Representative Nancy Pelosi is an unapologetic San Francisco liberal who presided over the largest expansion of federal entitlements since the Great Society. As she steps aside from leadership in January, she will be leaving behind a party that’s much further to the left than it was when she joined Congress 35 years ago.
Pelosi, born to politics — her father was a congressman and mayor of Baltimore — worked through the Democratic caucus ranks in the 1990s, eventually becoming the party’s whip, where she learned to count votes, and eventually, she rose to minority leader in 2002. In 2005, she helped unify Democratic opposition against President Bush’s plan to allow individuals to allocate a portion of their payroll taxes into personal accounts by simply denying there was any Social Security crisis. She first became speaker after the Democrats’ 2006 wave-election win because of the backlash against the Iraq War. But her first true test as a legislative leader came after Barack Obama won the presidency and brought unified Democratic control of Washington.
Enjoying a significant majority, Pelosi passed a flurry of bills, culminating with Obamacare. In her final drive to pass the legislation, she uttered her most infamous line: “We have to pass the bill,” she said, “so that you can find out what is in it — away from the fog of the controversy.” This launched a flood of political ads, as the quote spoke to the process in which Obamacare was written behind the scenes and then thousands of pages of text were rammed through without members having adequate time to read them. The more charitable interpretation of Pelosi’s comment was that she was arguing to Democrats reluctant to vote for the unpopular bill that it was actually a political winner, because once it passed people would understand its benefits. But even the charitable interpretation doesn’t particularly help Pelosi. Thanks to two elections largely fought on the grounds of opposition to Obamacare (2010 and 2014), Democrats went from 257 House seats to 188.
This brings us to another issue, which is Pelosi’s reputation as a master vote-counter with keen political instincts. That was largely built on her record in the first two years of the Obama administration, when she had a large enough majority that she could afford to lose 39 votes and still pass legislation. During the Biden administration, she was much less successful, because she had a much smaller majority with which to work. Winning elections in an overwhelmingly Democratic district also allowed her to get away with unforced political errors (such as subverting the San Francisco lockdowns to visit a hair salon and later claiming she was “set up”).
As liberal as Pelosi’s record was, however, she also had a pragmatic streak and attempted to walk the more radical elements of her party back from the ledge. During the Bush era, she fought back efforts by progressives to “defund” the Iraq War, fearing that it would backfire by making Democrats come off as anti-troop. During the Obamacare fight, she helped persuade progressives to vote for a final version of the bill that did not include a public option. In recent years, she has repeatedly been dismissive of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “squadmates.” She also deserves credit for being a good friend of Taiwan, highlighted by her courageous visit to Taipei earlier this year.
That said, her efforts to rein in the extremists in her party have had diminishing returns. When Representative Ilhan Omar tried to make herself a victim after unleashing a series of antisemitic statements, Pelosi backed off taking action against her, and instead passed a watered-down resolution aimed at condemning hate more broadly to help take the heat off Omar. Pelosi also couldn’t prevent the House Progressive Caucus from holding Biden’s signature Build Back Better social-spending agenda hostage rather than just agreeing to whatever Senator Joe Manchin was willing to vote for.
On Pelosi’s watch — and partly by her own doing — the party lurched to the left on abortion and purged pro-life Democrats. The passage of Obamacare, which expanded taxpayer funding of abortion, blew up the credibility of pro-life Democrats who voted for it and helped defeat those who didn’t.
In 2013, when Republicans introduced a federal limit on most abortions after the fifth month of pregnancy, Pelosi was fiercely opposed to the modest measure but unable to explain how late-term abortion was different from infanticide. Asked to explain the moral difference between elective late-term abortions and the infanticides for which Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell had just been convicted of murder, Pelosi snapped: “As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this. I don’t think it should have anything to do with politics.”
In September 2021, for the first time in history, Pelosi forced a vote on a radical abortion bill that would effectively require all 50 states to allow abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. By that point, the purge of pro-life Democrats was nearly complete: Only one House Democrat voted against it.
Nancy Pelosi is a liberal who advanced liberal policies, but relatively speaking, she was also more pragmatic than the younger, more extreme elements within the party. Though we don’t mourn her stepping down, without her at the helm, Democrats may have even fewer guardrails to prevent the party’s continued leftward drift.
We wish her husband, Paul, a complete and speedy recovery.