Pelosi’s prowess faces test next year
Narrow House majority makes negotiating crucial
WASHINGTON — Next year could put House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s reputation as a master legislator to the greatest test of her career, with Washington poised to enter one of its most sharply divided periods in a generation.
The San Francisco Democrat will be presiding over the narrowest House majority in her career as speaker. With a few races left to be officially called, Democrats are likely to have only a handful of seats more than the 218 needed for a majority.
Pelosi is likely to be onethird of a triumvirate of battlehardened legislators occupying the main power centers of Washington. It’s a dynamic that could result in one of the more productive stretches in recent years — or prove that political dysfunction has become inescapable.
Like the House, the Senate will be closely divided, with control to be decided in two Jan. 5 runoff elections in Georgia. Democrats would need to win both to have the effective majority, with Vice Presidentelect Kamala Harris providing the tiebreaking vote.
The White House will be held by Democrats — specifically Presidentelect Joe Biden, a Washington veteran who spent 36 years in the
Senate and eight in the White House as vice president.
Democrats are the underdogs in the Georgia races, making Joe Biden likely to take office as the first new president in 30 years whose party doesn’t fully control Congress.
Assuming Republicans hold the Senate, Biden and Pelosi will have to contend with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who blocked much of former President Barack Obama’s agenda and ignored virtually every piece of legislation Pelosi’s House Democrats passed in the past two years.
Pelosi and her allies are nevertheless projecting confidence that having a Democrat as president will shift the ground in their favor.
“Whether you’re in the minority or majority, if the president is of your party, you have more power,” Pelosi said this month. “That’s what Mitch McConnell’s going to find out now, that whether he’s in the majority or the minority, not having Donald Trump in the White House is going to change his leverage and that dynamic.”
Her optimism and reputation as a skillful tactician will be tested as she and Biden try to work through his agenda. But those who know her say people shouldn’t discount Pelosi’s chances of working with McConnell, even in a Washington that has been bitterly partisan.
“The speaker has absolutely earned and deserves her reputation,” said Blake Androff, a former Democratic leadership staffer under Pelosi who now works for the Signal Group, a lobbying and public relations firm. “You’d be hard pressed to find a more effective negotiator on Capitol Hill than Nancy Pelosi.”
Those who have watched the three politicians up close say several factors will affect the strategy next year. Both Pelosi and McConnell will be focused on the 2022 midterm elections and maintaining or growing their narrow majorities. Pelosi’s members say that after Democrats’ underwhelming performance in 2020 House races they want to have more legislative results to bring home to their constituents. And McConnell will have eight more seats to defend than Democrats in 2022, including potentially competitive races in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, where Biden either won or was close. Those senators also may demand successes to show their voters — and with Biden in the White House, McConnell will be unable to fill the Senate calendar confirming Republican nominees and judges, as he has for the past four years.
Democrats will control the megaphone of the White House and be able to set the agenda, creating pressure on
McConnell that didn’t exist under Trump.
The coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crisis also will create an urgent need for cooperative action.
Another factor will be Biden himself, a man who has negotiated plenty of deals with McConnell as both a senator and vice president and is not afraid of giving some ground to get to a compromise.
One man who knows all three, and their ability to negotiate with each other, is former Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who led Senate Democrats from 2005 until his retirement in 2017. He doubts McConnell is willing to work with Biden and Pelosi, but says that if anyone can find a way, it’s those two Democrats.
“Nancy Pelosi has been speaker twice. She’s done a good job both times,” Reid said. “She has good control of her entire caucus, so that’s her.”
Reid said Biden will come into office with a fair amount of goodwill among Republicans and is “somebody that they know, that McConnell knows, and they’ve done deals before. I know that because I was the recipient of a deal or two that they engineered. ... Compromise is how you get things done, and Joe Biden understands that. And I think he has the ability better than anybody at this stage to do a deal or two or three with McConnell.”
Obama likewise praised Pelosi’s acumen in his new memoir, saying she often outmaneuvered her opponents.
“[ P] oliticians ( usually men) underestimated Nancy at their own peril, for her ascent to power had been no fluke,” Obama wrote. “She’d grown up in the East, the Italian American daughter of Baltimore’s mayor, tutored from an early age in the ways of ethnic ward bosses and longshoremen, unafraid to play hardball politics in the name of getting things done.”
Neither McConnell nor Pelosi can be moved by flattery, only by pure strategy, which is why they take each other seriously. They also know how to get what they want in negotiations, including when that takes giving up something else.
“Majority Leader McConnell and Speaker Pelosi, these are two battlescarred politicians,” said Antonia Ferrier, a former senior staffer for McConnell. “They both know how to cut a deal when they want to, and they have before. The two of them have a level of respect for one another.”
But the potential for dealmaking rests on compromise — meaning that Democrats might need to temper their ambitions. Pelosi has made clear what she thinks are winning areas of focus: health care and prescription drug prices, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure and fighting corruption in politics. Policies she has pushed through the House on those fronts in the past two years resemble proposals from Biden’s campaign, giving them a common starting point.
Those are areas that could also potentially be bipartisan. Ferrier noted that under the Obama administration, the two parties agreed to pass a major highway bill, which may not have generated major headlines but was nonetheless significant.
“If there’s a will there’s a way, but that needs to be measured of the art of the doable, not the art of dreamable,” Ferrier said, suggesting Pelosi may have to resist the demands of progressives looking for more.
Androff, Pelosi’s former staffer, said the speaker knows how to focus her energy without giving up her ambitions.
“I think the expectations are going to be even higher this year, given they have the White House, so I think where you’ll see them focus is where there is the highest probability of the boldest change,” he said.
It will help to have a president who doesn’t change his mind midstream and respects the role of Congress, he added.
“Right now you’ve got goalposts moving up and down the field, based on what the president’s mood is and what segment he was watching on Fox News,” Androff said. “If you have clear goals for all parties involved and then you let negotiators in the room hash it out, left to her own devices, I think the speaker can very easily negotiate with McConnell to get stuff done.”
What makes both of them good at negotiating, both Ferrier and Androff said, is that they always know where their votes are.
In Pelosi, “there is no better vote counter in D. C., there is no one better at delivering her caucus when she offers it up,” Androff said.
Reid agreed. He said that when Pelosi was working with Obama on what would be their greatest legislative achievement, passing the Affordable Care Act, she gave Reid an ultimatum: Bring me a letter signed by all of your Democrats saying they will vote for it, or I won’t move it in the House.
“The Senate had disappointed the House so many times,” Reid said. “They would pass something and we would end up killing it. So she said, ‘ I’m not going to go out on a limb unless you can guarantee me that you will have the votes to pass this.’ ”
It took two letters, Reid said, because one senator insisted on writing his own. But he got them. “I took them both to Nancy Pelosi,” he said. “I said, ‘ Here’s the proof.’ And we got it done.”