The choice by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to go away Congress after virtually 4 many years marks the tip of an period for each the powerhouse Democrat and her celebration at massive.
The previous Speaker not solely wrote herself into the historical past books as the primary lady to carry the gavel, but in addition muscled into regulation a few of the most vital coverage adjustments of recent occasions, together with sweeping well being care, local weather and Wall Road reforms.
Alongside the way in which, Pelosi earned a fame as a potent vote-counter — one who might persuade even essentially the most reluctant Democrats to assist her agenda — and a mammoth fundraiser, who pulled in roughly $1.3 billion for the Democrats over her congressional profession.
“She made us proud to be Democrats,” former President Obama wrote Thursday, “and will go down in history as one of the best speakers the House of Representatives has ever had.”
Listed below are a few of the best hits of Pelosi’s storied time on Capitol Hill.
The Iraq Battle
Pelosi was the senior Democrat on the Home Intelligence Committee in 2002, when President George W. Bush and his administration got here to Congress for approval of army operations in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, Bush had warned, possessed potent weapons stockpiles that posed a direct menace to the USA and different Western democracies.
Within the wake of the terrorist assaults of 9/11, the administration informed Congress, it was crucial to hit Baghdad earlier than Baghdad hit the U.S.
Pelosi challenged the assertion, saying the administration had introduced no proof to Congress to again the declare that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — or to justify army operations in Iraq.
Though the struggle decision handed simply in October of 2022, Pelosi was among the many 133 Home lawmakers — virtually all of them Democrats — who opposed it.
Historical past would in the end vindicate the opponents. Iraq, it turned out, didn’t have WMDs. And the Iraq Battle not solely killed hundreds of American troops — and a whole lot of hundreds of Iraqi civilians — it additionally destabilized the area in ways in which empowered a brand new crop of anti-Western terrorists.
Pelosi’s vote in opposition to the struggle helped to solidify her standing within the liberal-leaning Democratic caucus, the place she would function the highest chief for 20 years, starting simply months after the battle started.
“Knowing what we knew then, this intelligence did not support the threat,” Pelosi stated years later. “It was a gross misrepresentation to the American people of the capabilities and intentions of the Iraqi government.”
A girl in energy
Pelosi broke the marble ceiling in 2003, when Democrats elected her to exchange Minority Chief Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) on the high of their caucus, marking the primary time a girl had led both celebration in Congress. And she or he shattered it once more in 2007, when she ascended to change into the primary feminine Speaker in historical past — a feat she repeated in 2019.
Pelosi relished the distinctive alternative to have a girl’s voice on the highest echelons of political energy in Washington, and wasted no time utilizing that perch to advance girls’s causes.
The primary invoice signed by President Obama, who entered the White Home within the midst of Pelosi’s first Speakership run, was the Lilly Ledbetter Honest Pay Act, which empowered girls to problem pay disparities between the genders for doing the identical jobs. And she or he made certain that the Inexpensive Care Act, Obama’s signature well being care regulation, prohibited insurers from denying protection or growing prices for girls primarily based on preexisting circumstances, to incorporate pregnancies.
Pelosi additionally lamented the stark gender imbalance on Capitol Hill — there have been solely 12 Democratic girls in Congress when she was first elected in 1987 — and he or she used her affect to encourage different girls to enter politics.
Former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.), who retired from Congress after being shot within the head in 2011, was among the many many Democratic girls to reward Pelosi on Thursday as a power that inspired their transfer into politics.
“As the first woman Speaker of the House, she inspired me,” Giffords stated, “and at my bedside following the taking pictures that turned my life upside-down, she uplifted me.”
She was additionally a number one champion of ladies’s reproductive rights — a place that put Pelosi, a religious Catholic, at frequent odds with the church. In 2022, the archbishop of San Francisco barred her from receiving holy communion in her hometown.
Unbowed, Pelosi defended that place, arguing that God supplied girls with the free will to make their very own reproductive well being selections.
“For us, it was a complete and total blessing, which we enjoy every day of our lives,” Pelosi stated on the time, referring to her personal kids. “But it’s none of our business how other people choose the size and timing of their families.”
That very same yr, as one in every of her final campaigns as Speaker, Pelosi sought to codify the abortion protections supplied by Roe v. Wade, after the Supreme Court docket overturned the landmark regulation.
ObamaCare
Pelosi had already been the Home Speaker for 2 years when President Obama entered workplace in 2009, on the top of the Nice Recession. The pair rapidly joined forces to go an emergency stimulus invoice designed to cushion the results of the financial downturn. However the high precedence for each Democratic leaders was one thing else: well being care reform.
The outcome was the Inexpensive Care Act (ACA), a large package deal of latest insurance coverage pointers and federal subsidies geared toward not solely increasing well being care protection to thousands and thousands of people that couldn’t afford it, but in addition guaranteeing that the protection was complete, advantages weren’t capped and sick folks weren’t disregarded.
Obama would finally signal the laws into regulation in March of 2010. However it would possibly by no means have occurred with out Pelosi’s navigation via a minefield of divergent ideologies and conflicting pursuits, together with clashes between liberal and average Home Democrats over the dimensions and scope of the advantages — and the way the prices could be offset within the face of pushback from just about each main well being business group within the nation.
Citing the invoice’s unpopularity, various front-line Democrats needed to desert the hassle altogether.
When Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) died amid the talk — and Massachusetts voters elected a Republican to exchange him, denying Democrats 60 votes within the Senate — many within the celebration thought the hassle was lifeless within the water. Pelosi was not amongst them.
“You go through the gate,” she informed reporters amid the deadlock. “If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”
Ultimately, Democrats used a procedural device permitting them to go the invoice with a easy majority within the Senate. Pelosi has stated it’s her single best accomplishment in Congress.
“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,” she stated in 2022, as she was stepping down from her management place. “That, for me, was the highlight.”
Local weather change
San Francisco is a liberal metropolis, and Pelosi’s curiosity in environmental safety mirrored the feelings of her constituents from her first days on Capitol Hill. However she additionally took that battle to a lot better heights by making world warming a nationwide precedence when she ascended to the Speakership.
In one in every of her first acts after taking the gavel in 2007, Pelosi created the Choose Committee on Vitality Independence and International Warming, tapping then-Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to steer the panel. It held dozens of hearings over the following 4 years, and Markey helped write laws designed to restrict greenhouse fuel emissions.
The proposal was controversial even inside Pelosi’s personal Democratic caucus, which, on the time, boasted greater than 50 centrist “Blue Dogs” who had been reluctant to assist the invoice. Nonetheless, Pelosi pushed it via the Home in 2009, and was livid when then-Senate Majority Chief Harry Reid (D-Nev.) refused to think about it within the higher chamber. (Republicans used the vote as a cudgel in opposition to Home Democrats within the elections of the next yr, which helped propel the crimson wave that flipped the chamber to GOP management.)
Pelosi was additionally a loud proponent of Obama’s transfer to affix the Paris Local weather Accord in 2015. And 4 years later, when Pelosi was Speaker as soon as extra, Democrats once more made the problem a precedence with the creation of one other choose committee to sort out local weather change, this one led by Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.).
Below President Trump, these efforts had no probability of transferring. However the dynamics modified in 2021 with the arrival of President Biden, who rapidly embraced the local weather subject as a part of the Inflation Discount Act.
That regulation, enacted in 2022, supplied virtually $370 billion in new local weather spending, largely to encourage a shift away from fossil fuels and towards cleaner vitality sources. Biden’s said aim was to chop America’s greenhouse fuel emissions by 50 % beneath 2005 ranges by the tip of the last decade. And Pelosi embraced it as a “moral responsibility” to youthful generations of Individuals.
“This is a values issue — if you believe, as do I, this is God’s creation — and we have a moral responsibility to be good stewards of it,” she stated on the time.
Trump and Jan. 6
Pelosi jousted epically with President Trump, significantly within the closing two years of his first time period, when she was once more the Speaker.
That feud reached new heights in 2019, when Pelosi led the Democrats’ first impeachment of the president after it was revealed that he had tried to leverage U.S. army support to Ukraine in return for Kyiv’s dedication to launch a corruption investigation into Biden and his household.
But even these hostilities paled compared to what would comply with the 2020 elections, when Trump refused to concede defeat and rallied hundreds of supporters in Washington to protest Biden’s victory — a marketing campaign that resulted instantly within the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Pelosi was among the many lawmakers focused by the mob, and he or she joined different bipartisan leaders in ensuring Congress reconvened that very same night time to certify the election outcomes. Shortly afterward, she launched Trump’s second impeachment, and the ultimate chapter of her time as Democratic chief shall be remembered for her decided protection of America’s democratic experiment.
On the middle of that marketing campaign was the creation of a choose committee to research the Jan. 6 riot — a bipartisan panel that concluded decisively that Trump was chargeable for the violence that day.
In stepping down from her management place, Pelosi sounded a warning about the way forward for the nation’s founding traditions.
“American democracy is majestic — but it is fragile,” she stated on the time.
Trump’s political revival two years later has left Pelosi visibly pissed off. Nonetheless, in her parting message, she was optimistic in regards to the nation’s future — so long as folks battle to protect it.
“As we go forward, my message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power. We have made history, we have made progress, we have always led the way,” she stated.
“And now we should proceed to take action by remaining full individuals in our democracy and combating for the American beliefs we maintain expensive.”
