Articles
CQ Weekly: Her Key to the House
10/29/2007
By Ed Epstein
With a testy, weary House clamoring to start its summer
recess, leaders of a sharply divided Democratic Caucus met Aug. 3 to decide
whether to accept an extension of the government’s powers to eavesdrop in
terrorism investigations, which the Senate had just passed before leaving town,
or fight on for the civil liberties protections that many liberals were
demanding. And congressional Republicans and President Bush, anticipating the
Democrats would take the latter course, were revving up their attack: The new
party in charge of the House, they said, was willing to coddle terrorism
suspects — a charge that stung for the moderate Democrats who held their seats
by close margins.
In the end, it was Nancy Pelosi, who had spoken often and
sharply about what she saw as an erosion of civil liberties because of the Bush
administration, who decided to try to cut her party’s potential losses and ward
off such criticism. She shut down the intramural debate, overrode her own
liberal allies and announced that the caucus would accept the Senate bill for
six months and come back to fight anew in the fall.
“As romantic as it would have been to stay on, it wasn’t
going to lead anywhere,’’ recalled Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers
Jr. of Michigan, who was at the side of the Speaker of the House when she made
the call. “If she listened to the more passionate members, we could have
descended into disunity.’’
In the year since the Democrats won control of the House for
the first time in a dozen years, Pelosi has made it clear that while she is an
activist — a decisive and partisan Speaker who often gets involved in the
nitty-gritty details of legislation — she also is a pragmatist who is unafraid
to disappoint her liberal base in the cause of maintaining or even expanding
her party’s House majority in 2008 and beyond.
The decision to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA) allowed her to extract herself and her party from a difficult
situation, even though her caucus is still wrestling with Republicans on the
issue. She has also tread carefully on questions of taxes, followed a
non-activist path on social issues such as gun control and abortion and
completely closed down talk of presidential impeachment.
“She has lived down the image of a San Francisco liberal,’’
said Florida’s Allen Boyd, a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition —
Southern-dominated, fiscally conservative House Democrats who now meet
regularly with Pelosi. “She’s a very practical, tough strategist who knows what
people can do and what they can’t.’’
The measure of control she exerts is reflected in almost
every question that comes before her caucus, from what to serve at breakfast
meetings to how to put together climate change legislation. Her Democratic
allies in the House — and at the moment there are very few in the caucus who
don’t describe themselves that way — say they wonder how she maintains this
degree of involvement without getting bogged down.
“She’s Speaker Houdini,’’ said Democrat Emanuel Cleaver II
of Missouri, a leader of the Congressional Black Caucus. “She balances
everything, all the balls in the air.’’
In her 10 months as Speaker, Pelosi has emphasized building
and sustaining consensus in a caucus that has a long and storied history of
being riven by ideological divisions. To a large degree, she has been
successful, her protracted honeymoon helped along by the president’s
unpopularity and by a relatively disjointed and dispirited state of affairs in
the House Republican caucus, which is struggling to find its voice as the
minority opposition.
But the formula for her relative success so far doesn’t
offer much insight into how Pelosi will fare when her leadership inevitably
hits sustained rough waters or when committee chairmen and other powerful House
Democrats begin to chafe under her strong hand. Nor does it portend how House
Democrats will operate, or how Pelosi’s own leadership style may evolve, if a
fellow Democrat is elected president next year.
And this month, for the first time, her leadership has shown
more signs of strain. In three quick days, the Armenian genocide resolution
that she ardently supports lost so much of its backing that she pulled it off
the debate agenda; the promised Democratic rewrite of the FISA law ran into
trouble on several fronts and was delayed; and her public campaign for an
override of Bush’s veto of children’s health insurance legislation came up
short.
It was her roughest period since the outset of her
speakership, when the dogged loyalty Pelosi gives to her allies and the
longstanding grudges she holds against foes — qualities many describe as her
political Achilles’ heel — led her to stick with her friend John P. Murtha of
Pennsylvania as her choice for majority leader long after it became clear he
would be soundly trounced by her frequent rival Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland.
Political analysts say challenges from within the Democratic
ranks are likely to pose greater problems for the Speaker in the long run than
those posed by Republicans, as she risks disappointing liberals who expected
the newly empowered Democrats to lean harder to the left in establishing and
pushing their party’s agenda.
But overall, says David Brady, congressional scholar at the
conservative Hoover Institution at
Consensus Driven
Ever since Pelosi was elected Speaker in January, she has
put a high priority on the happiness and political success of the 42 House
Democratic freshmen. She calls them the “majority makers’’ and invites them to
the Speaker’s conference room every Wednesday morning. And early on, the
67-year-old Pelosi — a mother of five, with a seventh grandchild on the way,
and a proud chocoholic — made it clear to the newcomers that she was firmly in
charge of every detail of the House’s operations: She ordered the menu be
changed from crumb cake to chocolate donuts.
“It was a small but striking example of her leadership,’’
Paul W. Hodes of New Hampshire, the freshman class president at the time,
recalled — only half in jest. “She’s a strong personality and has very clear
ideas.”
On more serious topics, though, Pelosi has made it clear
that she is, as Bush once famously described himself, “the decider.”
Describing her own style, she said in an interview:
“Legislators are more deliberative. When you are the leader, you have to be
decisive. It’s more intuition than deduction. When you go into such a job you
have to have the knowledge you bring with you and that you gain.
“The Speaker has to call the shots at the end of the day.
When you have the challenge: Act, so people know you will act,’’ Pelosi added.
But before that moment comes — and to improve the chances
that her decisions will be supported by the rank and file — Pelosi has made a
habit of arranging a seemingly non-stop series of meetings with all the party’s
factions, from the Progressive Caucus, to which she once belonged, on the left
to the Blue Dogs on the right.
“We work hard to build consensus in our caucus and then go
forward,’’ Pelosi said. “People tell me it’s a woman’s way, talking and talking
until you reach consensus. But I figure you can spend your time trying to get
votes or getting consensus first.’’
Her approach is evocative of the practices of Pelosi’s
mentors, two of the other most politically important San Francisco Democrats of
the modern era: Willie L. Brown Jr., a former mayor and speaker of the state
Assembly, and Phillip Burton, a powerful voice in the House for 19 years until
his death in 1983. “It’s all about your caucus. Never, ever, use your power to
twist the results so they are favorable only to your district,’’ Brown said.
“The Speaker must be empowered at all times to make the call. But you must be
sure that your decisions don’t cost you and your membership the majority.’’
To Xavier Becerra of California, whose political career
started as a junior state legislator under Brown and who is now Pelosi’s
handpicked deputy in the House leadership, the way “the Speaker has her hands
in everything’’ is no surprise. “Brown and Pelosi understand the workings of
politics very well — the passion, steadfastness in values and the understanding
of the political psyche in operating a body,” he said. “They both are also
masterful in counting votes.’’
But whereas Brown was outspoken and given to braggadocio,
Pelosi “is a softer sell of the fact that, even though she is Speaker, she
carries a smaller stick.’’
In her Capitol office, Pelosi keeps mementoes of the
politicians who have influenced her in addition to her father — Thomas “Old
Tommy’’ D’Alesandro Jr., who spent two decades as a congressman and then mayor
of Baltimore — and her brother, “Young Tommy,” a Baltimore mayor in the 1960s.
There is a foot-high statue of Burton and a picture of
herself as a teenager with Sen. John F. Kennedy, whose presidential inaugural
address she can quote from memory. And there is a Waterford crystal gavel that
belonged to Thomas P. “Tip’’ O’Neill Jr., which the late Speaker’s family gave
to Pelosi after her election as minority leader in 2002.
Pelosi describes O’Neill, who she came to know well when she
chaired the California Democratic Party in the 1980s, as her “hero” among her
51 predecessors as Speaker. Like Pelosi, he was also known for bringing
freshmen and other junior members into caucus decision-making and deeply
involved himself in the finer points of major legislation or in matters that
interested him personally.
“There’s an idealism tempered by realism,’’ Rep. Edward J.
Markey of Massachusetts, an O’Neill protégé, says in comparing the two
Speakers. “There is also a forcefulness they bring to their causes.’’
But Markey and others note that those role models all came
from a time when the congressional culture was less partisan and less media
driven. They say those changes, along with a president who has pushed to expand
the power of the executive branch, have compelled Pelosi to centralize power in
her office in the style of her ideological opposite, Newt Gingrich of Georgia,
the Republican Speaker from 1995 through 1998.
“She’s more like Newt. She’s partisan and not particularly
interested in a bipartisan agenda,’’ said congressional historian Julian E.
Zelizer of Princeton University. “They have both worked in this era of intense
media coverage and partisanship and reflect that and the fact that the parties
and voters are polarized.’’
But unlike Gingrich, Pelosi was slow to open herself up to
the press. Only since the fall has she accepted invitations from the Sunday
morning news-talk shows and started holding weekly news conferences. She has
even said she’s willing to revive a practice, which lasted from O’Neill through
Gingrich, of daily meetings with the Capitol press corps when the House is in
session.
She says her new willingness to spend time with reporters is
not about a loss of reticence, but because she has more time available now that
her legislation agenda has started moving and she has her leadership colleagues
and her staff operating close to her liking. (Her relationship with Hoyer, for
example, has seemed to evolve from frosty to at least businesslike.)
California’s Henry A. Waxman, who as chairman of the
Oversight and Government Reform Committee has occasionally chafed at the
Speaker’s top-down approach, says he’s come to share her view that such
centralized command is what their diverse caucus needs. “Otherwise, Democrats
would be accountable to voters, but I wouldn’t be sure we can deliver,’’ he
said.
Bypassing Committees
Like both O’Neill and Gingrich, Pelosi has decided to
sidestep the committee system and set up an ad hoc group to try to shape an
important bill to her liking. Pelosi favors a tough and aggressive approach to
curbing climate change; the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, John
D. Dingell of Michigan, favors a slower approach that would go easier on the
automobile industry central to the economy of his state.
And so in January, Pelosi picked Markey to chair a Select
Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which is supposed to
recommend, but not actually draft, legislation by the end of the year. Pelosi
and Markey led a delegation to Greenland this spring to see evidence of global
warming. Since then, the Speaker has repeatedly talked up the select
committee’s work.
Asked if Pelosi remains “deeply involved’’ in the issue,
Markey replied: “You need several more adjectives to describe how deeply she is
involved.’’ On other issues, though, she hasn’t hesitated to let down the
liberal wing of her party.
Gun control and abortion rights have not made it onto the
House agenda. A gay-rights bill — to ban job discrimination based on sexual
orientation — is only now starting to move, and gay-rights advocates oppose it
because, at Pelosi’s insistence, it has been written more narrowly than they
want. And the Speaker quickly and decisively shot down three close allies when
they proposed an income tax increase to pay for the Iraq War.
Pelosi aides said she knew in general terms about the surtax
proposal before the three — Murtha, David R. Obey of Wisconsin and Jim McGovern
of Massachusetts — announced it the morning of Oct. 2. Within minutes of the
Speaker’s return that afternoon from New York, where she appeared at a
fundraiser and as a guest on ABC’s talk show “The View,’’ her office rejected
the idea out of hand.
“It was the shortest-lived trial balloon in congressional
history,’’ an aide to one of the sponsors of the plan quipped.
Two other proactive moves by Pelosi were clearly designed to
help ideologically moderate junior lawmakers, many from districts that tend to
vote Republican, survive in 2008 and, as a result, help the party hold the
House.
One has been her push for the House to revive “pay as you
go’’ rules, which were dropped under Republican control, requiring that tax
cuts or increases in mandatory spending be offset by other revenue or spending
cuts. The other move was her insistence that House Democrats won’t talk about
impeaching Bush. She says impeachment would be an all-consuming and ultimately
unsuccessful undertaking that would only divert Democrats from their core
legislative agenda.
That decision has drawn some of the most vocal annoyance so
far from the left — already put out over the inability of the Democratic
Congress to clear veto-proof legislation to end the Iraq War — and helped
prompt a long-shot, independent challenge to Pelosi’s re-election in California
by the anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan.
For the next year, anyway, such pressure from the left will
remain her greatest source of tension, as liberal Democrats around the country
will be at times unhappy with the congressional majority’s inability to
overcome Republican filibusters in the Senate and the possible defections of
some Democratic moderates in the House, especially in close districts. And if a
Democrat wins the White House in 2008, says political scientist Larry J. Sabato
of the University of Virginia, the pressure from the left will grow even more.
But even if Democrats are disappointed with the Congress,
Pelosi should have little trouble hanging on to her power. “What is the base
going to do to the first woman Democratic Speaker? Not much. She’s an icon,
certainly in the Democratic Party and arguably in the entire country.’’
Relations With Republicans
In pursuing her legislative agenda, Pelosi has not often
actively sought Republican votes. But she touts the fact that some of the
Democrats’ top goals have attracted a significant numbers of GOP votes. None of
the planks of the “Six for ’06’’ campaign agenda, which Pelosi pushed through
the House at the start of the year, attracted fewer than 24 Republicans.
But House Republicans have taken every opportunity to
criticize her style and methods, particularly her centralized leadership.
“She’s coalesced a lot of power and ignored some senior members to ramrod
legislation,” said Ray LaHood of Illinois. “In the beginning of a speakership,
when you’re pushing an agenda, coalescing power in the office will work for a
while. But when your members grow disenchanted with you, you don’t have the
strength to back her.’’
His prescription for Pelosi: Adopt the coach-like model of
her predecessor as Speaker, Republican J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois. “Reach
out to members and chairmen, and let them work their will,’’ advised LaHood, a
close friend of Hastert’s.
Minority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri said he views Pelosi’s
leadership as already running out of steam, with voters upset over the gridlock
between the Democratic majority and the president on a host of issues.
“Everything gets harder for them than the day before because they’re burning up
their capital and not getting results,’’ Blunt said.
He also said that Pelosi’s efforts to bridge the gap between
the factions in her caucus are bound to eventually fail. “The ‘majority makers’
have nothing in common with Code Pink and MoveOn.org,’’ he said, referring to
two of the leaders of the anti-war movement. “It’s just a constant struggle
between the two wings of the party.’’
Republicans also charge that Pelosi hasn’t lived up to her
party’s promise to operate the House in a more open and democratic manner than
the Republicans themselves did. In the 2006 campaign, Democrats pledged that
bills “should generally come to the floor under a procedure that allows open,
full and fair debate consisting of a full amendment process that grants the
minority the right to offer its alternatives, including a substitute.’’
The reality has fallen well short of that ideal. Closed
rules, under which no floor amendments may be debated, still proliferate, as do
rules severely limiting the minority’s right to offer its alternatives or
changes. Democrats say that while they have tried to move a heavy legislative
agenda, Republicans are trying to use the amendment process to kill bills
rather than produce the change Americans voted for last year.
In this atmosphere, partisanship remains the norm on the
Rules Committee, which sets the parameters for floor debate and is essentially
an arm of the majority leadership.
“I have never said everything was hunky-dory when we were in
charge,’’ said David Dreier, the California Republican who chaired the
committee for the previous eight years. In a report last month, he and the
committee’s three other current GOP members put the number of closed rules so
far this year at 39 percent — up from 27 percent, by their reckoning, in all of
the GOP-run 109th Congress.
“This is the Speaker’s Rules Committee,’’ Dreier said. “At
the direction of Speaker Pelosi, these actions have taken place.’’
But Ron Peters, a congressional scholar at the University of
Oklahoma who is studying the Rules Committee process, views things differently.
“To the extent that the Democrats have relied on modified or closed rules, it’s
well within the range we can expect from a majority party these days,’’ Peters
said. “My impression is that the Democrats have, in general, been more
permissive than the Republicans were.’’
A Break for Vulnerable Freshmen
Beyond such macro-political decisions about her way of
operating the House, Pelosi has shown that she will go out of her way to help
individual members, freshman Democrats in particular, if she thinks they might
be hurt by pending House actions.
Democrat Zack Space, who was elected a year ago in a
reliably Republican part of Ohio that had been held by Bob Ney before the Jack
Abramoff scandal, recalls importuning Pelosi on the House floor in June soon
after the Appropriations Committee voted a deep cut for the Appalachian
Regional Commission, an important economic development engine in southeastern
Ohio.
Pelosi quickly reached out to the top members of the Energy
and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, Democrat Peter J. Visclosky of Indiana
and Republican David L. Hobson of Ohio, and in no time Space found himself
engaged in a colloquy on the floor with the two appropriators, who promised to
try to boost the allocation before their fiscal 2008 bill is finalized.
Space says Pelosi hasn’t asked for a thing from him in
return. “She’s put absolutely no pressure on me to vote any way,” he said. “In
fact, she encourages me to vote my district.’’
But members with more secure holds on their seats tell of
being lobbied personally by Pelosi, sometimes repeatedly on a single piece of
legislation, as she joins her leadership team in rounding up votes.
Next year’s election is a clear focus of Pelosi’s. One
concern is that public opinion polls show Congress’ popularity has sunk
considerably since the initial excitement over the Democratic takeover and the
election of Pelosi to break what she called “the marble ceiling’’ at the
Capitol.
Republicans are already shaping as a campaign theme the
notion that the Democrats haven’t accomplished all that much. In response, in
recent days House Democrats were told by the leadership to circumvent what the
Speaker and her team view as an overly critical Washington press corps and
instead tout Congress’ legislative accomplishments to their local media outlets
— with an emphasis on the times Republicans have thwarted Democratic
objectives.
Democrats are also heartened by the polling numbers showing
they hold a solid lead when voters are asked which party they’ll vote for in
next year’s congressional elections. And, especially given the spate of recent
GOP retirements in competitive districts, at this point almost no one is
betting the party will lose control of the House next fall, which would require
it to yield 16 seats or more to the GOP.
Pelosi first rose to prominence in California’s Democratic
Party as a dogged, successful fundraiser. And after two decades in the House,
she persists, mixing in several fundraising events weekly for the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee or for her own campaign coffers, which she
fills mainly so they can be tapped to benefit other Democrats. As she regularly
tells her caucus at its closed-door meetings, the members must raise an average
of $1 million a week to fund the DCCC’s effort.
By far, she is the committee’s No. 1 fundraiser, even though
there are still a good number of members of her caucus who don’t particularly
want her to appear in their districts — mainly because she’s clearly so much
more liberal than their constituents.
As a result, Pelosi says she’s optimistic her party will expand its majority a year from now, which would ensure that the first female Speaker in the House’s 218-year history serves more than two years. “We’re miles ahead of where we need to be,’’ she said.