An enemy, from the start, Missen powerhouse crowns Venezuela a beauty queen once again

Since the 1920s, women in the United States have had the right to vote nationwide. But it was nearly nine decades before any of them made it to the top of Congress. In 2007, the salutation “Mrs Speaker” was heard for the first time: Nancy Pelosi became the first female speaker of the House of Representatives. A role she fulfilled until 2011 and then again from 2019.

As of January, the Democrats no longer have a majority in the House of Representatives and the post of speaker will revert to the Republicans. Pelosi could then have run for minority leader and continued to lead the Democratic Party faction, which he had done for years when the Democrats were also outnumbered.

But she just wants to be a simple member of parliament. “It’s time for a new generation,” she said when she announced her decision Thursday afternoon in Washington. It is the greatest honor of all to serve the people of her San Francisco constituency, and she intends to continue to do so.

After 16 years, this isn’t just the resignation of the most prominent Democrat outside the White House. It’s also the end of an era that spanned four presidents and two impeachments that launched Pelosi-led Democrats against Donald Trump (who recently called them a “beast”).

That this end has now been reached is not necessarily due to the fact that Pelosi is already 82 years old and has simply had enough. In the approximately 40 years of her political career, she has rarely shown exhaustion or fatigue.

hatred and hatred

And not just because the pressure on them increased now that the Democrats had lost the House of Representatives. The political climate in America today is different from when she was the first speaker to break through what she herself called the “marble ceiling” of Congress. It has become hostile, aggressive and also violent.

Probably no one knows this better than Pelosi. She has suffered more from the hatred and hate speech of the US right-wing than any other prominent politician. During the violent storming of the Capitol, it was mainly her office that the mob attacked and destroyed.

And that this hatred continued, was evidenced when, nearly three weeks ago, Pelosi’s husband Paul was attacked at home in San Francisco by a right-wing conspiracy fanatic searching for “Nancy,” who hit him on the head with a hammer, critically injuring him. .

For Republicans, Pelosi was an enemy from the start, also because she represented San Francisco in Congress, the former hippie metropolis in liberal California. Rarely seen without a suit, pearls and three-inch heels, Pelosi is from Baltimore, the daughter of Italian immigrants, and grew up a Democrat: her father, and later her brother, were mayors of the city of more than a million people. Already as a child she helped in the election campaign, and that must have shaped her in terms of toughness and pragmatism.

Pelosi is considered a tough and skilled negotiator. But her biggest challenge came with someone who didn’t have that ability – and she discovered trolling instead. Another person can often be seen in the critically acclaimed images left over from her tenure: Donald Trump. They show Pelosi applauding, lips pursed in mockery, after Trump delivers a State of the Union address.

Pelosi tore up a copy of Trump’s speech manuscript on the same occasion a year later with a steely smile. Pelosi standing in front of the then president and his cabinet sitting around him and pointing his finger at him makes Trump look like a scolded child.

And then there are the scenes in which Trump himself was not present and which would never have happened without him: Pelosi on January 6, 2021 in an undisclosed location, as she did during a crisis meeting with then-Vice President Mike Pence holding the phone in one hand and a piece of beef jerky in the other, ripping the wrapper open with her teeth.

Nancy Pelosi is often said to be tough, to have a hard nose. The videos of that day, made by her daughter, a documentary filmmaker, and shown during the meetings of the Commission of Inquiry on January 6, testify to this.

There is also criticism of Pelosi, largely from within his own party. Not only in terms of content: there were quite a few moments of foreign embarrassment with her. For example, because of their penchant for pathos and their tendency to recite poems on important political occasions, such as after the abolition of the right to abortion. To younger, progressive Democrats like Biden, she represents a generation that may have its merits, but among which the country only got to the point of voting for Trump. A generation that does not want to let go.

One was missing

Pelosi has now refuted that last claim. Whatever ultimately affected her personally, it sends a signal: New times are dawning for the Democrats in Congress. They will have to make a lot of adjustments before the next election in two years if they want to maintain the momentum that has kept their losses in the House of Representatives lower than feared. And so is their leadership, right down to the president himself.

Pelosi’s successor as minority leader is New York MP Hakeem Jeffries, who would become the first black faction leader in Congress. His tenure is likely to be extremely uncomfortable: Republicans are already planning to launch all possible investigations in the Judiciary Committee against Joe Biden and his entourage. With the Senate still in the hands of the Democrats, they will be all the more brutal in the House of Representatives by blocking everything the Biden administration wants to accomplish in the remaining two years.

Pelosi’s farewell speech was missing one person: Kevin McCarthy, who wants to succeed her as the next speaker of the House of Representatives. In 2019 he had handed her the ceremonial gavel with a friendly smile, two years later he appeared before Republicans in Tennessee and said he had to resist not to hit her with it if she had to give it back.

“We fired Nancy Pelosi,” he tweeted Wednesday after his party’s majority in the House of Representatives was announced. Not the Democrats, but Pelosi himself: This showed once again how obsessed Republicans are with this woman.

She herself liked to let that run into the void. In her farewell speech on Thursday, Pelosi spoke of “three presidents” with whom she had the pleasure of working. Neither Trump nor the Republicans were explicitly mentioned. And yet she mentioned it several times, for example when she said: “Democracy must forever be defended against forces that would harm it.” She is now passing on this goal.

This article was first published on Zeit Online. Watson may have changed the headings and subheadings. Here’s the original.