Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the first woman ever elected Speaker of the House, announced Thursday that after 38 years in Congress, she will not seek another term.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Democratic representative Nancy Pelosi, the first woman ever 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 politics correspondent Scott Shafer looks back at her historic legacy.
SCOTT SHAFER, BYLINE: As Representative Nancy Pelosi prepares to exit the political stage at age 85, she leaves behind a long list of accomplishments, including passage of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Pelosi was first elected in 1987 to fill a seat left vacant by the death of Representative Sala Burton. Her first campaign was no cakewalk. Some of her opponents painted her as privileged and out of touch, including city supervisor Carol Ruth Silver at a televised debate held at KQED.
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CAROL RUTH SILVER: How can she relate to people like me – a single parent, working mother?
SHAFER: But Pelosi held her ground.
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NANCY PELOSI: My attitude is, they’ll take the low road and I’ll take the high road, and I’ll get to Congress before them.
SHAFER: And she did, quickly showing her political chops. Years later, her reputation as a tough-as-nails street fighter was well established, as she acknowledged in 2018.
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PELOSI: As I always say to the candidates, you have to know how to take a punch and throw a punch.
SHAFER: Pelosi arrived in Washington as 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 with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation said Pelosi’s impact was felt far outside her own district.
ERNEST HOPKINS: She understood that we could not end the HIV epidemic without addressing the epidemic in Black and Latino communities, and so she was all in.
SHAFER: But Pelosi’s rise to power within the Democratic Party was not easy.
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PELOSI: And when I did run for high office and leadership, some of the men said, who said she could run (laughter)? Well, that just lit my fire, really.
SHAFER: In 2006, Democrats reclaimed a majority in the House for the first time in 12 years. They elected Pelosi to be the next speaker. Pelosi was a partisan warrior, but Republicans used her as a foil, a liberal Democrat from San Francisco, tying her to other Democrats running in more conservative parts of the country.
There were times when she worked across the aisle. During the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency, when the economy was cratering from the subprime mortgage crisis, she rounded up enough Democratic votes to save financial institutions, which critics described as a Wall Street bailout. 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, no other speaker of the House in the modern era, Republican or Democrat, has wielded the gavel 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 the side of President Trump. In a meeting in the Oval Office during Trump’s first term, Pelosi said the blame belonged squarely on the president if there were a government shutdown.
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PELOSI: You should not have a 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 emerging from that meeting with the president wearing a vibrant red coat and sunglasses became an iconic image. Democrats retook the House in 2019, and Pelosi was elected speaker a second time, guiding two impeachments of Trump, efforts that ultimately failed in the Senate. She became the face of the Democratic Party’s resistance, dramatically ripping up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union speech in 2020. She later gave her reason in an interview with KQED, saying it was, quote, “full of lies.” Pelosi made history as the first woman and the first Californian to become speaker. But as Governor Gavin Newsom notes, it’s what she did with that power that mattered.
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GAVIN NEWSOM: You may never get something like this back. It will take 40, 50 years for someone to build the kind of credibility that she’s built and the influence and the capacity to deliver.
SHAFER: Several candidates are already vying to replace her. Whoever wins will be hard-pressed to match Pelosi’s ability to wield power.
For NPR News, I’m Scott Shafer in San Francisco.
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