Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, one of the most famous and influential politicians in the United States, leaves him. That will be next year, when he doesn’t run for re-election as a representative of San Francisco. The announcement, made as a surprise this Thursday, thus concludes four decades on Capitol Hill, during which she broke one of the hardest glass ceilings in Washington, becoming the first woman in history to be speaker of the House of Representatives. It was in two separate periods, two turbulent times in which he held the position of speakerwhich also incorporates responsibility as the third authority in the country, behind the president and vice president.
“I will not be running for re-election to Congress. With a heart full of gratitude, I look forward to my final year of service as your representative,” Pelosi, 85, said in a video addressed to her constituents in San Francisco, who then looked back at the most important moments of her career.
Pelosi also made history by becoming the first speaker to be so in two different periods starting from the 1950s. Neither was an easy tenure, despite which she amassed more power than any of her male colleagues in the Capitol thanks, in large part, to a strong, demanding personality and her reputation as a threat-based commander.
The first (2007-2011) was marked by the Great Recession; the second, which covered from 2019 to January 2023, for the two indictment to then (and current) president, Donald Trump, who celebrated the news of his retirement this Thursday as “a great day for the United States,” and squandered the opportunity to show nobility in the victory by calling it “evil and corrupt,” according to Fox News. In that second period he had to deal with the greatest crisis of American democracy in modern history, the assault on the Capitol by a Trumpist horde on January 6, 2021, in addition to the investigation of the special commission, made up of Democrats and Republicans, into the attack.
Despite adversity, he always knew how to leave his mark in Washington, both when his people were in the majority and when things were at their worst. Three years ago, the veteran Democrat, dressed in white like the suffragettes, excited and nervous, announced, after her party had lost control of her, that she would remain in the House as a representative, but without aspiring to leadership: “It’s time to make way for a new generation of Democrats,” she said.
It wasn’t entirely a surprise. Therefore, the future of this former Californian housewife, factotum of American legislative life, hangs by a thread, for reasons not only electoral. The violent assault suffered by her husband, Paul Pelosi, on October 28, 2022 sent him to the hospital with a fractured skull, and clearly weighed more heavily on her decision than Democratic luck at the polls.
Compared to those who believed that Paolo Pelosi’s slow recovery would push her to leave politics, others then underlined that she did not intend to throw in the towel on the action of
That ultra attack conspiratorialwho came to get her, and who brandished the hammer against her husband when he couldn’t find her, was the consequence of years of demonization of her figure by the MAGA (Make America Great Again) world. The hard core of Trump loyalists is always ready to hurl their misogyny-filled darts at Pelosi, one of the politicians who exemplified resistance to the Republican tycoon during his first presidency with a simple and theatrical gesture. It was February 2020, when the then speaker He tore up the pages of the new president’s State of the Union address after dictating it and in reaction to its content, with which the president “destroyed the truth,” as he warned.
A leap forward
When she declared two years later that she would step away from leadership, the politician recalled the difficulties she had encountered in making her way in a man’s world. “When I arrived in the House, in 1987, there were 12 Democratic women, today there are more than 90,” she said at the time.
At the time, Ronald Reagan, another Californian, was president, and she decided to throw herself into politics after raising her five children. She was clear that she would not be just another representative of a group of 435 politicians who, for the most part, go unnoticed.
He became minority leader in the House of Representatives in 2002. Four years later, after his party’s victory in the 2006 midterm elections, which marked the final stretch of George Bush Jr.’s presidency, he took up the gavel in January of the following year. speaker. It accompanied Obama’s first term, during which he aimed to promote the Affordable Care Act (ACA is its acronym in English and Obamacare is its nickname).
In the second round, he faced Trump and pushed the presidency of Joe Biden (2017-2021) like no other, despite having a slim majority in the lower house. His ability to navigate this adverse tide consolidated his image as a stern and convincing politician, but capable of communicating with his opponent to achieve his objectives. The same cannot be said of his current successor, Representative Mike Johnson, who has decided to close the House for the duration of what is already the longest government shutdown in history.
Pelosi’s withdrawal therefore puts an end to a long service, in which critics of the progressive wing highlight a blind spot: her skepticism regarding the two processes of indictment (impeachment) to which Donald Trump was subjected, which he resisted for fear of its consequences. Pelosi suspected that these would open the thunder curtain and destroy the ever-diminishing collaboration between the parties in an increasingly polarized country. Given what he saw, he wasn’t wrong.
Although it ceases to be the speakerThroughout the remainder of Joe Biden’s presidency, Pelosi maintained considerable influence over her party. First of all because he managed to put his candidate, the New York Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, in his place. Jeffries hasn’t had an easy time working in the veteran politician’s long shadow. In this period the politician, lacking the charisma of his predecessor, was unable to consolidate his control within the Capitol. Nor his image in Washington.
Subsequently, during the crisis due to doubts about Biden’s ability to run for re-election, Pelosi exerted strong pressure behind closed doors on her old ally, which led to the resignation of the Democratic candidate and his replacement with Kamala Harris, another prominent politician from the San Francisco Bay Area, who would end up losing, a year ago Wednesday, to Trump.
In the second Republican presidency, Pelosi has not been the personality who easily grabs headlines. That changed this Thursday, of course, when his announcement plunged Washington into an elegiac tone, farewell to one of the policies that best defined the city as a geographic space and theater of political operations.
