She muscled through the Affordable Care Act when even Obama White House officials were ready to give up.She became the face of the Democratic opposition to Donald Trump during his presidency.Her election as Speaker was so historic the Smithsonian would put the gavel she used that day on display.Nancy Pelosi made history in 2007 for getting the job, for becoming the first female speaker of the House and the highest-ranking woman in American history.As the California congresswoman steps back from her role as the leader of House Democrats through tumultuous times, she has also made history for what she has done in the job.Supporters and detractors can sharply disagree on the wisdom of the policies Pelosi has pursued, but there is no debating the impact of her groundbreaking tenure. Congressional scholars rate her as one of the most consequential speakers in the nation's history, a legislative master in the company of Henry Clay and Sam Rayburn.During the 2008 financial meltdown, she pushed through an unpopular bank bailout that economists say averted a looming depression, in the process rescuing a Republican president, George W. Bush. She muscled through Barack Obama's signature Affordable Care Act when even senior officials in his White House were ready to curtail their ambitions.She became the face of Democratic opposition to Donald Trump during his presidency, the crucial decision-maker in proceeding with impeachment proceedings not once, but twice.Pelosi's announcement:Speaker Nancy Pelosi to share future plans on House floor shortly after noon Thursday: updatesStay in the conversation on politics: Sign up for the OnPolitics newsletterAnd for decades, she has been the favored target of Republican candidates and opposition fundraisers, demonized as a liberal ideologue and caricatured as a devil and a witch. She was a prime intended victim of the Jan. 6 rioters last year and, more recently, of an assailant who broke into her San Francisco home and attacked her husband with a hammer.She had promised House Democrats four years ago that she would step down at this point, though speculation had persisted that she might change her mind, as she did in 2016 with Trump's election. After Democrats' surprisingly strong showing in the midterm elections this month, President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer were among those who urged her to reconsider leaving.She settled that speculation with an announcement Thursday.“For me, the hours come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect,” she told the House.Live updates:Speaker Nancy Pelosi to share future plans on House floor shortly after noon Thursday'Put on your brass knuckles' Here’s how she once described her job: “Every day I’m like, ‘Don a suit of armor, put on your brass knuckles, eat nails for breakfast, and go out there and stop them from taking children out of the arms of their parents, food out of the mouths of babies.'”She didn’t see all that as particularly remarkable.“I mean, it’s just the way it is," she shrugged.Some critics complain that her approach of politics-as-war has fueled the capital’s hyperpartisanship. The Republican speaker who succeeded her, John Boehner, said she wouldn't temper her rhetoric even when he tried to do so. George W. Bush privately complained to aides that she was unwilling to respond to his outstretched hand.Even Obama, a fellow Democrat, told a senior White House aide that he felt at times as though she was hectoring him.But it was a quality that he and other allies also appreciated.Exclusive:How Donald Trump upended Nancy Pelosi’s plans, then she unraveled his“The one thing that I understood about Nancy fairly quickly was the fact that she was as tough or tougher than anybody in the world,” Obama told me in an interview in 2020, declaring himself “a booster” of Pelosi. “There are times that I think we underestimate just that kind of being able to grind and grit it out, and she has that kind of capacity.”He called her “as effective as any legislative leader I’ve seen in managing a diverse and often contentious group of folks with a lot of different points of view.”Boehner called her "one of the top leaders that I’ve worked with over my career, no question.” But he added that her unyielding liberalism opened the door for the GOP to take control and make him her successor as speaker in 2011.She would win back the gavel when Democrats regained control of the House in 2019. Pelosi repeatedly managed to get results, even when the Democratic majority was narrow and the issues controversial.In her most significant legislative victory, in 2010, she pushed through the House the biggest expansion of health care coverage in a half-century. After months of negotiation, cajoling and threats, she held together a Democratic caucus that included progressives who didn't think the bill went far enough and moderates who feared supporting it would cost them their seats.Which it did, for some. Democrats would lose their majority in the midterm elections later that year."We came here to do a job, not to have a job," she would remind them.Politics in her DNA: Her mother's namesake, her father's heirHer election as speaker of the House was so historic that the Smithsonian would put on display the gavel she used that day, on Jan. 4, 2007.The exhibition at the National Museum of American History marked the centennial of women gaining the right to vote. The suffragists had been viewed as troublemakers in their time, she noted at the opening."But I can just tell you, a troublemaker with a gavel – that's the real difference," she declared with a smile.Politics were in her DNA. Her father, Tommy D'Alesandro Jr., was an FDR Democrat who served five terms in the House, then went home to Baltimore for three terms as mayor. As a child, she held the Bible for the first swearing-in at City Hall of the pol known to all as "Tommy the Elder."She was the namesake of her mother, Nancy D'Alesandro, a formidable political organizer in her own right. "Big Nancy" deployed the ground troops for her husband's campaigns from their corner house in Little Italy, and she dispensed and tracked constituent services in what they called the "Favor File."“If my mother were in this generation, she would be president of the United States," Pelosi once said. "She didn’t spend a whole lot of time cooking. We all managed to eat very well, but it wasn’t as if she was stirring a pot of stew. She cooked, but she was more a person of the community."In her generation, of course, her mother could operate behind the scenes, but as a woman was never seen as a potential candidate for office herself. For years, neither was "Little Nancy," who volunteered as a political organizer and fundraiser until she ran for the House in a special election in San Francisco in 1987.That victory would propel her on a path no woman, and few leaders, had walked before."Pelosi is unquestionably among the most powerful and effective Speakers in modern times and with Sam Rayburn, the most powerful and effective in the history of the House," said Charlie Cook, a veteran political analyst and founder of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "Given changes in society and institutions, technology and social media, one wonders whether there could ever be another this effective and powerful."This article is adapted in part from "Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power," by Susan Page, published by Twelve in 2021. Source link
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