House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent instructions to rank and file Democrats Monday to resist Republican initiatives, including the upcoming bill to reauthorize the nation’s agriculture and food stamp programs.
“With a strong first quarter behind us, we must now step up our efforts to protect Americans from the ongoing assault by the Trump Administration and Republican Congress on hard-working families and to promote A Better Deal,” Pelosi, D-Calif., told colleagues in a Monday memo.
Pelosi said the first quarter of the year “was a huge success” for the party in promoting their agenda and criticizing the Republican Party’s tax reform legislation.
“We defined the GOP Tax Scam,” Pelosi wrote. “We continued to use our resources to define the Republican tax bill as a scam that raises taxes on 86 million Americans, gives the top 1 percent of the country 83 percent of the benefits and deepens the deficit that threatens Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”
Democrats need to keep voting against Republican initiatives, including, Pelosi said, this week’s “hypocritical and dangerous” balanced budget amendment and the “disastrous” farm bill that the GOP is set to unveil and which includes a 20-hour weekly work requirement for some able-bodied food stamp recipients. Pelosi called the food stamp changes “cruel.”
Pelosi also called on Democrats to vote against any effort to rescind spending in the recently passed fiscal 2018 spending package.
Democrats, Pelosi urged, much also continue to “hold the Trump Administration accountable for a culture of corruption, cronyism and incompetence.”
Pelosi repeated her call for the resignation of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt who is facing criticism over travel expenses and an agreement to rent a condominium from a lobbyist.
“But he is merely the latest example of the staggering ethical blindness emblematic of this Administration that favors special interests and corporations at the expense of America’s children and the air they breathe and water they drink,” Pelosi said.
