Opinion | Nancy Pelosi Retires as a Master of Congress

Few modern political leaders will be as carefully evaluated for their historical significance as Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as the speaker of the House, who announced on Thursday that she will retire from Congress at the end of her current term.

She’ll be remembered as an American political giant.

A nearly 40-year veteran of the House of Representatives, Ms. Pelosi already occupies a larger-than-life place in the political firmament both for her two-decade tenure as the Democratic leader and for the essential role she played in the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, as well as the 2009 stimulus bill, the 2021 infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included significant investments in renewable energy.

But a list of her legislative achievements doesn’t tell the whole story. She is both a committed progressive and an operational pragmatist who has always been unperturbed by any contradictions required to embrace both stances. Indeed, that combination — perhaps to some people a paradox — is one of the chief reasons that she has been able to lead her party so ably. As the Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin has observed, “Ideological ardor, for her, always paled in comparison to doing what she deemed necessary to win power and hold it.”

Although often caricatured as the archetypal San Francisco liberal, Ms. Pelosi’s progressive credentials were often the very thing that enabled her to bring a notoriously diverse Democratic caucus together to embrace the achievable over the purely aspirational. She has an ability to build consensus that several of her Republican successors — John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy — were unable to replicate in trying to lead their fractious caucuses, rived in many instances by zealots who demanded ideological purity at the expense of a functioning government.

She didn’t hesitate to enforce party discipline: If she thought she had crafted a reasonable compromise, she would rarely give a pass to members who then complained about a tough vote.

But that didn’t mean taking things personally: In 2018, she said she didn’t object to Democrats in swing districts openly criticizing her, saying, “If they have to do that to win the election, I’m all for winning.”

In 2006, she persuaded House Democrats hungry to end their dozen years in the minority to embrace a campaign agenda — the “Six for ’06” plan — that eschewed edgier progressive policy goals in favor of a tightly fashioned platform that helped to unify the Democratic Party while still differentiating its House members from President George W. Bush and Republicans. That election propelled her to the speakership for the first time.

Despite her careful approach, Ms. Pelosi never gave up on ambitious policy goals like expanded access to health care coverage and the expansion of child tax credits. She often shared the passion of a visionary colleague or a progressive advocacy group, but remained grounded in the imperative of getting legislation passed.

Opponents never tired of trying to portray her as an out-of-touch radical. In 2010, the Republican National Committee chair, Michael Steele, announced a multicity “Fire Pelosi” tour — a theme that helped oust her from the speakership. Democrats lost control of the House again in 2022, at the end of her second four-year stint with the speaker’s gavel, after enacting another spate of legislative wins, this time with a razor-thin majority.

Ms. Pelosi’s historic significance goes beyond her legislative legacy. She was an indefatigable defender of the constitutional role of the Congress, and especially the role of the House. “You don’t respect the House!” she once admonished President Barack Obama, whom she thought was being too deferential to his former Senate colleagues. And when President Trump suggested during his first term that she lacked gravitas in her caucus, Ms. Pelosi legendarily said, “Please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats,” who had just recaptured the majority.

Some critics have faulted Ms. Pelosi for remaining in her leadership position for too long. But she endured because she was chosen again and again by her members in leadership contests against a variety of challengers. When she did step down from leadership, a new triumvirate of House Democratic leaders she had nurtured were voted into their positions without a significant challenge.

Over the years, Ms. Pelosi endorsed and supported minority and women House candidates to help ensure that the Democratic caucus would more closely resemble the American body politic, elevating several of those members into key leadership and committee posts.

In the wake of Democrats’ 2010 midterm losses she briefly weighed not seeking the minority leader slot and was again uncertain two years later, when Democrats failed to regain the majority. Yet she always found reasons that justified remaining: protecting the Affordable Care Act, promoting Mr. Obama’s re-election effort, standing up to Mr. Trump and ultimately helping President Joe Biden enact economic recovery legislation. With those goals achieved, she voluntarily stepped down, maintaining her presence in the Democratic caucus while making way for new leaders.

Many observers who’ve marveled that a San Francisco liberal could wield power so effectively have been reminded that Ms. Pelosi honed her political chops as the daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., a congressman from Baltimore and one of the city’s storied mayors. Her blend of power and diplomacy allowed her to run her caucus and the House with an iron fist inside a velvet glove.

She’ll rightly be lionized as the first woman speaker, but in one sense, that was the most incidental of her myriad accomplishments.

John A. Lawrence is a visiting professor at the University of California Washington Center and the author of “Arc of Power: Inside Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership, 2005-2010.”

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