Nancy Pelosi is the 52nd Speaker of the House of Representatives, having made history in 2007 when she was elected the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House. On January 3, the California Democratic Representative was elected to another term — her fourth — one she has promised will be her last. The congresswoman plans to set aside by 2023, spelling the end of a 20-year reign as the top-ranking Democrat in the chamber.
Pelosi was born Nancy D'Alesandro on March 26, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland. She carries on the family tradition of being involved in politics. Her father served in Congress and was the mayor of Baltimore for 12 years, and her brother Thomas later served as mayor of Baltimore as well. As a young girl, she managed her father's book of people who owed him political favours.
Pelosi graduated from Trinity College in Washington, D.C., in 1962. While a student there, she met Paul Pelosi. She was a mother of five by 1969, when the family moved to San Francisco. Paul worked as a banker, while Nancy raised their children and started a Democratic Party club at her home.
Focused on raising her family, Pelosi got into politics slowly, starting out as a volunteer for the Democratic Party. She rose up the party ranks and by 1976, she worked for the presidential campaign of California Gov. Jerry Brown. In 1981, she became the Democratic Party chair for the state of California.
At age 47, after her youngest child had left for college, Pelosi was encouraged by a dying congresswoman to run for her seat. She threw 100 house parties, recruited 4,000 volunteers, and raised $1 million in seven weeks. She narrowly won a special election and was reelected in 1988 to a full term. Pelosi easily won subsequent elections in her overwhelmingly Democratic district.
Pelosi got a big promotion in 2001, when she was named the House Democratic whip, the No. 2 job in the party. After raising $1.8 million for Democrats through her leadership PAC in 2002, she got the top job when Dick Gephardt stepped down as minority leader. She was the first woman to ever lead a party in Congress.
After the Democrats won majorities in both the House and the Senate in the 2006 midterm elections, Pelosi was chosen to become the first woman to take the post of speaker of the House. In the first 100 hours of being speaker in 2006, Pelosi raised the minimum wage, enacted the 9/11 commission report, ended many tax subsidies to oil companies, and made new rules about lobbying.
She was sometimes a divisive figure. A vocal critic of President George W. Bush's stance on the war in Iraq, she advocated for the withdrawal of troops from the region. Pelosi found herself at the center of a controversy in 2009 when the CIA asserted that she had been made aware of its use of waterboarding of terrorism suspects—a technique that Pelosi had vocally opposed. Pelosi denied the CIA's claims.
After Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Democrats controlled Congress and the White House for the first time in 14 years and Pelosi was in a position to work with a president of the same party.
Pelosi remained House speaker until November 2010, when Republicans gained control of the House and elected John Boehner to the role, relegating Pelosi to minority leader. Despite her diminished role, Pelosi was still a major power player in DC, having spent a decade as the top House Democrat.
Pelosi once again became House minority leader and remained a close ally to Obama during his second term. But after Democrats reclaimed control of the House in the 2018 midterms, Pelosi was once again elected House speaker at the beginning of 2019.
Pelosi has clashed with former President Donald Trump in the last few years. She was on the front line in the battle with Donald Trump over his demand for $5.7 billion for a wall spanning the U.S.-Mexico border. The stalemate turned into a contentious 35-day government shutdown,
After months of resisting calls from progressives to initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump, in September 2019, Pelosi announced that the House would launch a formal impeachment inquiry. The investigation concluded in early December 2019, and several weeks later the House voted to impeach the president.
Her frayed relationship with Trump was on display during his televised State of the Union address on February 4, with the president seemingly snubbing her attempted handshake and the speaker ripping up a copy of his speech afterward. The following day, the impeachment saga came to an end when the Senate voted along party lines to acquit Trump on both charges.
In the 2020 election, Trump was defeated by Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, and the Democrats maintained a slim majority in the House. Pelosi was elected to for her fourth and last term as speaker in 2021.
