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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Democrats are voting on new leadership this week, which means Nancy Pelosi is stepping down as Speaker. I'll never forget the first time I saw the Capitol. This week, Democrats are voting on new leadership, and she's taking herself out of the running. I was riding in the car with my brothers, and they were thrilled and jumping up and down and saying to me, Nancy, look, Nancy, look, there's the Capitol. In with the new, out with the Nancy. Every time I'd say, I don't see any Capitol. Is it a capital A, a capital B, or a capital C?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some would argue, though, that there has never been a better Speaker of the House than Pelosi. We're going to hear why on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I believed then as I believe today. This is the most beautiful building in the world because of what it represents. The Capitol is a temple of our democracy, of our constitution, of our highest ideals.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Four years ago, to the day, we had Molly Ball from Time on to talk about Nancy Pelosi, who was on the verge of once again becoming Speaker of the House. Nancy Pelosi is extremely good at managing her caucus and at counting votes and at figuring out how to strike the deal that everybody can agree to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Four years later, Speaker Pelosi is stepping away from leadership, and we asked Molly Ball back to see if she still agrees with her 2018 assessment. Absolutely. And honestly, I get asked a lot about sort of what her legacy is. And frankly, I think that is the main legacy that she leaves is her sheer effectiveness as a legislator, both during the four years she was speaker during the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies and over the past four years under Donald Trump and now during the Biden presidency.
--:-- Molly Ball: The sort of historians and political scientists who study these questions do rate her among the most effective legislative leaders, if not the most effective, you know, comparing her to Sam Rayburn from nearly 100 years ago or LBJ, who, of course, was known for his work in the Senate, not the House.
--:-- Molly Ball: One other thing to add to that is that she's done all that in the most difficult circumstances. This is an era when a lot of people have given up on Washington, think that it's just irretrievably broken, and nothing can get done there. You know, gridlock, polarization, just the sheer toxicity of politics.
--:-- Molly Ball: Certainly there was no love lost between Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump. And yet in all of these eras of gridlock, of partisanship, and with very narrow majorities, she has still consistently been able to get things done.
--:-- Molly Ball: And then this is also an era in which she has been an absolutely reviled figure. I was reading some articles in the past few weeks about how during various elections, you know, her name was cited more than Obama's, more than Biden's as this vilified figure on the left.
--:-- Molly Ball: So for all the haters out there who don't understand how effective she's been, what maybe best exemplifies her skills as a legislator over the course of her 20 years of leadership? If you ask her about her legacy, the first thing that she will say is the Affordable Care Act.
--:-- Molly Ball: Many presidents since Teddy Roosevelt have tried to pass health care reform for Americans, and many speakers of the House have tried to do it as well. And last night we had that level of success. That is certainly the accomplishment of which she is proudest.
--:-- Molly Ball: And, you know, I think a lot of people forget what not only how difficult it was to get that passed, but just how important it was. You know, the idea of some sort of guarantee to access to health care had been a liberal aspiration for nearly a century.
--:-- Molly Ball: And Democrats had tried and failed to get it done over and over and over again, going back to the days of FDR, going back to the days of JFK. The fact of the matter is that what we are now talking about doing, most of the countries of Europe did years ago.
--:-- Molly Ball: Everybody remembers Clinton care in the 90s, another failed attempt to get some sort of universal health insurance guarantee through Congress. Hello, this is Hillary Clinton. I want to thank you for letting me speak with you about an issue that is central to our children's future, solving our nation's health care crisis.
--:-- Molly Ball: And so when Obama, you know, came to this issue, which was not the central issue of his campaign, and not really the number one priority of Americans in the wake of the financial crisis, it was really not at all clear that it could get done.
--:-- Molly Ball: And to this day, you know, most people remember how difficult it was to get it through the Senate. For Senate Democrats, the health care bill is all about the nation's well-being. But behind this claim, at least seven senators demanded deals worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to mostly benefit their home states.
--:-- Molly Ball: But people forget that it was Nancy Pelosi who really steeled Obama's spine at that point. A version of health care reform had passed the House, a different version had passed the Senate. And a lot of the particularly political advisors to the president were urging him to give up and settle for less, saying, maybe we just pass something for children or some slimmed down version of this.
--:-- Molly Ball: And in a meeting in the Oval Office Nancy Pelosi turned to the president and said, Mr. President, I know there are people urging you to take the namby approach, but we come too far to give up.
--:-- Molly Ball: A lot of people thought it was impossible, particularly on the House side. You know, she had to go back to a quite progressive House caucus and convince them to accept a much more conservative Senate bill that they would then all have to vote for with some guarantees for changes being worked out through the process.
--:-- Molly Ball: But I think it's fair to say that any other legislative leader would have been hard-pressed to take on that task. And they said, well, it doesn't look possible. How do you intend to do this? I said, well, we go up to the gate. The gate is locked. We push open the gate. If we don't push open the gate, we'll leapfrog over it. If that doesn't work, we'll parachute in. But we're not letting anything stand in the way.
--:-- Molly Ball: And not only was she able to do it, but she made it look so easy that few people even remember how hard it was to get it done, right? Right. I think when people think of the legislative volleying that happened around the ACA, they think of the Senate and getting those last Senate votes.
--:-- Molly Ball: But what was Nancy doing? Well, first of all, there was getting the House bill passed, which was different from the Senate bill and which had already passed by December of 2009. But that was not easy.
--:-- Molly Ball: There's a scene where Nancy Pelosi is sitting with the liberal feminists, basically the most pro-choice members of the House Democratic Caucus. So these are women who've really devoted their political lives to women's rights, including women's reproductive rights.
--:-- Molly Ball: But based on her discussions with the leaders of the Catholic Church, she knew that the bill was not going to pass without some very strong prohibitions on abortion funding. And it was a very hard pill for these Democrats to swallow.
--:-- Molly Ball: And one of the things that Nancy Pelosi does is, you know, she really knows her members and she has a lot of trust with them. For hours and hours, she sat with these women. I believe they ordered in cheeseburgers and they went over and over the boat count and there was crying.
--:-- Molly Ball: And eventually they accepted that this was something they were going to have to do. So, you know, if you think about how it is that she's able to be so effective as a legislator, a lot of it is this kind of thing.
--:-- Molly Ball: It's having personal relationships with members who trust her and being able to go to them and say, I understand where you're coming from, but this is why we have to do this as a group. A lot of other legislative leaders are not as hands-on with their members or they operate more through, you know, committee chairs or proxies.
--:-- Molly Ball: Nancy Pelosi really has a one-on-one relationship with all, you know, 220-plus members of the House Democratic majority. And at one point, you know, her chief of staff said, well, I have a list of 60 members here whose votes we don't know if we have. How do you want me to parcel these out? You know, who should we get to make these calls?
--:-- Molly Ball: She said, give me the list. I'll make them all myself. And so that's the kind of leader she is, and that's part of how she's able to be so effective is just having those personal relationships.
--:-- Molly Ball: If you study Nancy Pelosi, you will learn a lot of little sort of tips and tricks about leadership and how to get your way and, you know, how to, you know, convince people to do something for you in this instance or another.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She's inarguably a successful politician, but as you recently told our colleague Lizeau here at Vox, mostly all anyone talks about is how much they hate her or how hated she is. Members of her own party have tried to throw her out of power a few times.
--:-- Molly Ball: Why is that? In some ways, I can't answer that question. She's easy to attack because people don't like her. Why don't people like her? I mean, you can speculate all you want, but at some level, it's that simple. People don't like her.
--:-- Molly Ball: And so when she is attacked, it reminds people of what they don't like, whether it's her personally or the Democratic Party or liberal ideas. Obviously, there are many who would argue there's a component of it that is gendered that when you know there have always been liberal leaders of the congressional Democrats and most of them have not been the focus of hundreds of millions of dollars of attack ads, so why is that?
--:-- Molly Ball: But for whatever reason, she just seems to generate a sort of visceral reaction among both Republican base voters and a lot of independent voters. They just don't like her. I've had to have a very thick skin about every kind of thing that was thrown at me.
--:-- Molly Ball: In fact, what's sad about it is women say to me, I would run for office, but I could never put my family through. From my own standpoint, I never expected anything but a double standard.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job? Like, really happy? The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But still, we stick it out, and we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse? I've already put years into this place, and maybe the most common one, isn't everyone kind of miserable at work? But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's such a fascinating person. Nobody knows better than Donald Trump, that he should not be president. Putin appears to be President Trump's puppeteer. Today explained back with Molly Ball from Time with whom we've mostly been talking about Obama-era Pelosi wins, but Speaker Pelosi might be chiefly remembered for her time as Speaker during the presidency of Donald Trump.
--:-- Molly Ball: Maybe he thinks if government shut down, he can golf more comfortably. Oh, yeah. You know, I think going up to the election of Trump, her career had really been flagging in a lot of ways. She was the subject of more and more angst and discontent within her own party.
--:-- Molly Ball: And it was really Trump as a foil that sort of revived her and caused a lot of people to reconsider their opinion of her. And the president may not know this, but Hawaii is part of the United States of America.
--:-- Molly Ball: During this tumultuous time, of course, she oversaw not one but two impeachments of the former president. And I'd love to speak about those for a minute here because, interestingly, she was never wild about the idea of impeaching Donald Trump.
--:-- Molly Ball: That's right. And it goes back to her history with impeachment. She lived through all of the modern presidential impeachments as an adult during the Richard Nixon administration and then as a member of Congress during the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
--:-- Molly Ball: We are here today because the Republicans in the House are paralyzed with hatred of President Clinton. And until the Republicans free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer.
--:-- Molly Ball: And then after she became speaker in 2007, she faced a lot of pressure to impeach George W. Bush over the Iraq War. And she resisted that pressure in part because of her history with President Clinton. Democrats are not about getting even. Democrats are about helping the American people get ahead. And that's what our agenda is about.
--:-- Molly Ball: I have said and I say again that impeachment is off the table. She saw how other Republicans paid a political price for what she considered an unwarranted impeachment. She didn't want the same thing to happen to the Democrats.
--:-- Molly Ball: And then, you know, in substantive terms, she did not believe it was warranted. In her mind, there's a distinction between what's political and what's impeachment-worthy, what's a violation of the Constitution.
--:-- Molly Ball: She would always draw this distinction when it came to Trump to say with the Iraq war, with George W. Bush, she viewed that as a difference of opinion on policy. And that's the kind of thing you're supposed to fight out in the political process, in Congress.
--:-- Molly Ball: You know, while George W. Bush was president, she consistently stiff-armed the impeachment caucus while trying to get Bush to back off the Iraq war. But when that was not successful, she also stiff-armed the liberals who wanted to defund the war on both political and substantive terms.
--:-- Molly Ball: She believed that was a bad idea and she refused to let that happen. All of that sort of fed into her mindset going into the Trump era when she did very publicly slow roll and badmouth the idea of impeachment.
--:-- Molly Ball: Impeachment is a very divisive measure. But if we have to go there, we'll have to go there. But we can't go there unless we have the facts and we will follow the facts and we will follow the obstruction that the president is making up aside getting the facts and make our decision when we're ready.
--:-- Molly Ball: That's the only question that's what I'm going to say about this subject. You know, when she first got the gavel back in 2019, the Mueller report was not out yet. And a lot of investigations were underway in Congress on that issue and many others with regard to Trump.
--:-- Molly Ball: And there was a lot of pressure within the Democratic caucus to get impeachment proceedings going on various fronts. And she resisted and resisted and resisted until the Ukraine scandal broke.
--:-- Molly Ball: It started with an explosive claim that Donald Trump pressured the Ukrainian president into launching a corruption investigation against his political rival Joe Biden and his family in exchange for U.S. military aid.
--:-- Molly Ball: And then gave the green light under pressure from her members, particularly the moderates in the caucus, but still very grudgingly and still in a very limited way. And to this day, there are a fair number of Democrats who believe that that impeachment might have been more successful if she had given it a little bit more breathing room, had not insisted on it being extremely limited in scope and extremely short in duration.
--:-- Molly Ball: In part because she thought it was potentially damaging politically. I argue in my book that the key to understanding Nancy Pelosi is that she's all about results. She cares very little about how things are perceived. She just wants to get to the results.
--:-- Molly Ball: And, you know, a former mentor of hers used this word about her operational that I think is really the key to understanding her. So when she looks at something like impeachment, she says, well, what is going to be the result of this? Are we just sort of going to make ourselves happy that we made a statement?
--:-- Molly Ball: Because from her perspective and I think this was certainly proven right there was very little chance that they were ever going to force Donald Trump from office.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's such an interesting question, and I think the answer is actually very little. Not because she's some sort of rigid partisan or even because she's 82 years old and already quite set in her views.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But one sort of hallmark of her career is that in a lot of cases, she has been more cynical about the Republican Party than a lot of her legislative partners on the Democratic side of the aisle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because she got to Congress in 1987 when Democrats had controlled the House for decades to the point where it seemed like that was just sort of the state of nature and nothing could change it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then, of course, Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution came along in 94 and introduced a level of toxicity and partisanship into Congress that had not been there previously.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that really led her to be extremely cynical about the Republicans and their intentions and whether they could be trusted. Fast forward several years when she's in House leadership in the early 2000s and the Iraq war is being debated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a lot of the top leaders of the Democratic Party were in favor of allowing George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi was whipping the House Democrats against the war authorization.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We'll pay any price to protect the American people. But is this the right way to go, to jeopardize in a serious way our young people when that can be avoided? And I think in retrospect, most people would say that she was right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And some of that may have come from just sort of her cynicism about the Republicans and whether they could be trusted to tell the truth. But go forward to the Obama era when Obama spends a lot of time trying to get Republican votes for the stimulus, trying to get a Republican buy-in for health care reform.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it was Speaker Pelosi who was really the chief person in the presidency or saying, you're wasting your time. They're not going to do it. They're going to spend a lot of time pretending. And then they're not going to give you the votes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And sure enough, that's what happened. So, you know, I think it's fair to implicate her in some of the contemporary partisanship that has infected politics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She is not, of all of the sort of strengths I've listed of hers, one of them is not her relationships across the aisle. And she has, despite being from the same state as the potentially incoming Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, she has virtually no relationship with him and is openly contemptuous of his intelligence and legislative skills.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She thinks he's real dumb. She has called him a moron. Yes. In no uncertain terms.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, when I spoke with her immediately after she gave her speech on the House floor, announcing that she was stepping down from congressional leadership, this was one of the things that I asked her about sort of her legacy and what she leaves behind.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And she said in no uncertain terms, I do not take any responsibility for the unreasonableness of the Republican Party, basically. She believes it is all on them. It is all their fault.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I guess, as you might expect from a person as partisan as she is, she blames the other side completely for the partisanship that's out there. There are a number of reasons for her to step down. Dems lost power. Her caucus has wanted fresh leadership for some time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Her husband got brutally attacked. She's 82. Which of these was it or or was it all of them? On the point about her husband's attack, that was something that discussed with her.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And she had said before the election that her thinking about whether to stay in Congress and stay in leadership had been affected by that brutal attack on her husband.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What she told me and a couple other reporters was that it did affect her thinking, but not in the way that people thought.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If people thought that she looked at that and thought, my God, I've got to get out of this horrible politics business, it was actually exactly the opposite. She said it motivated her to find a way to stay on because she didn't want to, quote, give them the satisfaction of having forced her out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But more than anything, it's just time in her view and in the view certainly of a lot of congressional Democrats, even those who admire her. The fact that not only has she been the leader of the congressional Democrats for 20 years, but for more than 15 years, her and Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn have been the top three congressional Democrats.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which means if you're a young, ambitious member of the House of Representatives on the Democratic side, there's basically no upward mobility. There's nothing you can do or there hasn't been in decades to climb the ladder of congressional leadership.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So a lot of very promising legislators on the Democratic side have instead gone and, you know, run for senator or governor in their states or left politics entirely, left the House entirely.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it's been hard for her to let go of a job that has just consumed her. But of course, she won't leave Congress just yet. She was just reelected and says she'll serve out the rest of her term.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is that the most Nancy move ever? That's right. And it's very funny to imagine her as sort of a backbencher, right? And when she talked about it right after she announced her decision, she was so excited to just be a regular member of Congress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So she says she anticipates the next two years involving a lot of thank yous, both her thanking a lot of people and being thanked by a lot of people and just sort of taking, I think, a two-year victory lap.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And she says she doesn't want to be a sort of shadow speaker the way she described it. This was right before Thanksgiving. She said, well, I don't want to be the mother-in-law in the kitchen saying, well, that's not how my son likes the stuffing or that's not how we cook it in our house.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So she claims she's not going to be a backseat driver. But it's impossible to imagine that she won't be consulted on a fair number of decisions by the new leadership going forward.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Molly Ball, she's the author of Pelosi. It's a book all about Nancy. She also writes about other people in American politics for Time. Our program today was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
