A special speakership: Nancy Pelosi
Wielding power is just as important as gaining power. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker that Republicans love to hate, is expert at both.
Pelosi, 82, one of the most consequential speakers in U.S. history, has announced she is stepping away from the role, in time for a new GOP-controlled House of Representatives in January.
Pelosi’s first speakership spanned 2007 to 2011. She became speaker again in 2019.
It remains a singular achievement: Pelosi is the only woman to hold the House gavel – the only woman, Democrat or Republican, to lead her party in either house of Congress.
According to one of her biographers, Susan Page, the key to Pelosi’s success is her embrace of “operational” expertise, which in its broadest terms translates into the use power in the service of legislation.
Page writes in her 2021 book “Madam Speaker” that Pelosi’s goal as speaker has been to turn “aspirations into reality, a process that nearly always entails cutting a deal, making a compromise, playing the long game.”
From the time she boldly stepped forward to run for the post of party whip in 2002, Pelosi has, in turns, been practical, principled, and persevering. She was always politically astute.
The speaker is incredibly hard-nosed.
Her tough-mindedness was on display back in 2004, when she set out to win the midterm elections of 2006, thereby securing Democrats control of Congress starting in 2007. (In a profession that can measure “forever” in terms of weeks or even days, the commitment of three years’ work to one goal was extraordinary.)
Along with raising cash and recruiting candidates to take on GOP incumbents in swing districts, Pelosi took the significant step of torching Democratic collaboration with Republicans on House legislation.
She wanted to ensure, Pages writes, that “Republican incumbents weren’t able to burnish their bipartisan credentials” in bidding for re-election.
(Placing a hold on cross-aisle link-ups may have been a sign of Pelosi’s sure political instincts, Page notes, but “it also reinforced the hyper-partisanship that was already making it hard to do almost anything across party lines.”)
The speaker’s practical political bent has been on display in any number of legislative battles, but perhaps never so prominently as in the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
The crowning achievement of Pelosi’s career, Obamacare was mashed about in the legislative meat grinder There were bitter and involved behind the scene disputes over a public insurance option, abortion, and a single national exchange vs. fifty separate state exchanges, to name just a few of the more contentious issues.
The speaker recoiled at scuttling the House version of Obamacare in favor of the less liberal Senate bill, but she did so, bowing to practical political reality.
Page writes, “Pelosi never argued that the [final Obamacare] bill was perfect. She argued [to House Democrats] that it was the best they could get at the moment.”
Eminently malleable in some instances, Pelosi has been highly principled in others. While more than a few prominent Democrats were scurrying for political cover in the build up to the Bush II war in Iraq, Pelosi moved resolutely into the firestorm by opposing the war.
She voted “no” on the congressional resolution that sanctioned the conflict, ostensibly about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent (as it turned out) weapons of mass destruction. Warned that she was risking her political career, Pelosi said, “I’m never going to vote for that war.”
More recently she resisted pressure from the Biden administration and visited beleaguered Taiwan. After touching down, Pelosi declared the “visit should be seen as an unequivocal statement that America stands with Taiwan, our democratic partner” against Chinese threats.
In sum, according to John Hudak, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, “The U.S. House may never see another leader as capable and agile as Nancy Pelosi.”
Instead of vilifying her, newly-crowned Republican power brokers in the House might usefully try to emulate the speaker’s special qualities.
Richard Robbins is the author, most recently of, “Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.