelosi defended President Obama from Republican attacks against his $4 trillion budget proposal, released a day earlier.
She took particular aim at Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who criticized Obama’s proposals as “envy economics.”
“That really is so wrong. When I saw it, I thought, ‘Stale. Yesterday,’ ” Pelosi said. “That isn’t what this is about.”
She did say that there were areas where Republicans and Democrats could compromise on Obama’s budget proposals, particularly on infrastructure spending and rolling back automatic federal spending cuts known as the sequester.
Still, she criticized Republicans during her prepared remarks for attempting to amend the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, which she argued would lead to the same policies that led to the 2008 economic collapse.
“Republicans want to take us back to those same failed policies, of trickle down and laissez, laissez, laissez-faire — including repealing Dodd-Frank,” Pelosi said in her prepared remarks. “In their obsession with trickle-down economics, Republicans fail to see the connection between the purchasing power of the middle class and the success of America’s economy.”
Republicans have argued that tweaking Dodd-Frank would lead to more economic growth and less red tape.
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