Hillary Clinton recently expressed doubt whether Donald Trump knows Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. Maybe Clinton’s condescending criticism would have been better directed at a member of her party who at one time was two heartbeats away from the president.
On the House floor Thursday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi performed a little geographic sleight of hand by correctly indicating that Puerto Ricans are by law natural-born citizens of the U.S. who may move freely between the island and the mainland, then in the same breath seeming to suggest they are immigrants. Now you see their citizenship, now you don’t.
House Democrats were meeting to discuss the ongoing crisis the island was experiencing as a result of Hurricane Maria. Pelosi’s turn at the podium came immediately after New York Rep. Nydia Velazquez, who is Puerto Rican, spoke.
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Pelosi began by awkwardly thanking Velazquez for her “commitment to our entire country and that includes Puerto Rico.”
Pelosi then claimed that Velazquez “came to America” when she moved from Puerto Rico to New York.
You were born and raised there and came to America to be a stark figure here – you became one of the first women to chair an entire committee in the Congress of the United States.
Pelosi’s occasional struggles with names, places, and facts have been growing more frequent. Last weekend she mangled Colin Kaepernick’s name while commenting on the NFL protests. Even when she’s able to complete a sentence as intended, the ideas are often non-nonsensical, such as when she recently declared that DREAMers’ families did a great thing for our country by illegally bringing their children here.
This report, by Amber Athey, was cross posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
