Politics

The Pelosi Era Comes to a Close


WASHINGTON — With a popular Democratic president in the White House and big Democratic majorities in Congress, an emboldened Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2009 pushed through a major climate change measure despite warnings of a political backlash.

“We passed transformational legislation which takes us into the future,” Ms. Pelosi exulted after the House narrowly approved legislation to cut emissions following her signature wheeling and dealing to corral reluctant Democrats.

It was a rare miscalculation. Her immediate future turned out to be in the minority as Democrats were crushed in the 2010 midterm elections by a public recoil to the climate bill, which died in the Senate, and a health care bill that was signed into law.

Ms. Pelosi refused to throw in the towel and step aside. She remained head of the defeated House Democrats and rose again in 2019 as a more pragmatic speaker, one who had learned from both her failures and successes and would preside over a period of remarkable legislative productivity. In the process, she sealed a legacy as the most powerful woman in American politics to date.

What can arguably be called the Pelosi era in Washington came to a close on Tuesday, with Ms. Pelosi retreating to the rank and file of a new Congress where, she insists, she does not intend to be a meddling mother-in-law offering unsolicited advice.

But her presence will be felt for years in the climate, health care, public works and social legislation she ushered through to signatures by two Democratic presidents, as well as the big moments of her tenure capped off by the electrifying invitation to Volodymyr Zelensky to address Congress just days before she lost the gavel.

The new leadership of both parties will find it daunting to try to match her performance and political reach, whatever their view of her policy agenda. Ms. Pelosi, the first female speaker, carved a singular path.

Her time in leadership was bracketed by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, two seminal events that tested her abilities but also showed a willingness to rise above political differences at times of crisis.

In between was a war in Iraq that she opposed, a harrowing financial crisis that she helped curb, the rise of the Tea Party movement that unseated her, the Trump presidency that she combated with two impeachments, a pandemic that threw Congress and the nation into turmoil, and finally a triumphant legislative push during the first two years of President Biden’s term. While her goals were big, she also devoted herself to — and appeared to relish — the minutiae of vote counting, picking off Democrats one by one until she reached the magic number of 218, usually with a few more tucked away in her purse just in case.

“Hank, I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi, a devout member of that faith, dryly told the beseeching Mr. Paulson.

But it is the approval of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 that Ms. Pelosi regards as her greatest accomplishment, one that required all the legislative skill she could muster. In the end, she had to persuade House Democrats to swallow a Senate bill that many found objectionable but could not change after Senate Democrats lost their crucial 60th vote with the death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. It required navigating the diverse objections of both conservative and progressive Democrats to deliver the win.

“Nothing in any of the years that I was there compares to the Affordable Care Act, expanding health care to tens of millions more Americans, 150 million families having better benefits, lower costs and no pre-existing condition risking their access, and no lifetime limits,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters in December, adding a point of particular pride to her, a mother of five: “Being a woman no longer a pre-existing condition.”

Her sarcastic clap at Mr. Trump during his 2019 State of the Union address has become an iconic image, and her decision to rip up his printed remarks at the conclusion of the same speech a year later surpassed even that rebuke.

“He lied on every single page,” Ms. Pelosi said in a recent interview, explaining her spontaneous decision to shred the speech. She said she had seen the address as disrespectful to the House of Representatives, particularly after Mr. Trump used the occasion to present an honor to Rush Limbaugh, whom Ms. Pelosi labeled a “thug.”

“Don’t come here with your trash and your trash talk,” Ms. Pelosi said, describing her thoughts at that time.



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