Nancy Pelosi leaves a long legacy: 5 takeaways

The decision by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to leave Congress after almost four decades marks the end of an era for both the powerhouse Democrat and her party at large.

The former Speaker not only wrote herself into the history books as the first woman to hold the gavel, but also muscled into law some of the most significant policy changes of modern times, including sweeping health care, climate and Wall Street reforms.

Along the way, Pelosi earned a reputation as a potent vote-counter — one who could convince even the most reluctant Democrats to support her agenda — and a mammoth fundraiser, who pulled in roughly $1.3 billion for the Democrats over her congressional career.

“She made us proud to be Democrats,” former President Obama wrote Thursday, “and will go down in history as one of the best speakers the House of Representatives has ever had.”

Here are some of the greatest hits of Pelosi’s storied time on Capitol Hill.

The Iraq War

Pelosi was the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee in 2002, when President George W. Bush and his administration came to Congress for approval of military operations in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, Bush had warned, possessed potent weapons stockpiles that posed a direct threat to the United States and other Western democracies. 

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the administration told Congress, it was imperative to hit Baghdad before Baghdad hit the U.S. 

Pelosi challenged the assertion, saying the administration had presented no evidence to Congress to back the claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — or to justify military operations in Iraq.

Although the war resolution passed easily in October of 2022, Pelosi was among the 133 House lawmakers — almost all of them Democrats — who opposed it.

History would ultimately vindicate the opponents. Iraq, it turned out, did not have WMDs. And the Iraq War not only killed thousands of American troops — and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians — it also destabilized the region in ways that empowered a new crop of anti-Western terrorists.

Pelosi’s vote against the war helped to solidify her standing in the liberal-leaning Democratic caucus, where she would serve as the top leader for 20 years, beginning just months after the conflict began.  

“Knowing what we knew then, this intelligence did not support the threat,” Pelosi said years later. “It was a gross misrepresentation to the American people of the capabilities and intentions of the Iraqi government.”

A woman in power

Pelosi broke the marble ceiling in 2003, when Democrats elected her to replace Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) at the top of their caucus, marking the first time a woman had led either party in Congress. And she shattered it again in 2007, when she ascended to become the first female Speaker in history — a feat she repeated in 2019.

Pelosi relished the unique opportunity to have a woman’s voice at the highest echelons of political power in Washington, and wasted no time using that perch to advance women’s causes. 

The first bill signed by President Obama, who entered the White House in the midst of Pelosi’s first Speakership run, was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which empowered women to challenge pay disparities between the genders for doing the same jobs. And she made sure that the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature health care law, prohibited insurers from denying coverage or increasing costs for women based on preexisting conditions, to include pregnancies. 

Pelosi also lamented the stark gender imbalance on Capitol Hill — there were only 12 Democratic women in Congress when she was first elected in 1987 — and she used her influence to encourage other women to enter politics.

Former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.), who retired from Congress after being shot in the head in 2011, was among the many Democratic women to praise Pelosi on Thursday as a force that encouraged their move into politics.

“As the first woman Speaker of the House, she inspired me,” Giffords said, “and at my bedside following the shooting that turned my life upside-down, she uplifted me."

She was also a leading champion of women’s reproductive rights — a position that put Pelosi, a devout Catholic, at frequent odds with the church. In 2022, the archbishop of San Francisco barred her from receiving holy communion in her hometown. 

Unbowed, Pelosi defended that position, arguing that God provided women with the free will to make their own reproductive health decisions. 

“For us, it was a complete and total blessing, which we enjoy every day of our lives,” Pelosi said at the time, referring to her own children. “But it’s none of our business how other people choose the size and timing of their families.”

That same year, as one of her last campaigns as Speaker, Pelosi sought to codify the abortion protections provided by Roe v. Wade, after the Supreme Court overturned the landmark law. 

ObamaCare

Pelosi had already been the House Speaker for two years when President Obama entered office in 2009, at the height of the Great Recession. The pair quickly joined forces to pass an emergency stimulus bill designed to cushion the effects of the economic downturn. But the top priority for both Democratic leaders was something else: health care reform.

The result was the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a massive package of new insurance guidelines and federal subsidies aimed at not only expanding health care coverage to millions of people who couldn’t afford it, but also ensuring that the coverage was comprehensive, benefits weren’t capped and sick people weren’t left out. 

Obama would eventually sign the legislation into law in March of 2010. But it might never have happened without Pelosi’s navigation through a minefield of divergent ideologies and conflicting interests, including clashes between liberal and moderate House Democrats over the size and scope of the benefits — and how the costs would be offset in the face of pushback from virtually every major health industry group in the country. 

Citing the bill’s unpopularity, a number of front-line Democrats wanted to abandon the effort altogether.

When Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) died amid the debate — and Massachusetts voters elected a Republican to replace him, denying Democrats 60 votes in the Senate — many in the party thought the effort was dead in the water. Pelosi was not among them. 

“You go through the gate,” she told reporters amid the impasse. “If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”

In the end, Democrats used a procedural tool allowing them to pass the bill with a simple majority in the Senate. Pelosi has said it’s her single greatest accomplishment in Congress.

“Nothing, in any of the years that I was there, compares to the Affordable Care Act — expanding health care to tens of millions more Americans,” she said in 2022, as she was stepping down from her leadership position. “That, for me, was the highlight.”

Climate change 

San Francisco is a liberal city, and Pelosi’s interest in environmental protection reflected the sentiments of her constituents from her first days on Capitol Hill. But she also took that battle to much greater heights by making global warming a national priority when she ascended to the Speakership. 

In one of her first acts after taking the gavel in 2007, Pelosi created the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, tapping then-Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to lead the panel. It held dozens of hearings over the next four years, and Markey helped write legislation designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The proposal was controversial even within Pelosi’s own Democratic caucus, which, at the time, boasted more than 50 centrist "Blue Dogs" who were reluctant to support the bill. Still, Pelosi pushed it through the House in 2009, and was furious when then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) refused to consider it in the upper chamber. (Republicans used the vote as a cudgel against House Democrats in the elections of the following year, which helped propel the red wave that flipped the chamber to GOP control.) 

Pelosi was also a loud proponent of Obama’s move to join the Paris Climate Accord in 2015. And four years later, when Pelosi was Speaker once more, Democrats again made the issue a priority with the creation of another select committee to tackle climate change, this one led by Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.).

Under President Trump, those efforts had no chance of moving. But the dynamics changed in 2021 with the arrival of President Biden, who quickly embraced the climate issue as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. 

That law, enacted in 2022, provided almost $370 billion in new climate spending, largely to encourage a shift away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner energy sources. Biden’s stated goal was to cut America’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade. And Pelosi embraced it as a “moral responsibility” to younger generations of Americans.

“This is a values issue — if you believe, as do I, this is God's creation — and we have a moral responsibility to be good stewards of it,” she said at the time.

Trump and Jan. 6

Pelosi jousted epically with President Trump, particularly in the final two years of his first term, when she was again the Speaker. 

That feud reached new heights in 2019, when Pelosi led the Democrats’ first impeachment of the president after it was revealed that he had tried to leverage U.S. military aid to Ukraine in return for Kyiv’s commitment to launch a corruption investigation into Biden and his family.

Yet even those hostilities paled in comparison to what would follow the 2020 elections, when Trump refused to concede defeat and rallied thousands of supporters in Washington to protest Biden’s victory — a campaign that resulted directly in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Pelosi was among the lawmakers targeted by the mob, and she joined other bipartisan leaders in making sure Congress reconvened that same night to certify the election results. Shortly afterward, she launched Trump’s second impeachment, and the final chapter of her time as Democratic leader will be remembered for her determined defense of America’s democratic experiment. 

At the center of that campaign was the creation of a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot — a bipartisan panel that concluded decisively that Trump was responsible for the violence that day. 

In stepping down from her leadership position, Pelosi sounded a warning about the future of the nation’s founding traditions. 

“American democracy is majestic — but it is fragile,” she said at the time. 

Trump’s political revival two years later has left Pelosi visibly frustrated. Still, in her parting message, she was optimistic about the country’s future — as long as people fight to preserve it.

“As we go forward, my message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power. We have made history, we have made progress, we have always led the way,” she said.

"And now we must continue to do so by remaining full participants in our democracy and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear.”