Nancy Pelosi is not an especially impressive figure. She was elected to Congress in 1986, and she spent her first six years in Washington, D.C., as a rank-and-file member of Congress who did nothing of any great interest. That changed after Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, but the immediate overreach resulted in Pelosi and her colleagues annoying the public so profoundly that the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years, and then stayed in the minority for the following twelve.
Since 1994, in which year the House became competitive for the first time since the 1950s, the Democrats have had a majority just four times — that’s eight years out of a total of 28. During those eight years, Nancy Pelosi has been the Democrats’ choice for speaker every time the question came up.
Did she do a good job? Not really, no. During half of the time that Pelosi was in charge of the House (from 2007 to 2009, and then from 2019 to 2021), Pelosi had a GOP president to deal with, and was thus prevented from effecting major change. For two of her years at the top (2021–2023), she had such a small majority that she couldn’t do much — and what she did do was highly questionable. And then there were the two years, between 2009 and 2011, when she got a lot done. But, really, how could she have avoided doing so? After 2008, the Democrats had massive landslide majorities, and, while they certainly used them to achieve big legislative goals, they also guaranteed a backlash that severely damaged the party at all levels of government, that took the gavel out of Pelosi’s hands at the next possible opportunity, and that kept her in the minority for nearly a decade thereafter.
Pelosi’s last act of note was to throw her own branch of government under the bus. Having insisted in no uncertain terms that the president could not unilaterally cancel student-loan debt — “people think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness,” she said last year, “he does not, the president can’t do it, so that’s not even a discussion” — Pelosi took to pretending that, actually, he could.
That’s not a great record, is it?