You get a lump of coal and You get a lump of coal and You get a lump of coal! We all get lumps of coal in our stockings this year. The Republicans are again the Grinch stealing Christmas.
On the verge of what is supposed to be a joyous season, instead is fraught with anxiety over layoffs due to Trump’s tariffs, his possible government shutdown over a disastrous wall that at most will destroy a vital Monarch butterfly destination, and now we must worry over the entire collapse of our healthcare system because a judge declared the Republican version of the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.
Five Democrats joined Republicans in passing the farm bill, mixed with a bitter poison. Our children will eat, but the children of Yemen will continue to be starved and bombed because a Republican clause says the Senate bill cannot be considered this year.
We are still imprisoning more than 14,000 child refugees from the south in tents behind barbed wire. One child recently died in our custody. This is a sad end to a difficult year.
But hope lies in the New Year. On January 3, 2019, Nancy Pelosi will pick up the gavel and become Speaker of the House. She has already shown that she will be a true leader and stiffen the spines of all the Democrats who have been demoralized over the past 10 years. Even without the Senate, I see good things coming from the 116th Congress of the United States.
Healthcare legislation is priority; don’t forget, Nancy Pelosi included Single Payer in the 2008 House version of the ACA, but it was defeated when then-Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman voted with Senate Republicans.
Perhaps like a phoenix rising out of the ashes of this catastrophe, real healthcare policies can be enacted this session. That hope would be strengthened if Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation removes the cancerous, illegitimate Trump/Pence administration from our government.
We could then say, Madam President after all. Not to the rightful Madam President, Hillary Clinton, but, as Speaker of the House is 3rd in line to the Presidency, Nancy Pelosi would be Madam President.