After 20 years at the helm of the Democratic caucus, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, announced this Thursday (17) that she will not run for re-election to lead what from next year will be the minority – a since the House will be controlled from January 3 by the Republican Party.
Republicans won a majority in the House in the midterms, the mid-term elections, which took place last week. The presidency of the House in the second half of the Joe Biden government must be occupied by Kevin McCarthy, now leader of the minority.
Nancy Pelosi has led the House Democratic caucus for four presidents and, after Vice Kamala Harris, is the highest-ranking woman in American politics. She was elected to the post for the first time in January 2003, in the George W. Bush administration, at the time as Minority Leader.
When Bush lost command of the House in the midterms of 2006, she assumed the post of Speaker of the House for the first time at the beginning of the following year. She held the post until the first half of the Obama administration, in January 2011, when the party lost control of the House, and returned to being minority leader. It was like this until Trump also had his own defeat in the midterms, in 2018, and Pelosi returned to the Presidency of the House, a position she will occupy until the next 3rd.
Therefore, there was also some pressure for her to give up command of the Democratic bench to make room for a new generation. The mayor is 82 years old and was elected for the first time in 1987.
New York Representative Hakeem Jeffries, 52, is one of those tipped to fill the post. If elected, he will be the first black lawmaker to lead a party in the US legislature.
Pelosi became a target of Republican radicals especially after the administration of Donald Trump – the former president even called her an “animal” at a recent campaign event.
In 2020, she tore up, without making a point of disguising it, a copy of the State of the Union address that the then president had given moments before. The gesture was seen as a response to the fact that the politician did not greet Pelosi, who extended his hand to him, upon arrival at the pulpit. As president of the House, she still led the two impeachment processes that the republican was the target of – he ended up acquitted in the Senate on both occasions.
On January 6, 2021, in the invasion of the Capitol to try to prevent the confirmation of Biden’s victory, Trump supporters invaded the deputy’s room. One woman even recorded a video saying that she was going to “shoot the damn brain” of the president of the House – and was sentenced to prison this year.
She referred to the episode in her speech this Wednesday. “American democracy is majestic but fragile. Many of us here have witnessed its fragility firsthand, tragically in this House. Therefore, democracy must always be defended against forces that wish to harm it,” she said.
Threats to the Democrat came close to materializing at the end of last month, when a man broke into Pelosi’s home in San Francisco, California. She was not at home, and the attacker, who spread conspiracy theories on the internet, attacked the parliamentarian’s husband, Paul Pelosi, 82, with a hammer – he had to undergo surgery on his skull.
Pelosi also had her moments of crisis with President Joe Biden, with whom she is a great ally. She ignored the White House’s appeals in August and traveled to Taiwan, an island that China considers a rebellious province, greatly raising tensions between Beijing and Washington.
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