Former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, to retire.
Representative Nancy Pelosi, former two-time Speaker of the House, has now announced her retirement from Congress after four decades of service. She is one of the most senior Democratic members of Congress. She helped shepherd the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, through the legislative process. She oversaw the impeachment of Donald Trump twice but was not able to gain conviction in the Senate.
Wonder who will replace her.
Newsweek lists several people, including her daughter.
As Newsweek indicates, California has a top two primary which means two Democrats may end up going into the general election against each other.
Wonder who will replace her.
Newsweek lists several people, including her daughter.
As Newsweek indicates, California has a top two primary which means two Democrats may end up going into the general election against each other.
Comments
US politics seems excessively dynastic at times.
But we don't have monarchs. We can watch them from afar.
Keeps everything on an even keel.
But you do seem to have some sort of aristocracy
Based on money, which the Pelosi family has lots of. Andrew Carnegie was a proponent of the estate tax and thought the wealthy shouldn't leave large sums to their kids. But that was a long time ago.
Ancient Rome was a republic with a wealthy aristocracy that dissolved in to a monarchy: that was a very, very long time ago, though as that chap Karl Marx said history tends to repeat itself, first as tragedy then as farce ( Trump ain't no Augustus)
As for Andrew Carnegie, I'm personally eternally grateful to him, because much of my academic success and later employment prospects were due to being able to avail myself of one of the many libraries he endowed here in the UK when I was young. It's seems a long time since people used their wealth to enrich their communities rather than using their communities to enrich themselves.
Which is one of the good reasons for Pelosi stepping aside. It seems a continuation of her resigning her leadership of the House Democrats at the end of the 117th Congress. I suppose the case could be made that at 86 years old (her age at the end of the current Congress in December 2026) she should have done this earlier, but given how effective she was in both her stints as Speaker I'm not sure you can make more than a general case.
I would say that she has been either the most effective Speaker of the House since Joe Cannon, or the most effective Speaker of the House ever. She managed to get some very tough legislation through very divided House with a very fractious Democratic caucus. She certainly seems a true giant when compared with her immediate predecessors and successors; Hastert, Boehner, Ryan, McCarthy, and Johnson.
I think negotiation is in the Democratic DNA. It is an amalgamation of many different interest groups that has learned to compromise ever since 1968. At one time, Republicans were good at negotiation too, but ever since Nixon's Southern Strategy, it lost the ability to compromise. Unfortunately, it looks like it will never get beyond being a stick in the mud.
I think that’s partly to do with what gets coverage - there’s Dolly Parton’s imagination library for example.
How much of the negotiating over the ACA was keeping the likes of Manchin on board?
There's also the question of self-publicization. Parton seems more interested in getting books into people's hands. Carnegie seems like he was mostly interested in rehabilitating the reputation he earned from how he acquired his wealth. I recall that someone calculated the number of libraries built by Carnegie's vile henchman, Henry Clay Frick, and determined that it was almost exactly one library per person killed by the Pinkertons during actions ordered by Frick. I guess Carnegie's PR campaign is still working.
tl;dr - Maybe Dolly Parton is less of a publicity hound than Andrew Carnegie because she has fewer murdered strikers in her past.
Manchin was in the Senate so he was mostly Harry Reid's problem. That being said, Manchin, though conservative by Democratic standards, was a pretty reliable party line vote on things that didn't directly impact the extraction industries, like health care or judicial appointments. The real problem Senator for the ACA was Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who was in the pocket of the insurance industry (as were most Senators from Connecticut in the twentieth and twenty-first century).
But what I'm referring to is the months of negotiations with Republicans in 2009 that resulted in zero Republican votes for Obamacare. I kept thinking the Democrats and Independents should have just figured out what they could agree upon among themselves and rammed it down the Republicans' throats. The point of a trifecta is doing what you want.