Buckeye Reporter

Imagine reviewing the monthly budget with your spouse. You start with an easy one – setting money aside for the mortgage. Except your spouse objects and demands that, if you’re going to plan for the mortgage, you must also earmark enough for a trip to Disney, designer clothes from Louis Vuitton, and a new Tesla.

You might be married to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Spending dollars for things you don’t want while allowing pennies for things you need is the cost of doing business in Pelosi’s Washington. Call it the speaker’s ransom. In Biden’s so-called Build Back Better Act, there’s free preschool, free hearing aids, free higher education, more workforce spending, tax breaks for having children, affordable housing, and electric car incentives stuffed inside an additional five hundred billion dollars in Green New Deal funding.

Preschool, hearing aids, and affordable housing are the car keys jiggling in Speaker Pelosi’s right hand while her left hand is pulling the graft of five hundred billion dollars in Green New Deal funding across the finish line. The Green New Deal graft is the ransom Nancy Pelosi demands to get to the funding that might actually help someone in need.

The hostages aren’t just Republicans either. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin refused to end the filibuster, which is the only way the 50-50 Senate could get away with this con. His own party tried to cudgel Manchin, telling him to explain to families paying $1,000 a month for insulin why Manchin doesn’t want them to have taxpayers lower that price to $35.

But these beltway bullies overlooked the fact that Manchin needs to speak to families in his own state of West Virginia, where coal helps pay the bills in countless households. Manchin’s pitch was simple – America ought not pay $500,000,000,000.00 to fund the Green New Deal just to lower the cost of insulin.

But Joe Manchin isn’t the only one on the Pelosi enemies list. If you dare oppose it, you’ll be raked over the congressional coals for allegedly hating old people or poor people or electric car loving people, or whatever flavor of the week identity politics Nancy Pelosi is concocting. It’s a bitter pill of progressive spending put inside some bread with peanut butter, served up in the hope we’ll swallow the whole thing without noticing.

Let’s be clear. Legislation in Nancy Pelosi’s Washington isn’t written to help families with afford insulin. It’s written to extract a political pound of flesh if you oppose her power. Here lies Pelosi’s ultimatum: support the Green New Deal or get slapped across the face with those jiggling keys.

Manchin and others stayed strong – refusing to negotiate ransom with the political hostage taker Nancy Pelosi.

The smart policy response would be to fast track a bill capping insulin prescription prices. Or put Medicare funding for hearing aid services into its own bill. Or offer the Higher Education and Workforce Standalone Act. Or immediately call for votes on preschool funding, child tax credits, for incentives for electric cars. Up or down votes on each issue.

Not Nancy Pelosi. She’s identified the problem with Build Back Better – the name. Lincoln once said that you can call a dog’s tail a leg but it’s still a tail. Today, Abe might point out that you can call a bad deal any old name and it will still be a bad deal.

But maybe there’s something in a name. After all, Nancy and her comrades named their plans for an unconstitutional federal takeover of elections the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Go ahead and vote against the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. You racist.

This week’s example comes nearly a year after the Senate passed the United States Innovation and Competition Act. – not a bad name as these things go. It included $50 billion to help bring computer chip manufacturing back to America. The sponsor wasn’t some first term junior senator – it was Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

China hates the bill, which one might think would cause the House to move even more quickly to pass it. Instead, Pelosi sat on it for eight months, even as Samsung announced plans for a chip manufacturing plant in Texas and Intel announced plans for their own manufacturing site in Ohio.

Under pressure to act, Nancy Pelosi sits at the family kitchen table with Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden going over their innovation and competition budget. She’s willing to allow Schumer’s plan to support domestic chip manufacturing, but only if they also approve billions more to address supply chain problems, support climate mitigation efforts, and remove caps on green cards for foreign scholars. The speaker’s ransom strikes again.

Matt Dole is a frequent political commentator based in Columbus, Ohio.