“We have fired Nancy Pelosi,” tweeted House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California a day after his party narrowly won back control of the House.
Fired? Not quite. She plans to stick around and, as things look now, Congress could use her advice.
Technically she will have to step down from her position as the first woman to serve as speaker of the House, a position second in line of succession to the president. But she announced she will continue in her congressional seat to which she was reelected handily in the midterms after serving since 1987.
At age 83, she nevertheless is not eager to ease into retirement. As a backbencher, she still will be able to witness her GOP opposition up close as they take on the daunting task of actual governing.
Her departure from leadership marks a watershed moment in Washington politics after two decades in Congress. She made history in 2007 as the first woman to assume the speakership. Then, after eight years in the minority, she won the speaker’s seat again in 2019, the only speaker to do so.
Love her or hate her — and many in today’s polarized political arena find it easy to do both — she got things done.
Her string of achievements is one of the most impressive of the past half-century.
Among her history-making accomplishments, there was the hard-won passage of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, more widely known as “Obamacare.” She pushed the Dodd-Frank financial reform act after the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
She helped pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to rebuild roads, bridges, railways, ports and airports, and carry out other major projects such as improving access to high-speed internet.
In other historic moves, she presided over the two impeachments of former President Donald Trump, and helped spur a full investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Everyone soon learned that Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi, daughter of the late Baltimore mayor and congressman Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., was not one to be trifled with.
She grew up in the trenches of big-city, precinct-level politics, witnessing firsthand the neighborhood-based relationships built on respect for people and their families in return for their votes.
When former Obama adviser and chief strategist David Axelrod asked Pelosi what she learned from growing up in a political family, he wrote in a recent CNN web essay, her response came quickly: “I learned how to count. And I learned that ‘I hear you’ is not a yes. ‘I got it’ is not a yes. Only ‘yes’ is ‘yes.'”
Such was her road map to success in pushing such landmark legislation as Obamacare. Obama put passage of his signature legislation on Pelosi’s shoulders and she set to work fashioning a delicate all-Democrat coalition, since Republicans had given her no indication they were going to cooperate.
Time’s Molly Ball, who wrote a book on Pelosi, quotes her as telling Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, later Chicago mayor, that she thought wooing Republican votes as Obama wished wasn’t worth the effort. “Does the president not understand the way this game works? He wants to get it done and be beloved, and you can’t have both. Which does he want?”
With that, she showed herself to be a political realist: Get as much done as you have the votes to achieve — and don’t overreach. That was a view that brought a lot of complaints from her own party’s left-progressive wing, even as she tried to woo their votes, and also made her an all-purpose bogeyman for rivals on the political right.
Pelosi’s blunt realism didn’t charm the idealists right away, but in building her coalitions, she was patient. Her rivals can learn many valuable lessons from her.
As Republicans return to power and elect a new speaker, they have a lot of work waiting for them, very little of which they’ve had to discuss seriously on the campaign trail. So far, after campaigning national on the issues of crime, inflation and border security, Republicans have not offered many specifics as to what remedies they have in mind.
But high on their to-do list are investigations, particularly of their pet concerns, fanned by right-wing broadcasters and websites. These include alleged lapses at the border, suspicious Internal Revenue Service nosiness and Hunter Biden’s business dealings, none of which is known to be connected to President Joe Biden or Congress — or, for that matter, the issues on which they campaigned.
And, just as Pelosi had her party’s left-wing to placate or criticize, McCarthy, if elected speaker, will have to deal with ultraconservative Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and others in his party’s right wing who seem no less interested in governing than grandstanding.
McCarthy is new to that level of leadership and factional bridge-building. For the good of the country, we wish him luck. The speaker’s job looks a lot more inviting from the outside than the inside. Nancy Pelosi knows.
This editorial reflects the opinion of the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board.
