RUSH: From The Hill newspaper. ‘House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is threatening to take President Bush to court if he issues a signing statement as a way of sidestepping a carefully crafted compromise Iraq war spending bill. Pelosi recently told a group of liberal bloggers, ‘We can take the president to court’ if he issues a signing statement, according to Kid Oakland, a blogger who covered Pelosi’s remarks for the liberal website dailykos.com. ‘The president has made excessive use of signing statements and Congress is considering ways to respond to this executive-branch overreaching,’ a spokesman for Pelosi, Nadeam Elshami, said. ‘Whether through the oversight or appropriations process or by enacting new legislation, the Democratic Congress will challenge the president’s non-enforcement of the laws.’ It is a scenario for which few lawmakers have planned. Indicating that he may consider attaching a signing statement to a future supplemental spending measure, Bush last week wrote in his veto message, ‘This legislation is unconstitutional because it purports to direct the conduct of operations of the war in a way that infringes upon the powers vested in the presidency.’ A lawsuit could be seen as part of the Democrats’ larger political strategy to pressure — through a series of votes on funding the war — congressional Republicans to break with Bush over Iraq.’
I don’t doubt that it’s that, but all this is… The fact that she made the statement to a bunch of liberal bloggers tells us what’s going on. The Democrats right now are pandering to their base. Everything is going through the filter of how the Democrat base is going to hear this. If she actually files suit against the president, at some point they are going to overplay their hand on this with a majority of the American people. I’m going to tell you something, folks. Whoever these liberal bloggers are and these liberal kooks and all of their websites, they are not mainstream American. They are leading these Democrats in the House and Senate around by a leash. This is being done for fundraising. It’s being done to keep these people at bay, if you will. In fact, David Obey had a little shouting match with Dennis Kucinich in a House committee meeting the other day. Obey apparently used a vulgarity and a profanity and this caused Diane Watson and Maxine Waters of California to express outrage, that they didn’t go to congressional committee hearings to hear this kind of vulgar language spoken. Obey was getting frustrated with the kookism found in his own party on the anti-war crowd. They’re bottling up everything, keeping anything from happening legislatively, and he sort of boiled over. Of course the Democrats and the Drive-Bys are trying to cover this with: ‘Well, that’s just David Obey. If you haven’t been insulted with profanity by David Obey, then you’re really not a Democrat in Congress.’ Of course, when Dick Cheney tells Leahy to (psst) off, stop the presses! It signals a new downturn in civility in Washington.