Happy 80th Birthday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi!

[lpetrich]

Congratulations to Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi for her 80th birthday today -  Nancy Pelosi

Her father was a prominent figure in his hometown's politics, being a Congressman from Maryland and later a mayor of Baltimore. Her mother was a Democratic Party community organizer. Her brother would be mayor of Baltimore for a while. So she was into politics from an early age.

She married Paul Pelosi in 1963, and in the 1960's, she interned for Daniel Brewster (D-MD), alongside Steny Hoyer, who eventually became House Majority Leader.

She moved to San Francisco, and she became involved in the Democratic Party there, becoming the head of the California Democratic Party over 1981-83. When Sala Burton (D-CA-05, then western SF) died in 1987, she ran in the resulting special election, and she won. She has been in the House of Representatives ever since.

She served in the Appropriations and Intelligence Committees, then as Minority Whip, and then as Minority Leader. When the Democrats got control of the House in 2006, she became Speaker.

She held that position until the Republicans got the House back in 2010, and she then became the House Minority leader. When the Democrats got it back in 2018, she got her title back again.

 

[lpetrich]

 Nancy Pelosi goes into a lot of detail about her career, like not wanting George Bush II impeached.

She was reluctant to support impeaching Donald Trump, but the Ukraine scandal forced her to support it. At one point, she had a rather tense meeting with Trump and his Cabinet, and there is a famous picture of her pointing a finger at him. For his part, he calls her "Nervous Nancy".

Nancy Pelosi’s unpredictable rise - The Washington Post - a very nice article on NP.

But her second act has been, by some measures, even more impressive than her first. Pelosi’s discipline and maturity, her refusal to be intimidated by Trump’s bluster, have energized the Democratic base and kept a volatile and impulsive president off balance.

...
A woman about to enter her ninth decade has become a warrior-heroine to the social-media generation. It seems that her every gesture toward Trump conveys a message of contempt. When he gave his 2019 State of the Union address, she offered stiff-armed, mocking applause. Right after he delivered it this year, she gracelessly ripped up her copy of what she called “a manifesto of mistruths.”

Let's not forget her famous finger-pointing at Trump.

In nearly every major negotiation between the executive and the legislative branches, Pelosi remains the lone female at the table where the biggest decisions are made. Still, the gains that she has seen women make over the course of her political career have been enormous. When Pelosi arrived in the House in 1987, a freshman at the age of 47, there were barely two dozen women among its 435 members. Now, in part thanks to her efforts, there are more than 100.

But even as these victories are celebrated, they remind us that no woman has yet to climb to the top. “My disappointment is that every time I’m introduced as the most powerful woman in American history, it breaks my heart because I think we should have a president,” she said. “We could have had a female president, and we should and we will.”

...
“Nancy Pelosi has wielded power more forcefully and effectively than any speaker since Joe Cannon,” says congressional authority Norman J. Ornstein, invoking the name of the iron-fisted Republican who ruled the House in the early 20th century. “Her assets include her public presence, her coolness under pressure, her remarkable negotiating skills and her ability to get to yes."

The article mentions her education and her family life.

It took a good deal of negotiation to persuade her father to allow her to move 37 miles south to attend Trinity, a women-only Catholic college in Washington. There, she felt the first stirrings of an ambition that would someday drive her. She majored in history because it was the only way she could study political science courses. As graduation approached, she began to consider applying for law school.

But while taking a summer class on Africa, she met and fell in love with a Georgetown University student named Paul Pelosi. They were married two years later, in 1963. Pelosi set aside her plans for law school and followed his career, first to New York City and then to his native San Francisco, where he made a fortune as a financier and real estate investor.

Over 1964 - 70, NP had 5 children: 4 girls and 1 boy. That seems like the stereotype of Catholics as big breeders.

But her friends marveled at the discipline with which the young mother ran her full household. ...

“She knew how to be organized. She crammed a lot into one day,” recalls fellow California Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D), a friend from back then. “Those are transferable talents to heading up the caucus. You know, people underestimate that.”

So NP is high in the Big Five trait of conscientiousness. So unlike the big baby in the White House.

 

[lpetrich]

At first, her political involvements were a hobby for her.

But she still couldn’t picture herself as a candidate. “No, I never had any interest. I didn’t have the ambition to do it. And I think that women today — I’m so proud of their ambition, because you have to be ambitious to run for president of the United States,” Pelosi told me. “I didn’t actually, when I got married, give up my thought of going to law school. It just turned out that I was having all these babies, being that devout Catholic that I am. And then one thing led to another.”

But in 1975, she got appointed to a seat on San Francisco’s Library Commission, her first non-volunteer political job. Thus starting her political career. She helped out Governor Jerry Brown when he ran for President in 1976, and she advanced in the California Democratic Party and ran for the position of head of the national one.

But many senior party figures could not see her as anything but a dizzy liberal from the Bay Area. To read the news stories about that race now is to be struck by the sexism with which she was treated. A top official of the AFL-CIO referred to her as an “airhead.” After Pelosi lost, journalist Joseph Kraft wrote that “she came on, in one news conference, as an overbearing player of feminist politics.”

That latter description still amuses Pelosi. “Yeah, maybe. I certainly hope so,” she said. “One person’s insult, I take as a compliment. But that was new and this was a long time ago. ’85. What are we talking about? A long time ago. Thirty-five years ago. And if I was called an overbearing feminist 35 years ago, I would consider that a compliment.” But she acknowledged that she wasn’t prepared for the attacks: “There’s nothing as, shall we say, revealing as having an intra-party fight.”

She stayed active in the party, then decided to run for Congress in 1987, running in a district that included most of San Francisco. She won, and she liked doing the work of the committees she got into - Appropriations and Intelligence.

Around 2000, she beat her proclaimed goal of getting 4 Democrats into the California House delegation, getting 5 in.

When the caucus, led by Missouri’s Dick Gephardt, held its annual retreat the following February, Pelosi stood up and made a presentation explaining how she had won in California. She argued that the party needed to sharpen its message, rev up its organization and stop being so dependent on cookie-cutter strategies devised by overpaid consultants. She believed that technology opened new opportunities to reach and raise money from the grass roots, rather than continuing to rely on traditional corporate interests.

She was very farsighted, unlike much of the party leadership. She came to concluded that with leadership acting this way, that she had to become a leader herself. In 2001, she became party whip (professional vote counter), and the next year, Minority Leader. When the Democrats got the House in 2006, she became the Speaker.

Newt Gingrich, one of her recent predecessors, helped produce the divisiveness that permeates the House today, but he also left Pelosi a gift. Gingrich elevated the visibility of the speakership, centralized decision-making power and stripped the committee chairs of their remaining autonomy.

She helped deliver Obama's agenda in the first two years of his presidency, but lost her job until 2018.

As part of the bargain for getting a second chance at speaker in 2019, Pelosi agreed to limit her tenure to four more years. If the party maintains its majority, she will be out by 2023, and she intends to make sure that the wait for a second female speaker is shorter than it was for the first.

“I’ll tell you this — and sometimes I get criticized for saying it — but when I was running for whip, my first leadership position, the last thing that anybody who was supporting me could say to somebody to get his or her vote was, ‘You should vote for Nancy because she’s a woman,’” she said. “That was the biggest turnoff. Now we’re talking 19 years ago, 18 years ago. You had to just say she’s the best. She can get the job done. This is why she should be that person. So I always say to people, ‘Being a woman — yes, you’re a woman. That’s self evident. Now show what else you have to offer.’”

Pelosi is grooming a generation of female lawmakers to follow in the footsteps of her four-inch stilettos. “When women come here, I want them to be subcommittee chairs, and I’m talking about in their freshman year,” she said. “I want them all to have a security credential, whether it is armed services, foreign affairs, intelligence, veterans affairs, homeland security issues and within other committees that focus on defense, because that’s an important credential for a woman to have.”

“Women are asserting themselves in arenas that a long time ago might not have been considered a woman’s arena. But [they are] not only at the table. They have a seat at the head of the table, and it’s pretty exciting,” she added proudly. “So we’ve opened the door to have these people rise up, gain standing on their issues, more reputation. So they’re better known further down the road, should they seek higher office.”

 

[lpetrich]

However, Nancy Pelosi has squabbled with "The Squad":

Pelosi quip riles Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib

"All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world," Pelosi said, according to Dowd. "But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got."

The response was swift.

"That public 'whatever' is called public sentiment," Ocasio-Cortez fired back on Twitter. "And wielding the power to shift it is how we actually achieve meaningful change in this country."

Pelosi after feud with Ocasio-Cortez: Talk to me, not Twitter

"You got a complaint? You come and talk to me about it," Pelosi told the group, according to a source in the room. "But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just OK."

Pelosi's comments came in the aftermath of bitter party in-fighting with some of the most outspoken progressive members of her caucus: Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.; and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.

But when Trump bellowed that those four Congresswomen should go back to their horrible homelands and fix those places before returning, NP reconciled very quickly with AOC, IO, AP, and RT. Like appearing with IO on a trip to West Africa, and having a meeting with AOC that both of them claimed went very well. NP said that in a family, what one does with disagreements is get together and talk about them, and that AOC is a "very gracious Congresswoman". The two even posed for a picture with each other.

As to NP and tRump, someone once stated that she is a "Mean Mommy" toward him. But given how he has acted, just about anyone could act more mature than him.

 

[lpetrich]

In Pelosi, Strong Catholic Faith and Abortion Rights Coexist - The New York Times - 2015 Sep 15

For Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, the issue of abortion rights has always been ancillary to her unwavering faith and deep approbation for generations of popes. “I actually agree with the pope on more issues than many Catholics who agree with him on one issue,” Ms. Pelosi said in an interview in her office at the Capitol last week.

But that one issue, abortion, is adding a thick layer of tension to the otherwise convivial mood as Congress prepares for the arrival of Pope Francis this week.

...
For Ms. Pelosi, the notion of disagreeing with other Catholics about abortion has not weighed on her sense of faith. “I think everyone grants everyone their position,” she said. “The church has their position, and we have ours, which is that a woman has free will given to her by God. My family is very pro-life,” she added, noting that she has lived with the conflict all her life.

In her office she keeps a folder that is full of pictures and newspaper clippings of visits of popes and her meeting them.

Like many other Catholic girls from Baltimore, Ms. Pelosi attended the Institute of Notre Dame high school and went on to Trinity College, now Trinity Washington University, a Roman Catholic college for women in Washington, although she notes that priests had more power than nuns and as such did not cotton to a career in the church.

In her childhood, she thought of becoming a priest, but since the Church doesn't allow female priests, she was told to settle for becoming a nun.

During the Trump impeachment efforts, she responded to those who claim that he hates President Trump.
ABC News Politics on Twitter: "A reporter asks Nancy Pelosi if she "hates the president."
"I don't hate anybody," she says in a strong response. "As a Catholic, I resent your using the word hate in a sentence that addresses me...Don't mess with me when it comes to words like that." [url]https://t.co/bsfJRKZ0IN https://t.co/DfSs9d2T33" / Twitter[/url]

President Trump’s jab at Pelosi’s prayers, and what it says about how he sees his opponents - The Washington Post has more on her response:

This is about the Constitution of the United States and the facts that lead to the president’s violation of his oath of office. And as a Catholic I resent your using the word hate in a sentence that addresses me. I don’t hate anyone. I was raised in a way that is full, a heart full of love, and always pray for the president. And I still pray for the president. I pray for the president all the time. So don’t mess with me when it comes to words like that.

But Trump responded to that:

Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying “I pray for the President,” when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense. It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!

It is very evident to me that NP's prayers are a complete failure.

 

[ZiprHead]

[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/0WspkN8kkmM[/YOUTUBE]

The orange asshole would never give respect like this.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Thank you Nancy for getting the stimulus passed. A lessor democratic might have tried to play politics with it, which would have doomed democrats running this November.