Pelosi long has been a lightning rod for the right wing.
Insecure conservatives hurled their bolts at her because she had a checkmark in every box of things they feared or distrusted.
She was a Democrat.
She represented a California district.
In fact, the district she represented was … San Francisco.
And most of all, she was a woman—a woman who didn’t suffer fools, didn’t back down and did, did, did get things done.
Many of the legislative triumphs recorded by America’s two most recent Democratic presidents—Barack Obama and Joe Biden—had Pelosi’s fingerprints all over them. She was the one who could turn a big but vague idea into first a plan and then a program.
Then she’d go round up the votes necessary to make it a law.
Reasonable people could, did and do disagree about whether many of these plans, programs and laws were good things, but no fair-minded person could dispute that she kept the machinery of government running.
Things happened when she ran the U.S. House of Representatives. Pelosi may have been the greatest vote counter and herder in the history of the people’s chamber.
Rarely did a measure move to the floor on her watch if the votes weren’t there for it to pass. She challenged, on a routine basis, the U.S. Senate, regardless of its leadership, to keep pace with the lower chamber.
She also respected the power of the speakership.
Like other strong speakers, such as the legendary Texas Democrat Sam Rayburn and hard-barked Illinois Republican conservative Joseph Cannon, she saw the position as almost co-equal with the presidency, one designed to serve as a check on runaway executive power.
She was quick to assert the powers and authority of the legislative branch—and the people’s chamber in particular. Presidents who thought they could intimidate her quickly learned otherwise. All 5’5” of her could stand her ground—and, generally, make the guy confronting her backpedal a bit.
Sometimes, more than a bit.
She did not do it out of ego or personal self-interest.
Pelosi understood the role the legislative branch was supposed to play in formulating the nation’s laws, providing a forum for a diverse country’s grand debates and—this seems much more important now—honoring a duty to perform oversight on the executive branch.
This is why the timing of her retirement announcement is fraught with both symbolism and significance.
The current Speaker, Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, has all but abdicated his responsibilities—no, his duties—regarding those three essential functions.
He’s abased himself before President Donald Trump, which is more than just a source of personal shame and humiliation for Johnson. His refusal to stand up for the prerogatives and powers of the House means that government itself can’t work.
And that the people’s will is much, much, much more easily thwarted.
It’s impossible to imagine Pelosi allowing herself to be cowed by any president the way Trump has domesticated Johnson.
She, after all, marshalled not one but two impeachments of Trump. He touts those now as his triumphs because he escaped removal or being barred from office in each case, but the reality is that, in both cases and for the first time in American history, members of a president’s own political party voted that he should be expelled from the White House and prevented from holding a federal office again.
No other U.S. president bears that stain on his legacy.
Nor was Pelosi’s toughness simply partisan.
She and Joe Biden had been friends for decades, but her voice saying it was time for him to go was decisive in determining that he retire from the 2024 presidential campaign. Friendship for her did not trump—the pun is intentional—her duty to her party.
Or her country.
Again, reasonable people can disagree about the policies adopted during her tenure. She had her critics on the left as well as the right—young Turks who thought that she so valued getting things done that she weakened important measures to the point of ineffectiveness in pursuit of that goal.
But the fact is that the U.S. House of Representatives now is the living embodiment of dysfunction and disarray.
It wasn’t under Nancy Pelosi’s leadership.
It will be a long time before we see her like again.
