Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the first woman elected House speaker, announced Thursday that after 38 years in Congress, she will not seek another term.
JUANA VERANOS, PRESENTER:
Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi, the first woman elected speaker of the House, announced today that she will not seek another term. Pelosi spent 38 years representing her San Francisco constituents in Washington. KQED Senior Political Correspondent Scott Shafer discusses his historical legacy.
SCOTT SHAFER, BYLINE: As Rep. Nancy Pelosi prepares to leave the political stage at age 85, she leaves behind a long list of accomplishments, including the passage of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Pelosi was first elected in 1987 to fill a seat left vacant by the death of Rep. Sala Burton. His first campaign was not a piece of cake. Some of her opponents described her as privileged and out of touch, including City Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver in a televised debate held on KQED.
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CAROL RUTH SILVER: How can you relate to people like me, a single mom and a working mom?
SHAFER: But Pelosi stood her ground.
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NANCY PELOSI: My attitude is that they will take the low road and I will take the high road, and I will get to Congress before them.
SHAFER: And he did, quickly showing his political skills. Years later, her reputation as a tough street fighter was well established, as she acknowledged in 2018.
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PELOSI: As I always tell candidates, you have to know how to take a punch and throw a punch.
SHAFER: Pelosi arrived in Washington when the AIDS epidemic was ravaging her district. She pushed for more federal funding at a time when the Reagan administration was ignoring it. Ernest Hopkins of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation said Pelosi’s impact was felt far beyond her own district.
ERNEST HOPKINS: She understood that we couldn’t end the HIV epidemic without addressing the epidemic in Black and Latinx communities, so she was totally on board.
SHAFER: But Pelosi’s rise to power within the Democratic Party was not easy.
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PELOSI: And when I ran for high office and leadership, some of the men said, who said she could run (laughter)? Well, that lit my fire, really.
SHAFER: In 2006, Democrats regained the majority in the House for the first time in 12 years. They elected Pelosi as the next speaker. Pelosi was a partisan warrior, but Republicans used her as a foil, a liberal Democrat from San Francisco, linking her to other Democrats running in more conservative parts of the country.
There were times when he worked across the hall. During the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency, when the economy was collapsing from the subprime mortgage crisis, she mustered enough Democratic votes to bail out financial institutions, in what critics described as a bailout of Wall Street. Even former Republican Speaker John Boehner praised her at the unveiling of Pelosi’s official portrait in 2022.
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JOHN BOEHNER: And the fact of the matter is that no other House speaker in the modern era, Republican or Democrat, has wielded the gift with such authority or with such consistent results.
SHAFER: Pelosi’s superpower was cultivating relationships and understanding how to win enough votes to pass legislation. She was also a thorn in President Trump’s side. In a meeting in the Oval Office during Trump’s first term, Pelosi said the blame would fall entirely on the president if there was a government shutdown.
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PELOSI: There should be no Trump shutdown. Are you having a (ph)…?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: A what? Did you say Trump?
PELOSI: A Trump shutdown.
SHAFER: A photo of her leaving that meeting with the president in a vibrant red coat and sunglasses became an iconic image. Democrats retook the House in 2019 and Pelosi was elected speaker for the second time, shepherding two impeachment trials against Trump, efforts that ultimately failed in the Senate. He became the face of the Democratic Party’s resistance, dramatically tearing up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union address in 2020. He later gave his reasons in an interview with KQED, saying it was, quote, “full of lies.” Pelosi made history as the first woman and first Californian to become president. But as Governor Gavin Newsom points out, what matters is what he did with that power.
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GAVIN NEWSOM: You may never get something like this back. It will take 40 or 50 years for someone to build the kind of credibility that she has built and the influence and the ability to deliver.
SHAFER: Several candidates are already running to replace her. Whoever wins will have a hard time matching Pelosi’s ability to wield power.
For NPR News, I’m Scott Shafer in San Francisco.
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