OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Users on social media mocked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after she appeared to struggle with her final speech on the chamber floor on Friday, with some speculating that she may have imbibed some alcohol beforehand. At one point, the California Democrat wished everyone happy holidays, including “Happy Schwanza,” which threw several users for a loop.
WATCH:
Pelosi ends her final speech as Speaker of the House by wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah and a "Happy Shwanza" pic.twitter.com/LtcMeA8KIT
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 23, 2022
“Happy Shwanza to all and to all a good night,” Greg Price noted.
Rob from Long Island posited that Pelosi had just gotten a “refill.”
“Vodka is strong with this one!” quipped one user.
“Nanshee has already started with the Christmas cheer,” another noted.
“Seems like she’s had a few vodka tonics this morning,” another Twitter user observed.
“It’s called day drinking,” someone snarked.
“Kwanza + vodka = Shwanza,” yet another wrote.
It’s likely that Pelosi was attempting to say “Kwanzaa.”
While Pelosi will be relinquishing the Speaker’s gavel early next month, some GOP lawmakers want her to answer questions — presumably under oath — before a committee she created ostensibly to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol Building.
“The reason there wasn’t a proper security presence on that day goes right to the speaker’s staff and the speaker’s office,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told Just the News Wednesday after the release of the House Republicans’ report detailing the security failures that led to the breach of the Capitol.
“As you go back and look at the communications, there’s this pattern that develops where the Sergeant of Arms is meeting with Pelosi’s staff,” Jordan, the incoming House Judiciary Committee chairman, noted further. “Many of those meetings, Republican staff wasn’t allowed to be there, but they had this pattern where everything had to run through her office, her staff, before the Sergeant of Arms could make a decision.”
In a separate interview with the outlet, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) said that the National Guard was delayed in arriving at the Capitol on Jan. 6 because then-Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving was waiting to hear from Pelosi on the matter.
“It’s almost like there were individuals within the current administration that wanted this to happen,” Nehls said. “All the intelligence was there, and what did they have? What did they have? They had bicycle racks. … A bicycle rack couldn’t keep your cat in your yard.”
The two lawmakers are among five House Republicans who released the GOP report, which offered substantially more detail about events that day and leading up to it than have been noted or released by Pelosi’s Democrat-run committee.
Nehls made reference to some texts from Irving corroborating accounts that some U.S. Capitol Police officers ushered protesters into the Capitol Building, noting: “The American people aren’t hearing any of this from the sham [Jan. 6] committee.”
The Texas lawmaker also said that a former D.C. National Guard commander told him that had Guard troops been deployed when police asked for assistance on Jan. 4, the riot would have “never, ever happened.”
“And Nancy Pelosi. You do have questions you need to answer … Nancy, we’ll get you, and we’ll fly you back from Italy once you’re the ambassador,” Nehls said, making reference to earlier reports that President Biden will offer the U.S. Ambassador to Italy post to Pelosi, who is 82.
The GOP report, in addition to Pelosi and her staff, also cited the USCP Intelligence and Interagency Coordination Division for ignoring or refusing to act on intelligence that indicated there was a need for greater security due to politics, bureaucracy, and the “misplaced priorities of their leadership.”
“In fact, IICD’s leader—Julie Farnam—spent the weeks leading up to January 6, 2021, attempting to overhaul the division, including by reassigning expert intelligence analysts to new roles and creating new processes for synthesizing threat data,” the report notes, adding that key information and threats of violence were disregarded on Farnam’s orders.
Jordan has also vowed to look into alleged Biden family corruption as well.
In an interview on Fox News with host Sean Hannity earlier this month, the Ohio Republican suggested “something is up” with the probe because of a new recent interest in the story by many of the same media outlets that initially dismissed reports of corruption evidence stemming from materials and emails obtained from a laptop he reportedly abandoned at a computer repair store in Delaware in 2019.
