The decision of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to step down from her leadership position provides an important opportunity to assess the legacy of the first woman to lead the legislative branch of our government. When Pelosi arrived on Capitol Hill, many dismissed her as the personification of the “San Francisco liberal” Democrat that conservatives had castigated. After three and a half decades of legislative achievements and skilled political helmsmanship, no one doubts her historical significance.
Pelosi leaves many legacies, aside from being the first of her gender to hold the gavel. Indeed, her record of recruiting a diverse collection of women and minorities to run for Congress and aggressively elevating them to key committees and leadership positions assures that the impact of her time as speaker will influence the House permanently.
Although often accused of a rigorously partisan and bareknuckle approach to politics, Pelosi frequently and sincerely extolled the value of finding common ground, believing that bipartisan legislation was more enduring and preferable to one-party governance or ephemeral executive orders. “It’s always better to govern from the middle,” she told president-elect Barack Obama in 2008. She collaborated with Republican presidents with whom she had profound policy disagreements in addressing the 2008 financial collapse or the COVID crisis of 2020, encouraging her members to cast politically perilous votes because of the severity of the crisis. Concerned about creating a distraction that jeopardized policy objectives, she resisted her own caucus’s demand to impeach George W. Bush for distorting intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — and hesitated to take action against Donald Trump until the evidence compelled a congressional response.
Pelosi would often observe that “Washington is a perishable city,” by which she meant that the power conferred by voters is often fleeting, and leaders could not “wait for the slowest ship” before acting.
She has been a fierce advocate for her side of Capitol Hill, reproaching those who assumed it was easy for her to find the votes to pass legislation. She did not hesitate to chide those who minimized her challenges, as she did when telling President Obama in 2010, “You don’t respect the House!” or George W. Bush whose veto threats were an affront to the House’s demands for constraints on spending in Iraq.
Still, she bowed to the reality that often, the approach favored by the House faced obdurate barriers in the Senate or White House. Nowhere was that more the case than with the Affordable Care Act in 2010. While she preferred a more sweeping version of the health law, she refused to allow divisive issues — from abortion to the public option to regional repayment formulas — jeopardize Democrats’ best chance in decades of passing a health care law. “If you don’t have 218 votes,” she would remind aspirational colleagues, “you’re just having a conversation,” and Pelosi’s goal was always to legislate.
Indeed, as I argue in my new book, Arc of Power, Pelosi’s most remarkable achievement was not her ability to deliver the sweeping reforms she and a majority of her House caucus preferred, but her facility for persuading similarly disappointed liberals to take the best version of a bill she could negotiate — and then continue to fight for more. Often, doing so meant capitulating to a few recalcitrant senators who blamed their chamber’s rules for the Senate’s “my way or the highway” approach that House colleague, majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), decried.
Pelosi would go the extra mile to accommodate a member whose vote she needed, often agreeing to office meetings well past midnight to hear out a disappointed colleague. She strolled through the Minnesota State Fair wearing cowboy boots, jeans and munching a pork chop on a stick with conservative Democrat Collin Peterson to secure his vote on a key energy provision. “I have to have the bill,” she told the Agriculture chairman. “And I will have one. I have the votes without you.” Such attention to member needs meant that during periods of large majorities and small, as well as when in the minority, no one achieved greater unity.
Pelosi used those unparalleled skills to pass sweeping legislative achievements under both Republican and Democratic presidents: stimulus under Bush and Obama; financial and auto rescue; energy efficiency; lobbying and ethics reform; health care; a visionary infrastructure program; human rights safeguards at home and around the world, and a massive investment to fight climate change. True, the scope of the legislation was not always what she had sought, but she embraced the axiom of the great British political philosopher, Sir Mick Jagger: You don’t always get what you want, but you get what you need. And no one knew better what her members need.
What seems a bit strange is that after two exhausting decades of leading the party, so many are questioning why Pelosi chose to depart. Those of us who worked alongside her — members and staff — have endured her indefatigable pace for years: long days on the floor and the conference room, late night negotiations, weekends traveling to multiple states for fundraising, recess trips to battle zones and strategic partners to assess the state of our international relations. Perhaps then it is not so surprising that, with a Democrat in the White House, a Democratic Senate and the tiniest of margins in the House, she decided this was the time to give others the opportunity to lead.
Fortunately, a new generation of diverse and skilled leaders has been elevated by the Caucus and has spent crucial years honing the skills needed to manage the disparate Democrats and hone them into a unified party. Will the new leaders be as skilled as Nancy Pelosi? They would doubtless be the first to admit her high heels are difficult ones to fill, but that is the nature of political change, and change is very much what Nancy Pelosi has wholeheartedly embraced.
John Lawrence is visiting professor at the University of California Washington Center and author of “Arc of Power: Inside Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership 2005-2010” (2022) and “The Class of ’74: Congress After Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship.” He was Speaker Pelosi’s chief of staff from 2005-2013.