Nancy Pelosi made the biggest mistake of her life.
The Speaker of the House picked a career-defining fight with Donald Trump.
And that led to Nancy Pelosi suffering this massive defeat that sent her running for the hills.
Nancy Pelosi and other anti-Trump forces dared Donald Trump to press forward with his declaration of a national emergency.
Democrats figured the threat of a bipartisan rebuke would cause President Trump to withdraw the declaration rather than suffer a humiliating defeat on the Congress floor.
Pelosi’s pressure point was the GOP controlled Senate.
The press painted a picture of Trump’s own party turning on him and joining the Democrats to block the President.
Trump called their bluff.
Even though both Houses of Congress passed resolutions of disapproval, few Republicans joined in after Trump made it clear he would go nuclear and veto the resolution of disapproval.
Trump vetoed the resolution in an Oval Office ceremony where law enforcement personnel and families whose children were killed by illegal aliens flanked the President.
Pelosi scrambled to schedule a veto override vote and pressured Republicans into turning their backs on President Trump.
“The House and Senate resoundingly rejected the President’s lawless power grab, yet the President has chosen to continue to defy the Constitution, the Congress and the will of the American people,” Pelosi ranted in a statement.
“House Republicans will have to choose between their partisan hypocrisy and their sacred oath to support and defend the Constitution.”
But the move backfired.
And it exposed Pelosi as holding no cards.
The veto override failed and just 13 Republicans crossed the President and the conservative base.
That meant the vote fell nearly 50 votes short of the two-thirds threshold to override Trump’s veto.
It was an embarrassing failure for Pelosi.
President Trump boasted about the victory on social media, tweeting, “Thank you to the House Republicans for sticking together and the BIG WIN today on the Border. Today’s vote simply reaffirms Congressional Democrats are the party of Open Borders, Drugs and Crime!”
Pelosi tried to put on a brave face in a statement she released with Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro.
“The President’s lawless emergency declaration clearly violates the Congress’s exclusive power of the purse, and Congress will work through the appropriations and defense authorization processes to terminate this dangerous action and restore our constitutional system of balance of powers,” Pelosi and Castro wrote in their joint statement.
“We will continue to review all options to protect our Constitution and our Democracy from the President’s assault.”
Heading into the national emergency vote, the fake news media tried to paint a picture that cracks were appearing in the relationship between President Trump and Congressional Republicans.
But like many negative stories in the Trump era, this was another case of the fake news media trying to will a fantasy into a reality.
The truth of the matter is there was never any distance between Trump and rank-and-file Republicans.
With a few rare exceptions, the Republicans who voted against Trump were the pro-open borders RINOS who were never with the President in the first place.
We will keep you up to date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
