Nancy Pelosi To Step Down, Spend More Time Murdering Republicans' Families
Damn right we're gonna hagiography the shit out of this post. She earned it.
After serving 38 years as the US representative for California’s 11th District, which covers most of San Francisco, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi announced yesterday that she will not run for reelection next year. When she first took office in 1988, she was one of only 25 women in Congress. As she prepares to retire, there are 151 and it’s fair to say that’s in part thanks to Nancy Pelosi’s efforts to make the House and Senate look a little more like the country. Like her 2022 decision to step down from leading House Democrats, Pelosi’s retirement presents an opportunity for fresh blood in the House, and let’s hope San Franciscans elect someone with even half Pelosi’s spine.
Yr Wonkette is damned sentimental sometimes, so let’s indulge and enjoy Pelosi’s retirement video, which is both an overview of her career and a love letter to her city and her constituents. Please enjoy the same pang of nostalgia we felt at that half-second clip of her standing with Barack Obama as he signed the Affordable Care Act into law. It was a big fucking deal.
Pelosi closes the video with a call for voters to keep fighting the good fight, especially now: “My message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power. We have always led the way, and now we must continue to do so by remaining full participants in our democracy and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear,” over clips of San Franciscans demonstrating again and again over the years, from Harvey Milk and gay rights protests, right through last month’s No Kings rallies. Goddamn right.
Our only complaint with the video is that Pelosi didn’t revive our favorite line from that 2022 partial-farewell speech, when she noted that she had “enjoyed working with three presidents,” and then named George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, but not that other guy.
There’s a good reason Yr Wonkette has given Pelosi our coveted Legislative Badass of the Year award multiple times, most recently in 2022. She’s probably the most effective person to ever hold the position of House speaker, because time and again, she got Democrats — famous for the old Will Rogers joke about not being an organized political party — to settle differences and pass stuff. (We could just as well have named her the legislative cat-herder of all time.) Since Republicans took over control of the House in 2023, they not only haven’t managed to pass stuff, they’ve barely been able to keep a speaker in place for more than a few months. Thank Crom. During the years when Pelosi led Democrats as either speaker or minority leader, Republicans chewed up and spat out multiple leaders of their ungovernable caucus.
In her first stint as speaker, Pelosi led Democrats in repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” in passing the Dodd-Frank financial reforms following the 2008 economic meltdown, and of course the Affordable Care Act.
After Democrats retook the House in 2018 — thanks in part to Pelosi’s work to recruit women to run for office — she led the opposition to Donald Trump’s madness, including his impeachments. When Republicans in the Senate blocked a full congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection, Pelosi made damn sure the House Select Committee established a clear record of the coup attempt. And of course during Joe Biden’s first two years, Pelosi guided the landmark infrastructure, climate, and domestic manufacturing bills to completion.
Being that effective came with a price, of course, which was that the rightwing lie machine demonized Pelosi as a virtual antichrist figure, invoking her (and San Francisco) as the boogeySpeaker who was secretly pulling the strings of every single Democrat running for the House. No big surprise that the constant slurs convinced an unhinged conspiracy devotee to try to murder her husband Paul in October 2022, but only because the speaker herself, his intended assassination target, was in Washington at the time.
Republicans — especially noted comedy enthusiast Donald Trump — found a deranged man beating an octogenarian almost to death with a hammer hilarious.
And while we’re at it, let’s just remind everyone again that no, Pelosi never said that Americans would only learn what was in the ACA bill once it was passed. She said that once it was passed, people would like what was in it and that they’d really appreciate the bill, and lo, that has turned out to be the case. Also too, we have to keep correcting another, lesser bit of fakelore about Pelosi and the ACA, which is the lie that she was responsible for killing off the public option. Nope, nope, nope! When the ACA passed the House under Pelosi, the public option was in the bill, but it was ultimately removed by then-Sen. Max Baucus, in the Senate, where Nancy Pelosi actually did not serve despite being perceived by some as omnipresent.
Also also too: Please enjoy this curated Best-of collection of Wonkette headlines about Pelosi:
I'm Nancy Pelosi And I Will Punch Donald Trump's Head Right Through The Wall
Nancy Pelosi Will Be On Your Show Never, Bill O’Reilly, Does Never Work For You?
Hey, Remember When Nancy Pelosi Killed 45,000 Americans By Passing Obamacare?
And that’s a pretty good legacy, too!
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As mentioned before, I will never forget as long as I live Speaker Pelosi and her team rescuing the Mace of the Republic and the electoral ballots during the Republican Insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.
I will say this: it speaks to her awareness that she's choosing to retire, unlike a lot of congresspeople who just stay in office until they literally die.
Politicians are often a lot like old athletes; they always think they can have one more go, one more moment in the sun, and they just end up looking really bad and doing more harm than good.
For example, RBG comes to mind as someone who refused to retire and in no small way helped lead to the problems we're dealing with now. Or someone like Senator Dianne Feinstein who, for whatever her successes in her prime, was at the end being used as a weekend at bernie's figure rather than being retired and then died in office.
Pelosi, not unreasonably, deserves plaudits for being self aware enough to call it a career before she couldn't step away gracefully. She's doing what few other politicians agree to do, and that's on both sides of the isle. Biden, McConnell, Schumer; lots of people just refuse to leave office until it's too late, and then everyone remembers them at their worst.
So good on her for calling it a career now and not leaving a mess for everyone else to clean up. So very few politicians are willing to do that.