Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, visibly angry with Republicans for standing fast on their opposition to Obamacare and forcing the Democrat-controlled Senate to enter government shutdown mode on Tuesday, pulled out a George Washington paraphrase on Tuesday to lambaste the GOP.
“What the speaker is doing is doubling and tripling down [on] a path that it was always intended to take us to shutting down government. [The GOP has] wiggled this way and that to keep being very resourceful to come up with ways to shut down government. Because as [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid said, they don’t believe in government. They’re anti-government idealogues,” Political reported Ms. Pelosi as saying.
She then raised the ghost of George Washington.
“This is a proxy fight for really the debate on the extent of government, and that has been a debate in the history of our country,” the California Democrat said, Politico reported. “But to say no government, that’s what President Washington cautioned against.”
Ms. Pelosi didn’t specifically quote Mr. Washington, but she was perhaps referencing this statement, made by the first president during his 1796 Farewell Address: “However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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