Pelosi: With firm control, speaker forges a legacy she never sought
Hours before she announced the House would investigate whether to impeach President Donald Trump, Speaker Nancy Pelosi received a call from him at her Washington home, ostensibly to talk about gun violence. But he quickly changed the topic to Ukraine.
“He kept saying, ‘The call was perfect. When you see the notes, you’ll see the call was perfect,’ ” Pelosi recalled in an interview, sharing for the first time how Trump previewed a reconstructed transcript showing he had asked Ukraine’s president to investigate a political rival.
“Frankly, I thought, ‘Either he does not know right from wrong, or he doesn’t care,’ ” she said.
Now Trump has become only the third American president to be impeached. But when the final vote was tallied Wednes
day on charges the president abused his power and obstructed Congress, he became one of two Washington figures to go down in the history books.
The other is Pelosi. From the moment she ascended to the speakership in January, becoming the first woman to hold the office — not once, but twice — Pelosi has been the maestro of the unruly Democratic orchestra that crescendoed Wednesday to an impeachment vote she sought mightily to avoid. Like a conductor, she has presided over the process with discipline and at times an iron fist, knowing which notes to hit, when to go fast and when to slow down, and when to allow the musicians to play solo.
The pursuit is fraught with risks for Pelosi and the Democratic majority that handed her the gavel in January, and they could face a powerful backlash from voters in 2020 for their decision to move forward with the effort to remove the president. Those dangers, including costing them control of the House, have been evident from the moment she took over as speaker.
When Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the liberal freshman firebrand from Michigan, used an expletive on her first day in office to describe how she wanted to impeach Trump, Pelosi pointedly did not criticize her. “I’m not in the censorship business,” she insisted.
But she also made very clear that House Democrats had no intention of doing any such thing, even as she instructed her top lieutenants to investigate Trump on numerous fronts, including his communications with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and whether he had violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause by profiting from his real estate business as president.
When Robert Mueller, the special counsel, released his report documenting Russian interference in the 2016 election and at least 10 instances of possible obstruction of justice by Trump, a new wave of Democrats began pushing to open an inquiry. In private caucus conference calls and one-on-one meetings in her suite just off the Capitol Rotunda, she heard every one of them out — and patiently pushed back.
“I told her that we were struggling to justify why we were not moving forward,” said one of those Democrats, Rep. Val Demings of Florida, recounting her own effort to get Pelosi to change her mind. The speaker, she said, delivered a firm response about “being strategic and arriving to the right place at the right time.”
When news of Trump’s pressure campaign broke, and Pelosi decided she could hold off no longer, she involved herself in every aspect of the impeachment inquiry. She met nearly every day — sometimes twice a day — with the leaders of the six committees that were already investigating Trump on an array of matters.
She insisted on signing off on which witnesses would testify before the House Intelligence Committee, and personally approved the wording of news releases, committee reports and some of the high-profile statements her lieutenants would deliver in public. When Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, showed her his opening statement for the panel’s first impeachment hearing, Pelosi changed a single word — “was” to “is” — arguing the present tense made for a stronger argument.
Committee chairs, ordinarily insistent on their autonomy, knew not to make a single move on impeachment without consulting her. When debate in the House Judiciary Committee on the articles of impeachment dragged late into the night last week, the chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., checked with Pelosi before deciding to delay the vote until the next morning. And Tuesday, on the eve of the historic debate on the House floor, the speaker was in her Capitol office late into the night, coordinating which lawmakers would get to speak and for how long.
Over the past week, as Pelosi has rolled out the final stages of the impeachment process, culminating with Wednesday’s vote, she has carefully sequenced each step alongside broadly popular, bipartisan legislative items such as a giant defense policy bill, a $1.4 trillion government spending measure, and the ultimate prize for Trump: a sweeping North American trade agreement known as USMCA.
The result is that the most politically vulnerable Democrats — moderates who represent districts that Trump won in 2016 — can point to a list of legislative accomplishments as they leave Washington at year’s end, telling their constituents they did more with their time in Congress than just impeach the president. The strategy is typical of Pelosi, who excels at determining precisely what will be needed to win over holdouts in her ranks and then delivering it, generating remarkable party unity.
In this case, all but two Democrats voted Wednesday to support the article of impeachment on abuse of power, and all but three supported the article on obstruction of Congress.
As the highest ranking woman in Washington and leader of her party for nearly two decades, Pelosi, 79, of San Francisco, made her mark as a leader with muscle and spine when Trump was still a reality television host. She says she wants to be remembered not for impeachment but for her legislative achievements, primarily a meticulous and politically complex push to pass the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s landmark health care law.
But for better or worse, people in both parties say, her legacy is now wrapped up with Trump.
In many respects, Pelosi’s management of the impeachment process recalls the tactics and style she used to push through the Affordable Care Act, and to work her way into the speaker’s office for a second time. Her grasp on the speakership seemed tenuous after the 2018 midterm elections. A number of incoming freshmen Democrats, including many moderates, said they would not vote for her.
“I was one of them; I thought it was time for new leadership,” said one of those freshmen, Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota. “And I’ve got to tell you, thank goodness. Thank goodness that we have Nancy Pelosi speaking for the House of Representatives, because I do not think there is a better, more qualified, more principled person for these circumstances.”