Nancy Pelosi v. Mitch McConnell: What a difference a leader makes

With apologies to Charles Dickens...

It is the best of times and the worst of times on Capitol Hill in the City of Washington, D.C.

The paradox stands out not simply in how differently the House and Senate vote, but in how they are led.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, serving her third two-year term as Speaker of the House, has already taken her place alongside the late Sam Rayburn as one of its greatest leaders. She is the most influential woman ever to hold national elective office, as well as the first to lead either chamber and the first to serve as a minority leader.

She controls the House by force of personality, as well as the use of power. Having raised five children before she was elected to Congress in 1987, she perfected a steely glance — “that look,” some call it — that speaks louder than words. She used it to good effect to silence applause after the vote to impeach President Trump on Wednesday night.

She didn’t need the impeachment to achieve historic stature, although it is certainly an accomplishment.

Without her, the Affordable Care Act probably would not have been enacted nine years ago, during her previous term as speaker. Given what has been happening in the courts, she might have to do it again next year.

In this term, the House has passed more than 400 bills, some of such extreme importance as restoring vital parts of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court had overturned, protecting the 2020 election from renewed Russian interference, raising the minimum wage, and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

Despite today’s hyper-partisan climate, the Democratic speaker produced a bipartisan budget agreement and a new North American trade bill, one of the president’s highest priorities, which he will owe to her.

Only five bills, not counting resolutions, remain to be voted on in the House. Pelosi represents the best of times. But more than 300 of these bills are languishing in the Senate, including some 275 that passed the House with bipartisan support.

That brings us to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He personifies the worst of times.

There is no valid reason for him to prevent the Senate from voting on any of the House bills other than his contempt of Democrats and his desperation to keep Trump in power, for the sake of the Republican Party, even if it leaves the nation vulnerable to foreign meddling in our elections.

McConnell’s abuse of power is second only to Trump’s. He plumbed the depths of partisan irresponsibility when he stole a Supreme Court appointment from President Barack Obama on the spurious and historically inaccurate pretext that a president shouldn’t be allowed to make such an appointment during his last year in office.

Pelosi’s leadership is a case study in the wise use of power. McConnell’s is quite the reverse.

Only a year ago, however, some younger House Democrats were agitating for her and other veteran Democratic leaders to step aside. Despite their having shattered Republican control in the 2018 mid-term elections, there were even hints that some might throw in with Republicans to deny her a majority when it came time in January for the official vote.

Pelosi is 79. Her two top aides, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland and Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina are 80 and 79 respectively.

The insurgents should be glad they didn’t get what they wished for. Most seem to be.

“I thought it was time for new leadership, and I’ve got to tell you: Thank goodness, thank goodness that we have Nancy Pelosi speaking for the House of Representatives,” said Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn.

Pelosi won the decisive caucus vote with 124 votes to 63 for Rep. Tim Ryan, 46, of Ohio, who mounted a short-lived campaign for president this year.

But the confrontation prompted her to promise to abdicate the speakership after one more term, assuming the Democrats hold the House in 2020. The policy she proposed would have her and the other top leaders serve only three two-year terms in those capacities, with a fourth depending on the support of two-thirds of the party caucus.

She said she sees herself “as a bridge to the next generation of leaders,” with a “continuing responsibility to mentor and advance new members into positions of power and responsibility in the House Democratic caucus.”

Hoyer said he wouldn’t be bound by that. There was discussion of the caucus making it a party rule, but nothing has been heard of it since.

Term limits for leadership positions would be a plausible check on abuse of power, such as McConnell has demonstrated. But while Senate Republicans term-limit their committee chairs, no Republican there has cared or dared to challenge McConnell’s dictatorship.

On the other hand, there’s nothing right and much wrong in term limits for individual members of Congress, the nostrum touted by presidential candidate Tom Steyer. Term limits ruined the Florida Legislature and would leave U.S. representatives and senators even more dependent than now on keeping in good graces with whomever happen to be Speaker and Senate majority leader. Worse, term limits would make the presidency even stronger at the expense of Congress.

It’s not by coincidence that the Founders devoted the first article of the Constitution to the Congress and only the second to the executive branch.

“In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates,” wrote the anonymous author of The Federalist 51, who was either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton.

The three branches of our government were meant to be co-equal. Power is dispersed among 535 people in the Congress and among nine at the Supreme Court, but in the executive branch it is concentrated in one person, the president, which makes it easier to abuse.

The Founders left each house to make its own rules, allowing them to give as much or as little power to their presiding officers as it suits the members from time to time. The caucuses, not the presiding officer, determine who lead committees and who serve on them. That still leaves enormous power to the House Speaker and Senate Majority leader to decide what will or won’t become law.

But the last word isn’t theirs. This is still a democracy.

In next year’s elections, the voters will pass judgment not only on Trump but, indirectly, on the respective leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell.

Their own voters may or may not return them to Washington. Pelosi’s surely will and McConnell’s shouldn’t. But it’s Americans across the nation who’ll determine control of the House and Senate.

Thanks to Pelosi, House Democrats have a strong case for retaining the majority. McConnell’s drones do not.

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Sergio Bustos, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.