WASHINGTON — With a popular Democratic president in the White House and large Democratic majorities in Congress, an emboldened speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through a major climate change measure in 2009 despite warnings of a political backlash.
“We passed transformative legislation that takes us into the future,” Ms. Pelosi exulted after the House narrowly passed legislation to cut emissions following its signature trade and deal with reluctant Democrats.
It was a rare miscalculation. Her immediate future turned out to be outnumbered when Democrats were crushed in the 2010 midterm elections by a public backlash over the climate bill, which died in the Senate, and a health care bill signed into law.
Ms. Pelosi refused to throw in the towel and step aside. Remaining head of the defeated House Democrats, she rose again in 2019 as a more pragmatic speaker, one who had learned from both her failures and successes and would preside over a period of remarkable legislative productivity. In doing so, she sealed a legacy as the most powerful woman in American politics to date.
What might be called the Pelosi era in Washington comes to a close at noon on Tuesday, when Republicans take control of the House and Ms. Pelosi finally retires to the ranks where, she insists, she has no intention to be a meddling mother. in-laws who give unsolicited advice.
But her presence will be felt for years to come in the climate, health care, public works and social legislation she ushered in to the signatures of two Democratic presidents, as well as the great moments of her tenure that concluded with the exciting invitation to Volodymyr Zelensky to to speak to Congress just days before she lost the gavel.
The new leadership of both parties will find it daunting to try to match its achievements and political reach, regardless of their view of its policy agenda. Mrs. Pelosi, the first female speaker, made her own way.
A new congress is taking shape
After the 2022 midterm elections, the Democrats retained control of the Senate, while the Republicans flipped the House.
Her time as a leader was interrupted by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, two groundbreaking events that tested her capabilities but also demonstrated her willingness to rise above political power in times of crisis. disagreements to rise. crisis.
In between, there was a war in Iraq she opposed, a dire financial crisis she helped curb, the rise of the Tea Party movement that toppled her from her throne, the Trump presidency she fought with two impeachments, a pandemic that wreaked havoc on Congress and the nation. turmoil, and finally a triumphant legislative push during the first two years of President Biden’s term. While her goals were big, she also devoted herself to — and seemed to enjoy — the minutiae of vote counting, picking out Democrats one at a time until she reached the magic number of 218, usually with one more couple in her bag just in time. case.
“The fact is that no other speaker in modern times, Republican or Democrat, has wielded the gavel with such authority or such consistent results,” said John A. Boehner, the Ohio Republican who dueled Ms. Pelosi in his roles as minority leader and speaker, said last month at the dedication of her official portrait. “Let me just say you are one tough cookie.”
And a partisan. As the House faced a dangerous vote on a bank bailout as the economy faltered in September 2008, Ms. Pelosi tied her call for passage of the legislation to an attack on the Republican economic policies that sparked the crisis. Some Republicans cited the tone of her attack as an excuse to oppose the package, an outcome that rocked financial markets when their party failed to get the promised votes and the bill was rejected.
Mrs. Pelosi then led the Bush administration and members of both parties in Congress in regrouping and finding a bipartisan way out of the economic meltdown. Her role was captured in a now-famous moment in the west wing of the White House, when Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson got down on one knee and begged for help from Ms. Pelosi.
“Hank, I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Mrs. Pelosi, a devout member of that faith, said dryly to the pleading Mr. Paulson.
But it’s the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 that Ms. Pelosi considers her greatest achievement, one that required all the legislative skills she could muster. Ultimately, she had to convince House Democrats to pass a Senate bill that many found objectionable but couldn’t change after Senate Democrats lost their crucial 60th vote with the death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy from Massachusetts. It required navigating the diverse objections of both conservative and progressive Democrats to secure victory.
“Nothing in the years I was there compares to the Affordable Care Act, which expands health care to tens of millions of Americans, 150 million families with better benefits, lower costs, and no pre-existing condition to compromise their access, and no boundaries for life,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters in December, adding a point of particular pride to her, a mother of five: “Being a woman is no longer a pre-existing condition.”
The victory was costly as Ms. Pelosi became the target of harsh Republican political hits that continue to this day and contributed to a violent attack on her husband, Paul, in October. Democrats were deeply outnumbered. Republicans were able to put the brakes on the last years of President Barack Obama’s administration, even as he was re-elected in 2012 before turning the White House over to Donald J. Trump — or “what’s his name,” as Mrs. Pelosi sometimes disparages the man who called her “Crazy Nancy.”
Although she faced a challenge for her return as speaker after Democrats won back the House in 2018, Ms. Pelosi solidified power again, aided by her fierce and public distaste for Mr. Trump.
From their first meeting, Ms. Pelosi showed that she would not fool Mr. Trump like so many others did. When he falsely claimed to have won the popular vote during his first meeting with congressional leaders at the White House in January 2017, she emphatically corrected him. At another rally, a photo showed her pointing her finger at him, berating him for his sympathy for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and telling Mr. Trump that “with him, all roads lead to Putin.”
Her sarcastic slap to Mr. Trump during his 2019 State of the Union address has become an iconic image, and her decision to tear up his printed remarks at the end of the same speech a year later surpassed even that rebuke.
“He lied on every page,” Ms. Pelosi said in a recent interview, explaining her spontaneous decision to shred the speech. She said she viewed the speech as disrespectful to the House of Representatives, especially after Trump took the opportunity to pay tribute to Rush Limbaugh, who labeled Ms. Pelosi a “thug.”
“Don’t come here with your junk and your junk,” said Mrs. Pelosi, describing her thoughts at the time.
In her second round as speaker, a challenge came from the left as younger, more progressive Democrats saw Ms. Pelosi reluctant to push the legislative envelope when they launched the Green New Deal, a comprehensive environmental plan that Ms. Pelosi dismissed at one point as the green dream. Not ready to go there, the more pragmatic Nancy Pelosi used her own credentials as a San Francisco card-carrying liberal to draw a line.
At an October fundraising reception in Detroit, Ms. Pelosi told backers that while she appreciated the new members’ enthusiasm and even shared their forward-thinking views, it wasn’t a “winning message.”
“I had those plates in my basement from 30 years ago,” she said. “But that’s not what we’re doing now.”
Facing a 2021 stalemate, Ms. Pelosi agreed to untie a massive tax and climate change package from a bipartisan public works bill that threatened to hold progressives hostage. The infrastructure measure passed and proved to be a political winner, but some of the social programs and tax breaks Democrats sought in the failed companion were never revived.
In her final months as speaker, she oversaw a wave of bipartisan legislation that, while falling short of what she and other House Democrats would have wanted, represented a real achievement: the biggest climate change measure ever enacted, an unexpected gun safety bill, the manufacturing of microchip legislation, new provisions to reduce drug costs for older Americans, and a huge spending package, including money for Ukraine to carry out its war against Russian aggression. Finally, there was legal protection for same-sex marriage, which Pelosi said was a fitting end to her career in Congress, where her first speech after winning a special election in 1987 was a call to fight AIDS.
There was one last job for a leader who often had no time left on her toughest tasks. With only days left as speaker, she aimed a final barrage at Mr. Trump. First, the January 6 special commission she had set up ended its review by referring the former president to the Justice Department for criminal charges and releasing a series of testimonies that showed Mr. to cancel the 2020 elections. Then, on Friday, the Democrat-led Ways and Means Committee released the income tax returns Mr. Trump had fought to keep secret.
Nancy Pelosi wielded power to the end.