Nancy Pelosi, who led the Democratic Party in the US House of Representatives for nearly 20 years, has announced that she will no longer be the House Democrat leader.
At 82, she is the most powerful Democrat in Congress and the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Pelosi will continue to represent her California district in the House.
Currently, Republicans are expected to regain control of the House of Representatives following the midterm elections.
Republican Kevin McCarthy (Kevin McCarthy) won the nomination for the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Pelosi’s likely successor.
“I never imagined that I would one day go from housewife to Speaker of the House,” Pelosi said in a floor statement on Thursday (November 17).
“In the next Congress, I will not seek reelection as a Democratic leader. Now is the time for a new generation to lead full Democratic Party membership,” he said.
Pelosi will remain speaker until a new Congress takes over in January. He will remain in the House of Representatives until January 2025. He first served in the House of Representatives in 1987.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York is expected to be the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, which would make him the first black congressional leader in US history.
Speaker of the House of Representatives is a congressional position detailed in the United States Constitution. It ranks after the vice president and is second only to the president and vice president.
The chairman and committee chairs decide which bills are debated and voted on. They set the agenda and decide the rules to guide the debate.
Pelosi became House Minority Leader in 2003, and the House Minority Leader leads the opposition in the House. In 2006, Democrats took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in more than a decade and she became the first woman to lead a major party in both houses of Congress.
Four years later, Pelosi was Minority Leader again, but returned to the speaker position in 2019.
As a speaker, Pelosi has played a key role in advancing or stalling the agendas of multiple presidents.
She is widely credited with spearheading passage of the health care overhaul signed by former President Barack Obama and, under current President Joe Biden, bills addressing infrastructure and climate change.
Pelosi has also directly challenged Trump during his presidency, most famously by ripping his State of the Union address off his back.
Rumors have swirled about her future after her home was violently broken into last month, resulting in her husband Paul, 82, needing skull surgery.
Lawmakers gave her a standing ovation Thursday as she thanked them for their prayers and spoke of her “beloved life partner and my pillar.”
She later said she struggled with “survivor guilt” from the attack because her husband was injured “because they were looking for me,” according to The Washington Post.
Pelosi’s former chief of staff John Lawrence told the BBC he wanted Pelosi to play a major role in advising new members of Congress and working with the White House now that Democrats are once again in the minority.
“There’s never a really good time to walk away,” she said. “When you’re at your limit, you want to achieve a lot, and when things go against you, you want to fight back.”
In a statement Thursday, President Biden called Pelosi “the most important Speaker of the House in our history.”
Pelosi will go down in history as one of the most influential leaders of the United States Congress. He is an invaluable asset to Democrats and a formidable adversary to Republicans.
Her legislative acumen, impeccable timing, and instincts on the political scene have made her a force on Capitol Hill and a spotlight for critics.
His speeches and press conferences have been uninspiring, but he has few rivals in his ability to maintain his unruly and often narrow majority in the House on important votes.
But his strength comes at a price. In a sense, it is thanks to these skills that she has become a badass on the right.
He has profoundly controlled the democratic forces in the House of Representatives for more than 20 years and has also stunted the growth of young leaders in the House of Representatives.
Now they finally have a chance. But Pelosi is doing so well, they will have a lot of work to do.
