Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi will be the first woman sworn in as speaker of the House of Representatives today, making her the highest-ranking female politician in U.S. history and second in the line of presidential succession. Let it be noted, even as Pelosi’s accomplishment is justly celebrated, that America should not have needed the 91 years since suffragist Jeannette Rankin, a Montana Republican, was elected our first congresswoman to arrive at today’s milestone.
Rankin earned her place in history as World War I loomed over Europe. A pacifist, she voted against the congressional declaration of war against Germany in 1917, and later cast the lone vote in the House against going to war again in 1941. “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake,” she famously said, but was proved wrong by the defeat of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich and the 1945 surrender of Japanese Emperor Hirohito.
Accurately described as a “San Francisco liberal,” Pelosi assumes her historic role in equally turbulent times, with the United States embroiled in military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and militant Islamists threatening western democracies like jack-booted Nazis did a generation ago. With her newfound power come formidable challenges that will greatly test her mettle in the days and months to come.
But the problems of the world can wait until tomorrow. Today, the daughter of former Baltimore Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. and herself the former Democratic minority leader — the first woman ever to lead a major party in the House — deserves to bask in the national spotlight. As the chief architect of an ambitious, aggressive and ultimately successful campaign to take back Congress after 12 years of Republican rule, Pelosi is the Newt Gingrich of the Democratic Party.
Congressional politics is a blood sport. There’s no affirmative action program in the complex calculus of outsized egos and lust for power that determines which of the 435 representatives rise to the top of the class. Some might see it as social Darwinism at its most ruthless.
Pelosi’s new House majority may be razor-thin, but the Democrats wouldn’t be where they are today without her. They acknowledged as much by unanimously electing her speaker, which gives her control over the House’s legislative calendar, access to every foreign leader who visits Washington, and a say in who chairs each major House committee. In other words, Pelosi is a force to be reckoned with, and she’s earned every one of the trappings of power she now enjoys.
Even though it is now nearly a century after Rep. Rankin broke into this exclusive men’s club, that Pelosi is now running it is a testament to her own vast and impressive political skills and to the enduring capacity of our republic to take stock, shift gears and right wrongs peacefully at the ballot box.
You don’t have to agree with all of Pelosi’s political views to applaud her feminine embodiment of the American Dream, appreciate her deft climb up the steep rock wall of political success, or wish the first Lady Speaker of the United States well in her new job.
Congratulations, Madam Speaker.
