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Bush, Pelosi taking fight to new level |
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By Mike Soraghan
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Posted: 11/02/07 07:50 PM [ET] |
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) attacked President Bush’s legacy Thursday, saying he’ll be remembered for an unfair tax code and a failed war strategy.
“What does he have to show for his presidency?” Pelosi asked at her weekly Capitol news conference. “He’s the president of the United States already talking about his library. What is he going to have in a library: a tax cut for the wealthiest people in the country at the expense of the middle class and a war without end that is a total failure?”
Pelosi also criticized Congress, acknowledging it hasn’t forced the change in the course of the Iraq war that many expected.
“I don’t approve of Congress, because we haven’t done anything that — we haven’t been effective in ending the war in Iraq,” Pelosi said at the news conference. “And if you asked me in a phone call, as ardent a Democrat as I am, I would disapprove of Congress as well.”
Pelosi’s attack on Bush was in response to remarks the president made hours before at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Bush charged Democrats in Congress as too responsive to liberal groups like MoveOn.org and Code Pink.
“Sounds like we’ve struck a nerve,” said White House Press Secretary Dana Perino. “The new Democratic leadership in Congress has worked for 10 months and has precious little to show for it.”
By contrast, Perino said, Bush has numerous accomplishments, including the No Child Left Behind education program, a Medicare prescription drug benefit, stronger border enforcement and “the liberation of more than 50 million people from repressive regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq … we could go on and on.”
Pelosi and Bush have been ratcheting up their war of words in recent days as they prepare for a showdown between Congress and the White House on spending. Bush says congressional spending bills are $22 billion too high.
Democratic leaders respond that $22 billion is a small fraction of the federal budget and not worthy of a major showdown. They also say the figure pales in comparison to the $196 billion Bush has requested for the latest installment of money to fight the war in Iraq.
“So what we’re talking about is a debate on the priorities of our country. And the president has fallen very short on meeting the needs of America’s families, meeting the health needs of our country, and he is trying to call that wasteful,” Pelosi said. “We disagree.”
On Thursday, Democrats merged a spending bill Bush supports funding veterans’ operations with a bill he opposes that funds social and labor programs, in an effort to prevent him from vetoing the bill or pave the way for an override. They dropped plans to merge the defense spending bill, which Bush also supports, into the bill some call a “mini-bus,” as opposed to an “omnibus” spending bill. |
