What Nancy Pelosi understood about power

The purpose of winning elections is to pass laws

Nancy Pelosi (Gage Skidmore)

Nancy Pelosi, who announced her retirement after 40 years in Washington, was many things at once. The first (and thus far only) woman to wield the Speaker’s gavel, a towering figure in Democratic politics and an unflinching champion of liberal causes. But above all, she was a legislator — and one who instinctively understood what remarkably few politicians do: that the purpose of winning power is to pass laws.

Just one example. In January 2010, the Democrats lost a US senate seat. Not just any seat, but their 60th, meaning that Republicans could muster enough votes to filibuster healthcare reform. Many in the media and indeed her own party pronounced the legislation dead. Not Pelosi.

One week later, the Speaker outlined her new strategy for passing the Affordable Care Act, and she said it with such confidence she may even have believed it herself:

You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.

And they did. The Democrats lost the House of Representatives later that year, in large part because of a backlash against Obamacare. But not before Pelosi had ensured the safe passage of legislation that expanded access to health insurance to tens of millions of Americans.

All hail the 111th Congress

It is not hyperbolic to suggest that the 111th Congress, which spanned the final few days of the George W. Bush administration and the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, was the most impactful in terms of passing laws that impacted Americans since Lyndon Baines Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ of the 1960s.

(rawpixel.com / National Archive)

Not all of this is due to Pelosi’s genius. It certainly helped that for much of the time, the Democrats enjoyed a 60-40 supermajority in the Senate and a substantial majority in the House of Representatives. Moreover, Pelosi’s talents often shone brighter in her prodigious fundraising and behind-the-scenes persuasion than in her public pronouncements. Remember “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”?

Nonetheless, it is worth pausing for a moment on what that Congress got done in addition to healthcare reform. It really is remarkable stuff: