Nancy Pelosi

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 4th of January 2007, Nancy Pelosi defeated Republican John Boehner of Ohio by 233 votes to 202 in the election for speaker of the House. Standing in the chamber afterward, she declared, "today, we have broken the marble ceiling." The line captured a first for the nation's lawmaking body, but it did not capture the whole of her career.

  Pelosi, an American politician from California, led House Democrats for twenty years. That span ties her with Joe Martin as the second longest party leadership in the House, behind only Sam Rayburn. She would lose the speaker's gavel, win it back, and then give it up for good.

  Three questions run through her story. How did the youngest child of a Baltimore political family come to hold one of the most powerful offices in the country? Why do scholars rank her among the most effective speakers ever, while opponents spent tens of millions of dollars on advertisements attacking her? And what did it take to keep a fractious party in line for two decades?

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• 2. Baltimore Beginnings

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  Nancy Pelosi was born Nancy D'Alesandro in Baltimore, Maryland, the only daughter and youngest of six children in an Italian-American household. Her father, Thomas D'Alesandro Jr., was a Democratic congressman from Maryland at the time of her birth. Seven years later he became mayor of Baltimore. Her mother, Annunciata, known as Nancy, was born in Fornelli in Southern Italy and emigrated to the United States in 1912. Her father traced his own ancestry to Genoa, Venice and Abruzzo.

  Politics was the family trade. Her mother organized Democratic women and passed political skills on to her daughter. Her brother, Thomas D'Alesandro III, won election as Baltimore City Council president and later served as mayor from 1967 to 1971. As a child, Pelosi pitched in at her father's campaign events. In the 1960s her liberal outlook took shape, and John F. Kennedy's inaugural address left a strong impression on her.

  In 1958 she graduated from the Institute of Notre Dame, an all-girls Catholic high school in Baltimore. Four years later she earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science from Trinity College. During the 1960s she interned for Maryland senator Daniel Brewster, alongside Steny Hoyer, who would later become House majority leader. In 1963 she married businessman Paul Pelosi. The couple lived in New York City before settling in San Francisco, where they raised their children.

  In San Francisco, she became friends with Phillip Burton, the congressman for the 5th district. Volunteering for the Democratic Party grew into formal posts. In 1976 she was elected a Democratic National Committee member from California, a seat she held until 1996. A year after taking the chair of the party in Northern California in 1977, she was working toward bigger things, and in 1981 she was chosen to head the California Democratic Party until 1983. In 1984 she chaired the San Francisco host committee for the Democratic National Convention. From 1985 to 1986 she served as finance chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

  Phillip Burton died in 1983, and his wife, Sala Burton, won a special election to complete his term. She was then reelected twice. When Sala Burton decided against running in 1988, she wanted Pelosi to take her place, which guaranteed Pelosi the backing of the Burtons' network of contacts. After Sala Burton's death, Pelosi won the 1987 special election to succeed her.

  The district she inherited has sent Democrats to the House without interruption since 1949. As of 2006, only 13 percent of its registered voters were Republican, and no serious Republican contender had appeared since the early 1960s. Pelosi has won reelection 18 times without substantive opposition. From 1988 through 2004 she averaged 80 percent of the vote in her first seven reelection campaigns. Unlike in her 1987 race, she has not joined candidate debates since.

  When she took her seat, only 23 women served in the House.

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• 3. Climbing the Ranks

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  In her first speech on the House floor, Pelosi promised to fight what she called "the crisis of AIDS." San Francisco, with its large population of gay men, had become the epidemic's first epicenter. Soon after taking office, she hired a gay man to direct AIDS policy in her congressional office. The subject carried heavy stigma, and some in her own party privately scolded her for taking it on.

  She co-authored the Ryan White CARE Act, which funded treatment and services for people affected by HIV and AIDS. President George H. W. Bush signed it into law in December 1990. She also helped shape the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, working with California senator Dianne Feinstein and New York congressman Chuck Schumer. It became law in 1994. She held seats on the Appropriations and Intelligence Committees, and she was the ranking member of the latter until she became party leader.

  In 2001 Pelosi was elected House minority whip, second to Minority Leader Dick Gephardt. No woman in American history had held that post. She beat both John Lewis and Steny Hoyer for it. As a prolific fundraiser, she used campaign money to help win colleagues' votes. Among members of Congress, she gave more to other campaigns than anyone else during the 2000 and 2002 election cycles. In 2006 only Bill and Hillary Clinton raised more for the party. Between 2003 and 2014 she raised over $400 million.

  In 2002 the House passed the Iraq Resolution, which authorized President George W. Bush to use military force, by 296 to 133. Pelosi voted no. She warned that using force alone, without first exhausting diplomacy, would be "harmful to our war on terrorism."

  The 15th of November 2002 brought a closed-door caucus vote to replace Gephardt, who was leaving the leadership to seek the 2004 presidential nomination. Marcy Kaptur withdrew before the vote, and Pelosi beat Harold Ford Jr. by 117 to 29. She became the first woman to lead a major party in either chamber of Congress. Critics argued that she was too liberal to succeed.

  In 2004 the Democrats lost three House seats, a relative surprise, as Bush won reelection. Bush then proposed letting workers redirect part of their Social Security withholding into stock and bond investments. Pelosi insisted there was no crisis and imposed intense discipline on her caucus. Democrats voted against the idea almost unanimously, and the proposal was defeated.

  Iraq tested her again in November 2005, when John Murtha urged a troop withdrawal at the "earliest predictable date." Pelosi first declined to back him. Speaker Dennis Hastert then forced a vote on an immediate withdrawal, hoping to trap Democrats into a more radical position. Pelosi led her members against it, and the resolution failed 403 to 3. About two weeks later she endorsed Murtha's plan at a press conference. Some critics feared that decision would cost Democrats the 2006 elections.

  Pelosi was still unfamiliar to much of the American public. Before the 2006 elections, Republicans began running advertisements to sour voters on her, and they would keep doing so for years.

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• 4. The First Gavel

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  Thirty House seats changed hands in the 2006 elections, the party's largest gain since the 1974 vote that followed Watergate. On the 16th of November 2006, the Democratic caucus unanimously nominated Pelosi for speaker. She backed her friend John Murtha for majority leader, but Steny Hoyer, her second-in-command since 2003, won that contest by 149 to 86.

  Rahm Emanuel, the incoming chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, nominated her. John Dingell, her longtime friend, swore her in, as the dean of the House traditionally does. She was the first woman, the first Californian and the first Italian-American to be speaker. Tom Foley of Washington, the last Democrat in the job before her, was the only earlier speaker from west of the Rocky Mountains.

  In her speech, Pelosi said the day was one "for which we have waited more than 200 years." She named Iraq as the issue facing the 110th Congress, saying voters had rejected "an open-ended obligation to a war without end." Tradition shaped her role. She did not usually join debate, almost never cast floor votes and sat on no committees, though she had the right to do all three.

  Before the elections she had promised to move most of the party's agenda in the first 100 hours of the 110th Congress. The phrase echoed Franklin D. Roosevelt's "first hundred days" during the Great Depression. Newt Gingrich, speaker from 1995, had set a similar 100-day agenda for his Contract with America.

  On the 5th of January 2007, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent Bush a letter opposing the expected troop increase in Iraq. "There is only a political solution," they wrote, and they urged a phased redeployment over the next four to six months.

  One demand she refused to meet came from her own side. In May 2006 she had told colleagues that impeaching Bush was "off the table," though she had told The Washington Post that "you never know where" investigations might lead. She held that line as speaker despite strong support for impeachment among her constituents. In 2008 antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan ran against her as an independent, mainly over this refusal, and Pelosi withstood the challenge.

  Health care reform became her defining fight. In January 2010 Republican Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat in Massachusetts, which cost Democrats their 60-seat filibuster-proof majority. President Obama accepted the view of his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, that the White House should pursue smaller initiatives. Pelosi mocked those scaled-back ideas as "kiddie care." She persuaded Obama that large Democratic majorities made this his only chance, then led what she called an "unbelievable marathon" two-month session. The House passed the Affordable Care Act 219 to 212. Before signing it, Obama called her "one of the best speakers the House of Representatives has ever had."

  That same Congress also passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the 2010 Tax Relief Act. NPR's Brian Naylor counted an $800 billion stimulus measure and a multi-billion-dollar rescue of the banks among her achievements.

  The political bill came due quickly. Hours after the House passed the health law, the Republican National Committee rolled out a "Fire Pelosi" slogan. Republicans spent $65 million on anti-Pelosi advertising before the 2010 elections. Democrats lost 63 seats and their House majority.

  Observers split on her record. In March 2010 columnist Mark Shields wrote that she had "proved herself to be the most powerful woman in U.S. political history." Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said that only Sam Rayburn ranked higher among speakers of the previous century. Politico's John Bresnahan called her record mixed. She wielded "an iron fist in a Gucci glove," he wrote, yet had a "horrible approval rating with the rest of America." He argued that the health law had hurt her party at the polls. Robert Draper later offered a different explanation for her success in The New York Times Magazine. She understood what her caucus wanted rather than imposing her own will, he wrote, because "an autocratic speaker is a short-lived one."

  Within weeks, Representative Heath Shuler would challenge her hold on the party's leadership.

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• 5. Years in the Minority

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  Heath Shuler lost to Pelosi by 150 to 43 in the caucus vote on the 17th of November 2010. On the opening day of the 112th Congress, she was elected minority leader once more.

  In November 2011, the program 60 Minutes alleged that she and other members of Congress had used information from closed sessions to profit in the stock market. It cited her purchases of Visa Inc. stock while a bill limiting credit card fees was pending in the House. Pelosi denied the claim and called the report "a right-wing smear." When the STOCK Act arrived the next year, she voted for it. She praised its drafters, Louise Slaughter and Tim Walz, for closing a gap in ethics law. On the 14th of November 2012, she announced she would stay as Democratic leader.

  In August 2016, after a cyberattack on top Democratic campaign committees, her personal contact information was posted online. She reported receiving obscene calls, voice mails and texts, and she warned colleagues not to let children or family members answer their phones.

  After the 2016 presidential election, Tim Ryan of Ohio launched a bid to replace her on the 17th of November 2016. Pelosi promised to give junior members more leadership opportunities, and she beat Ryan 134 to 63 on the 30th of November.

  In 2017 four straight special-election losses reopened the question. In June, Representative Kathleen Rice of New York and a small group of Democrats, including Congressional Black Caucus chairman Cedric Richmond, met behind closed doors to discuss new leadership. Rice told an interviewer that a losing sports team would see "changes would be made." Pelosi answered that her "decision about how long I stay is not up to them." Asked why she should remain, she said: "I'm a master legislator."

  In November 2017 she called for John Conyers's resignation over harassment allegations. She then convened the first of a planned series of meetings on reforming workplace policies in Congress.

  February 2018 brought the Nunes memo. Republican staff, acting for House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, had written a memo attacking the FBI's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Pelosi wrote to Speaker Paul Ryan that the FBI and the Justice Department had warned the memo was inaccurate. She accused Republicans of a "cover-up campaign" and called for Nunes to be removed from his post.

  That month she also set a record for the longest House speech under the "magic minute" custom, speaking for more than eight hours. She used the time to tell stories of DREAMers, people brought to the country as minors by undocumented immigrants. Her aim was to object to a budget deal that raised spending caps without settling the future of DACA recipients, who faced possible deportation. In April, Peter Beinart wrote in The Atlantic that she was the most effective congressional leader of modern times and, not coincidentally, the most vilified.

  In August 2018, Pelosi called for Duncan D. Hunter to resign after his indictment on charges of misusing at least $250,000 in campaign funds. She called the charges "evidence of the rampant culture of corruption among Republicans in Washington today." The midterm elections were only months away.

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• 6. The Second Gavel

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  The 2018 elections gave Democrats 41 new House seats, again the largest gain since the post-Watergate vote of 1974. House Democrats nominated Pelosi on the 28th of November. On the 3rd of January 2019 she was reelected speaker, with 220 Democrats voting for her and 15 voting for someone else or no one. No former speaker had reclaimed the gavel since Sam Rayburn in 1955. The deal that quieted her critics carried a limit: she promised not to stay in the job beyond four years.

  A federal government shutdown was under way when the 116th Congress began. Pelosi called it a "hostage-taking" of civil servants and rejected Trump's attempt to use it to force funding for a border wall. She also refused to let him deliver the State of the Union address in the House chamber while it continued. On the 25th of January 2019, with polls showing his popularity falling, Trump signed a stopgap bill without any wall concessions. It reopened the government for three weeks. On the 15th of February, he declared a national emergency to bypass Congress.

  On the 4th of February 2020, at the end of Trump's State of the Union address, Pelosi tore up her copy of the speech. She said it was "a courteous thing to do considering the alternatives," calling it a "dirty speech." Trump and other Republicans condemned the gesture.

  Impeachment came slowly, and with private reluctance. In April 2019 Trump vowed to defy all House subpoenas, and in May the White House stopped former counsel Don McGahn from complying with one. Pelosi said Trump was "goading us to impeach him," and declared: "we believe that the president of the United States is engaged in a cover-up." Even so, she had resisted the push by fellow Democrats and privately worried that impeachment would endanger the party's majority.

  Revelations in the Trump-Ukraine scandal changed her course. On the 29th of September 2019, she opened a formal impeachment inquiry, saying "no one is above the law." On the 5th of December she authorized the Judiciary Committee to draft articles. Two were announced on the 10th, and the House approved both on the 18th. The Senate could not reach the two-thirds majority needed to convict.

  During the Capitol attack of the 6th of January 2021, Pelosi's laptop and gavel were stolen from her office. Neither has been recovered. The next day she demanded that Trump resign or be removed under section four of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. On the 10th of January she told Vice President Mike Pence that she would move to impeach within 24 hours unless he acted. On the 13th of January, the House impeached Trump a second time, and the Senate again fell short of conviction.

  The pandemic brought both legislation and embarrassment. Pelosi helped pass the CARES Act. In early September 2020, footage showed her visiting a San Francisco hair salon, despite rules against indoor service at the time. Trump and the salon's owners accused her of hypocrisy. She called the episode "clearly a setup," and her stylist and other Democrats defended her.

  The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 showed her method at its most patient. The New York Times credited her decision to adopt a Congressional Black Caucus proposal, pairing the final vote on the bill with a good-faith vote on rules for a later safety-net bill. She did not front the effort, leaving Joyce Beatty, the caucus chair, to persuade colleagues. In the Times's phrase, the speaker had "harnessed one faction of her unruly Democrats to win over two others." CNN's Chris Cillizza noted she held just a three-seat majority while the larger $1.75 trillion social bill sat stalled. The same Congress also produced the American Rescue Plan Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the PACT Act.

  Superlatives piled up. In June 2019 Brent Budowsky called her "the most important, consequential and effective Speaker since Tip O'Neill." Paul Kane of The Washington Post wrote in January 2020 that she was the most powerful speaker in at least 25 years. In 2021 John Boehner, the Republican she had beaten for the gavel, called her the most powerful speaker in American history. Historian Lindsay M. Chervinsky added that she managed this despite "the double standards that apply to powerful women." Salon's Amanda Marcotte went further, calling her "both the most effective and most progressive House speaker of all time." Brookings analyst John Haduk pointed out the range of her success: she worked with a majority of 81 seats, 258 to 177, in late 2009, and with one of just 6, 218 to 212, in spring 2021.

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• 7. Convictions and Controversies

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  Pelosi helped found the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which she left in 2003 after becoming minority leader. She is still widely regarded as a liberal. Her record on civil liberties is mixed. She voted for the USA Patriot Act in 2001 but against reauthorizing parts of it in 2005. She also opposed a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning.

  On immigration, she voted against the Secure Fence Act of 2006. In June 2018 she visited a federal facility holding migrant children separated from their parents, then called for Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to resign. A Republican compromise bill that July earned the label "deal with the devil" from her.

  She voted against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, and against the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004 and 2006. When California's Supreme Court overturned the state's ban on same-sex marriage in 2008, she welcomed what she called a "historic decision." In 2012 she said her stance grew from her Catholic faith, even though it put her at odds with church doctrine. She told listeners her religion compelled her to oppose discrimination of any kind. In 2019 she spoke in Congress for the Equality Act.

  Her faith also drew church rebukes. In 2008 on Meet the Press, she told Tom Brokaw that the church's view of when life begins had long been disputed. Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., called her comments incorrect. In February 2009 she met her own bishop, Archbishop George Hugh Niederauer of San Francisco, and Pope Benedict XVI about the controversy. She called the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade "cruel."

  On guns, she favored expanded background checks and an assault weapons ban. Gun Owners of America gave her a 0 percent rating in 2012, and the National Rifle Association gave her 7 percent. In February 2013 she called for the "Boldest possible move," and in 2018 she said that cowering to the gun lobby was an assault on the country after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.

  She called climate change "the existential threat of our time" in 2019. After the tax law that Trump signed in December 2017, she said the bonuses that companies announced were "crumbs."

  Some controversies trailed her for years. In 2002, as ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, she was briefed on the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on the captured terrorist Abu Zubaydah. In 2009 she said lawyers from the CIA and the Justice Department had assured her they were legal. Two unnamed former Bush officials said the briefing was graphic and that she raised no substantial objection. Her office said in 2007 that she had protested at the time. Secrecy rules barred her from taking notes or consulting lawyers or staff. In April 2009 she insisted she was never told that the techniques had been used.

  A different charge involved the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007. It initially left out American Samoa, where Del Monte's StarKist Tuna brand is a major employer. Del Monte was headquartered in her district. One Republican congressman who voted against the bill accused her of unethically benefiting the company. Pelosi had co-sponsored legislation omitting American Samoa from a wage increase as early as 1999, before Del Monte bought StarKist in 2002.

  In March 2009 Judicial Watch obtained staff emails asking the Air Force for a Boeing 757 for her travel. Pelosi said the arrangement began under Bush for her predecessor Dennis Hastert, after the September 11th attacks. The Sergeant at Arms wanted an aircraft capable of non-stop flights. The Pentagon said no one had judged her use of it excessive.

  Her view of the Capitol itself shaped one more cause. During her first speakership she moved the statue of Robert E. Lee from the National Statuary Hall into the Capitol crypt. After nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd in June 2020, she pushed to remove every Confederate statue from the building. On the 18th of June she ordered down four paintings in the Speaker's Gallery. She said the curator had told her, during an inventory, of "four Speakers who had served in the Confederacy."

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• 8. After the Gavel

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  In December 2021, Pelosi announced she would run for reelection to the House in 2022. In 2018 and again in 2020, she had agreed to leave the speakership by January 2023, but she had otherwise sidestepped questions about her future. She won her seat in 2022, but the Democrats lost the House majority. Ten days later she announced she would not seek a leadership post in the next Congress. Hakeem Jeffries succeeded her as House Democratic leader.

  On the 29th of November 2022, the Steering and Policy Committee of the House Democratic Caucus honored her with the title "speaker emerita" for the 118th Congress. Her second speakership and her place in party leadership ended on the 3rd of January 2023.

  In 2024 she turned to a different kind of pressure. Worried that President Biden's faltering candidacy could hand Trump the White House and bring Democratic losses in the House and Senate, she and other party officials urged him to withdraw before the national convention. On the 10th of July she said the party was encouraging the decision because time was running out. Biden withdrew on the 21st of July and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.

  Before he stepped aside, Pelosi had told fellow California Democrats she believed a competitive "open process" should pick the nominee. Yet she endorsed Harris within a day. Harris won no primaries, but Pelosi insisted the path was a primary all the same. "We had an open primary, and she won it. Nobody else got in the race," she said. After Harris lost to Trump, Pelosi blamed Biden's late exit and the absence of an open Democratic primary.

  Pelosi belongs to the House Baltic Caucus and the Congressional Equality Caucus. She is in her 20th term, and she has served in the House since 1987. On the 6th of November 2025, she announced she would not seek reelection and would retire from the House in 2027.

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