Way to go Nancy! The Speaker of the House appeared on the Today Show this morning and reminded the interviewer Campbell Brown that we do in fact live in a democracy. Many people are still criticizing Pelosi about her trip to Syria despite leaving out some inconvenient facts. Apparently Congressional leaders do go on fact-finding trips (and have done so for over 200 years) and when she went to Syria she was accompanied by Republicans as well as Democrats, something left out by her critics.
From the interview:
NP: The president is not king, the president is the president of the United States. America is a democracy. We have to make decisions based on our judgment. Thus far, the president's judgment hasn't been good, in terms of say for example the war on Iraq. So with all due respect to the president and the role he has, we want respect for the role we have. And members of Congress have gone on fact finding trips since our country began. We're not going to stop because the president wants to avoid the facts and doesn't want to engage in dialogue. We had a bipartisan trip, interesting that the administration chose to ignore the trips of the Republicans who had been there in the week that we were there.
CB: But the Republicans don't have your megaphone. They're not speaker of the House. You speak, the world listens.
NP: That's right, and that's because I have power, and that's why I have — in other words — the president wants to have it both ways. She shouldn't go because what difference does it make? She shouldn't go because she makes a big difference. They have to make a decision. But the fact is that we will never stop finding the facts to honor our responsibility to provide for the common defense to fight terrorism and to deliver the president's message.
The President may want to be dictator but we do still have a constitution that affords powers to the Congress to do their due diligence for the American people. Since George Bush shuns any type of oversight on his misguided 'leadership' we are going to have to keep him in check any way that we see fit. Having a dialogue with other countries is a good thing, even if they aren't so nice. Syria is definitely not a model nation by any means but that doesn't mean we are going to ignore them.
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