It’s Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023.
I’m Albert Mohler, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
Part I
A Reshaped Landscape of Political Expression in the U.S.: Today Marks the Opening of the 118th Congress — We Must Watch It Closely
Huge issues, of course, as we head into the new year. Hope the New Year has begun with promise for you and for your family. Big headlines demanding Christian worldview attention, among them, of course, the death in Rome on Saturday of the Pope Emeritus of the Roman Catholic Church, something that had actually never existed in the entire history of the Roman Catholic Church before. On Thursday, there will be something that has also never happened in the Roman Catholic Church before, and that is a Pope presiding over the funeral of his predecessor, but that’s on Thursday, and we will consider those issues on Thursday.
First, we need to turn to some big news here in the United States and big news, particularly today: the United States Constitution calls for a new session of the United States Congress to begin at noon on January the 3rd. So what will be happening today in the United States Capitol in Washington DC is the beginning of what will be known as the 118th Congress. Now, congresses are named for every two-year election cycle for the House of Representatives, and that means also about a third of the Senate. So every two years, we get a new United States Congress. This. Again, the 118th, something of great historical significance in itself; the fact that the United States Constitution has continued in an unbroken line of governance all the way from the late 18th century until now.
But even as today marks the beginning of the 118th Congress in both the House of Representatives and in the United States Senate, every year represents a new session, and the House in the Senate actually operate by different rules, and outside constitutional limitations, you have the two parties in the house. For instance, the Democrats are known as a caucus in the House; the Republicans are known as a conference. In any event, what you have today is the convening at noon of the new Congress, and the big action is going to be in the House of Representatives, because one of the first acts undertaken by a new sitting of the House of Representatives is the election of the Speaker of the House.
Now, interestingly, the speaker of the House, which is third in line of succession to the presidency, and by the way, that means only after the Vice President of the United States, the Speaker of the House doesn’t actually have to be a member of Congress. The speaker elects someone, and in the beginning, it was considered to be something of a more organizational than political function, but now, the Speaker of the House is an extremely powerful position. At this point, it’s basically inconceivable that the House would not elect one of its own members to this important role.
And it’s because not only of the line of succession, it’s because not only of the organizational powers of the speakership, but it’s also because the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is now, especially in the media age, a profoundly powerful position, and Congress is not about to give that to someone who’s not a member of Congress, but the big action is going to be on the Republican side. Just ask yourself, “How does one get elected as Speaker of the House of Representatives?” Well, as I said, constitutionally, you don’t even have to get elected to the House, but let’s just put that aside, because it is going to be a member of the House who is elected speaker, and all it takes is 218 votes. That’s just a bare majority of the votes.
There’s a very formal process, which includes the fact that members of the House have to speak the name of the individual they wish to elect as speaker, and it just comes down to the fact that even as in the British Houses of Parliament, you have in the House of Commons, the majority party just basically always as party leader, establishing who will be the new Prime Minister, when it comes to the Speaker of the House, if you have a Republican majority, it’s going to be Republican speaker; if you have a Democratic majority, it’s going to be a Democratic speaker, as it has been for most of recent history, but as you’re looking at this, you need to recognize that the big issue is whether or not California Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy, who is at this point, the leader of the Republicans, can hold onto that position and actually gain 218 votes to be elected speaker.
The fact that we’re having to raise this as something of a very open question just indicates what we’re looking at in terms of what could become a very, very long day in the United States House. It has been a very long time since there has had to be a second ballot for the speakership, but it could happen in this case, because as you’re looking at the very narrow Republican majority, in the House, the Republicans hold 222 seats, the Democrats 213, to get 218 seats, it should look like Kevin McCarthy would have an easy path, except for the fact that as of last night, you still had a handful of Republicans in the Republican Conference who said that they were not going to vote for Kevin McCarthy as speaker, some of them rather adamantly.
So we just don’t know this morning, but we’re likely to know tomorrow morning, so we will look at the speaker decision in light of whatever action the House takes, but it’s going to be a very interesting day. All this points to a couple of other dynamics. One of them is the fact that even as you’re looking at a very narrow margin in the House, you’re looking at an even more narrow margin in the Senate; the House 222 Republicans, 213 Democrats, and the Senate, 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans. Technically you have to count a couple of them as independents, but we’ll simply say that there are 51 who are identifying with and voting with the Democratic majority, and there are 49 solidly identified as Republicans.
But, of course, there are Republicans and there are Republicans, and there are Democrats and there are Democrats, but the point is that increasingly we see two things shaping the American congressional picture. One of them is how close the divide is. Again, 222-213 and 51-49. It’s just incredibly close, but also consider the fact that the Republicans are arguably a good deal more Republican, even more conservative than the profile would’ve been just a matter of a decade or so ago, and the Democrats are more liberal, they are more democratic than they would’ve been just about, say, a decade ago, and so you have a political polarization that is deeper, and yet, at the same time, narrower. That’s going to lead to some very, very interesting political developments, and all of them, of course, will come with worldview significance, which we will seek to track and to think through together.
At this point, it’s good for us to remember that when you are looking at the profile of the United States Congress, you’re looking, in some sense, at a profile, in terms of worldview and political views, of the citizens of the United States, or at least the electorate within the United States, but even then, that’s not exactly true, because the United States of America doesn’t elect members of Congress and the United States of America doesn’t elect senators. Senators are elected on a statewide basis, and members of Congress are elected according to a state identification, but according to congressional districts that are distributed and they are assigned by relative population in what is known as apportionment.
This is a part of the wisdom not only of the separation of powers, but the separation of electoral levels in US government, and this means not only the fact do you have local elections, and you have county elections, and statewide elections, it means that even as you are looking at our federal government, there are officials, such as members of the House, elected on a relatively close basis, the basis of a congressional district, and those are reapportioned according to every 10-year census of the United States, and they’re apportioned among the states, and then the states have a great deal to say about how the districts are drawn within the respective states.
But then statewide, you have the election of senators, and let’s just remind ourselves that in the beginning of the American Constitutional Order, senators were elected by the state legislatures. Later came the amendment to the Constitution that allowed for the direct election of senators, but still, that’s at a statewide basis. So voters who are actively involved in electing officials as American citizens for a federal government, they vote for district-wide members of Congress, statewide members of the United States Senate, and then, of course, every four years, there is a presidential election, but even then, constitutionally, citizens in the respective states are actually electing electors to the electoral college as assigned to the respective states by the very same process and the very same census that provided for the apportionment of congressional seats state by state.
All that to say you have a separation of powers between the executive branch and the congressional branch, or the legislative branch, as it is more commonly known, and the judicial branch, but it’s really important for us to recognize that even just within the legislative branch of government, given the separation of powers, there actually are at least three different ways that American citizens fully engaged in the electoral process to elect those who will represent us in the nation’s high offices.
Part II
The Passing of a Political Epoch: Nancy Pelosi’s Tenure as Speaker of the House Comes to an End
But as you have the beginning of the 118th Congress today in Washington, it’s going to be important not only for something that begins anew a new Congress, but for something that comes, in a very real sense, to an end, and that is the age of Nancy Pelosi.
The Speaker of the House for the 117th Congress will relinquish that role as soon as Congress actually elects a new speaker. When the House elects a new speaker, the gavel will be passed from Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat from San Francisco, who has held that role, and quite famously, or infamously, and it will be passed to presumably a Republican, but in the meantime, we need to know that this is not just the passing of a gavel, it is the passing of a political [inaudible 00:10:11] era in the United States, because by any measure, Nancy Pelosi has been one of the most powerful political figures on the American landscape for a generation. Arguably, you could say that, in retrospect, she may have been the most powerful political figure in Washington for much of the last 20 years and more.
Let’s consider what we’re talking about as we mark the passing of the age of Pelosi. Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi was elected to the United States Congress in 1987, and she has served in Congress since then, and since the year 2003, she has been the Democratic leader in the House caucus. That’s a long time. That means almost 20 years, and furthermore, a very strategic 20 years, and during that time, Nancy Pelosi, from the very beginning has had an out-sized political influence. She’s the first Italian-American, and she is the first woman, to serve as the leader of the United States House of Representatives, by the way, the first woman to serve as a leader of either of the houses when you’re looking at the House and the Senate.
Ever since 1987, she has represented not just a district, as the democratically elected member of Congress from California, but the district that has included the majority of the population of the city of San Francisco, and if there is any one city and any one state that represents the liberal or progressive direction of the Democratic Party in the United States, it is San Francisco, California. No accident there, but many Americans recognizing that Nancy Pelosi has represented one of the most important liberal leaders in American politics of the last generation that failed to understand that she came to politics by family, not just by ambition.
Nancy Pelosi’s father was Thomas D’Alesandro, and he was the son of immigrants to the United States from Italy. D’Alesandro was elected to the United States Congress in 1939. He served as a democratic member of Congress from 1939 to 1947. From 1947 to 1959, he served as the Democratic mayor of the city of Baltimore. Again, two very powerful political positions, and so Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi was actually raised within one of the most powerful political families on the East Coast and within the Democratic Party. She was born into liberal democratic politics. She had early heroes such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but she also was present at the inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as President of the United States, and by the way, she was very publicly identified with the Roman Catholic family, as was the first Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy.
So Nancy Pelosi grew up understanding democratic politics and the Democratic political machine as something of a family business. Not only was her father a member of Congress and later Mayor Baltimore, but her mother was a major political figure unto herself, especially when it came to dolling out political patronage. The mother in the family kept a very famous box of cards that indicated to whom favors were owed and from whom favors were owed. Nancy Pelosi’s mother, also named Nancy, and known in the family as Big Nancy, kept what she called the favor file.
Susan Page, reporter for USA Today, in her biography of Nancy Pelosi, explains how it worked this way, speaking of Nancy, the mother, Page writes, “She trained her daughter how to keep the favor file, a distinctively D’Alesandro system, during those days before computers. It became the stuff of local legend, taking the classic rewards of political machines to a new level. Constituents would line up on the sidewalk outside the house on Albemarle Street seeking, well, favors. They would file in past presidential portraits of FDR and Harry Truman and take a chair on one side of a big desk. Big Nancy would be seated on the other side, ready to chat in Italian if an immigrant didn’t speak English. Little Nancy was often seated by her side, taking notes in her careful hand.”
So if you want to know where Nancy Pelosi learned politics, it was not only by watching her father, but by watching her mother and the favor file. Her mother, by the way, had at least harbored some hope that Nancy, later known as Nancy Pelosi, Little Nancy, would enter religious service and become a nun, but Nancy Pelosi had no such intentions, and we refer to her as Nancy Pelosi because after attending school in Washington, D.C., and then graduating from a local college, she married Paul Pelosi from San Francisco, whose family there was also very involved in local politics.
Once married Nancy and Paul Pelosi relocated to San Francisco, where Paul Pelosi began a very successful career in finance, but Nancy Pelosi began to exercise her own political ambitions, first as a volunteer, later with statewide gubernatorial appointments, and then most importantly, in 1987, when she ran in a special election to fill that house seat in San Francisco. Once elected to the United States House, Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi never looked back, and the Democratic Party recognized that they now faced a formidable political figure. From the beginning, in terms of the congressional district representing San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi represented a very liberal congressional district; liberal even by standards of the Democratic Party.
Over time, she would identify more and more with the liberal wing, even though as Speaker and party leader, she had to read some rather pragmatic decisions, but she pushed her own party to the left, and even if she was challenged in later years by the group known as The Squad, she made very clear that she was publicly identified with the left wing of the Democratic Party long before many of them had actually had a political thought. It’s important to recognize that Nancy Pelosi exercised her leadership, and she ascended, in terms of influence, in the Democratic caucus in the House. In 2002, she was elected the Democratic whip. The very next year, in 2003, she was elected the Democratic leader, that is the leader of the House Democratic caucus, and then after leading her party to a congressional victory in the 2006 elections, she was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, taking office on January the 4th, 2007.
She continued in that role as Speaker until January the 3rd of 2011, when Republicans gained another majority, and she reached her second speakership, continuing her leadership of the Democratic Party, entering the speakership on January the 3rd, 2019. Her term will come to an end either today or tomorrow, depending upon when the Republican majority is able to elect a new Speaker. Presumably, that takes place today or at least tomorrow, but at this point, that’s only presumably. There are some big political and worldview issues for us to consider here, because Nancy Pelosi wasn’t just a Speaker, she wasn’t just a very powerful Speaker, the Nancy Pelosi age, you might say, in Congress, reminds us that something is passing here, and it’s not just a gavel, because in the Democratic Party when you’re looking at Nancy Pelosi, you also have to take into account that young, even more liberal Democrats wanted to see new leadership in the Democratic caucus.
Not only once, but twice, she had to negotiate with the left of her own party to maintain her leadership role, and it was clear that that had come to an end even as the Republicans had gained a bare majority in the new Congress. Nancy Pelosi is also 82 years of age, and so the last 30 years have really represented a great deal of change, not only in her life, not only in Congress, but in the entire nation, but there’s something else for us to consider, especially as conservatives, and that is this: Nancy Pelosi was identified with the left wing of the Democratic Party, and yet, she ascended to the role of Speaker and as democratic leader, only to be exceeded in liberalism by the resurgent, even more progressive liberalism that marks the current direction of the Democratic Party, but it’s also important to recognize there will not be another machine democratic leader like Nancy Pelosi, because this isn’t the way politicians are made now.
It was the way her father was made, and it was the way many congressional leaders, including some of her colleagues in the retiring leadership of the House, as the way they were made, and it certainly is the way she was made, but the Democratic machine that produced a Nancy Pelosi, or for that matter, a Thomas D’Alesandro, that machine basically doesn’t exist anymore. That machine has not been replaced by a vacuum, however; it has been replaced in the age of social media, and in an age of woke progressivism, by an even more liberal democratic caucus, a democratic caucus that has left the very liberal Nancy Pelosi behind. But there’s something else we need to recognize, and that is that there is no Republican Pelosi, and there probably never will be, and that raises the question, “Why?”
Well, it’s not because Republicans have never had a political machine, it’s just that compared to the Democrats, the Republicans have never had much of a political machine, especially when it comes to the kind of urban politics that marked Thomas D’Alesandro, and later Nancy Pelosi, but there’s something else here, and that is a fact that for at least the last century or so, the Democrats in the main have been the Congressional Party far more than the Republicans. You ask the question, “Why? Why has leadership and power in Congress been so important to the Democrats for so long, and why have they been relatively so good at it, rather than Republicans?”
Well, there are a lot of arguments to be made here, but one of them is this: Democrats, especially since the ages of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not to mention Lyndon Johnson and beyond, they have been the party of activist expansionist government. Just consider the $1.7 million budget reconciliation bill that was pressed through just before the end of the year. You’re talking about massive amounts of federal spending, you’re talking about massive expansions of the federal government, you’re talking about massive expansions of the administrative and regulatory state, and all of that has basically taken place with a great deal of congressional initiative, or at least congressional allowance, and much of the energy has come from the Democratic leadership in Congress over the course of the last several decades, which just points to another worldview consideration.
Political energy tends to go towards the activist wing, rather than towards the reactive wing, or the wing opposed to that kind of action, and that puts conservatives in the United States at a permanent disadvantage, and in this case, with the Republicans being the more conservative party, the Democrats being, well, let’s just state the obvious, the far more liberal party, that means that congressional energy tends to reside more than often with the Democrats than with the Republicans, and furthermore, you have the leadership of someone like Nancy Pelosi that is basically without parallel on the Republican side, and that’s not really a fault of the Republicans, it’s just a fact of congressional politics.
To put it another way, there’s more political energy behind making promises that will be fulfilled by an ever-expanding government and ever-expanding government spending than trying to say, “You elect me, and I will put the brakes on that, or at least try to put a stop to that.” That’s the most important conservative message, but it’s a very hard message to sustain when put alongside the activist expansionist big spending vision, the big government vision of the Democratic Party in the modern age. But even beyond those party differences in Congress, the rise of social media and of the kind of political platforming that takes place now makes it very difficult for someone like a Nancy Pelosi, who began at the very most local level of democratic politicking, to rise to the summit of the speakership and hold on for so long.
You have people who are becoming rather instant celebrities being elected rather instantly to Congress, and far more interested in building a platform and a personal brand than in long-term congressional power. By the way, as the 118th Congress convenes on the Democratic side, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, New York, a very liberal democratic figure, will be the new Democratic leader, and should the Democrats gain a majority in the House in the 119th Congress, it can be assumed he is likely to become the first African-American Speaker of the House, but there’s something else to note here, and that is a switching of the coast in terms of politics and energy in the Democratic party.
Hakeem Jeffries represents Brooklyn. Just remember this, the Democratic leader in the United States Senate, Chuck Schumer, is also not only from New York, but also from Brooklyn.
But as you have the beginning of the 118th Congress today in Washington, it’s going to be important not only for something that begins anew a new Congress, but for something that comes, in a very real sense, to an end, and that is the age of Nancy Pelosi.
The Speaker of the House for the 117th Congress will relinquish that role as soon as Congress actually elects a new speaker. When the House elects a new speaker, the gavel will be passed from Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat from San Francisco, who has held that role, and quite famously, or infamously, and it will be passed to presumably a Republican, but in the meantime, we need to know that this is not just the passing of a gavel, it is the passing of a political [inaudible 00:10:11] era in the United States, because by any measure, Nancy Pelosi has been one of the most powerful political figures on the American landscape for a generation. Arguably, you could say that, in retrospect, she may have been the most powerful political figure in Washington for much of the last 20 years and more.
Let’s consider what we’re talking about as we mark the passing of the age of Pelosi. Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi was elected to the United States Congress in 1987, and she has served in Congress since then, and since the year 2003, she has been the Democratic leader in the House caucus. That’s a long time. That means almost 20 years, and furthermore, a very strategic 20 years, and during that time, Nancy Pelosi, from the very beginning has had an out-sized political influence. She’s the first Italian-American, and she is the first woman, to serve as the leader of the United States House of Representatives, by the way, the first woman to serve as a leader of either of the houses when you’re looking at the House and the Senate.
Ever since 1987, she has represented not just a district, as the democratically elected member of Congress from California, but the district that has included the majority of the population of the city of San Francisco, and if there is any one city and any one state that represents the liberal or progressive direction of the Democratic Party in the United States, it is San Francisco, California. No accident there, but many Americans recognizing that Nancy Pelosi has represented one of the most important liberal leaders in American politics of the last generation that failed to understand that she came to politics by family, not just by ambition.
Nancy Pelosi’s father was Thomas D’Alesandro, and he was the son of immigrants to the United States from Italy. D’Alesandro was elected to the United States Congress in 1939. He served as a democratic member of Congress from 1939 to 1947. From 1947 to 1959, he served as the Democratic mayor of the city of Baltimore. Again, two very powerful political positions, and so Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi was actually raised within one of the most powerful political families on the East Coast and within the Democratic Party. She was born into liberal democratic politics. She had early heroes such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but she also was present at the inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as President of the United States, and by the way, she was very publicly identified with the Roman Catholic family, as was the first Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy.
So Nancy Pelosi grew up understanding democratic politics and the Democratic political machine as something of a family business. Not only was her father a member of Congress and later Mayor Baltimore, but her mother was a major political figure unto herself, especially when it came to dolling out political patronage. The mother in the family kept a very famous box of cards that indicated to whom favors were owed and from whom favors were owed. Nancy Pelosi’s mother, also named Nancy, and known in the family as Big Nancy, kept what she called the favor file.
Susan Page, reporter for USA Today, in her biography of Nancy Pelosi, explains how it worked this way, speaking of Nancy, the mother, Page writes, “She trained her daughter how to keep the favor file, a distinctively D’Alesandro system, during those days before computers. It became the stuff of local legend, taking the classic rewards of political machines to a new level. Constituents would line up on the sidewalk outside the house on Albemarle Street seeking, well, favors. They would file in past presidential portraits of FDR and Harry Truman and take a chair on one side of a big desk. Big Nancy would be seated on the other side, ready to chat in Italian if an immigrant didn’t speak English. Little Nancy was often seated by her side, taking notes in her careful hand.”
So if you want to know where Nancy Pelosi learned politics, it was not only by watching her father, but by watching her mother and the favor file. Her mother, by the way, had at least harbored some hope that Nancy, later known as Nancy Pelosi, Little Nancy, would enter religious service and become a nun, but Nancy Pelosi had no such intentions, and we refer to her as Nancy Pelosi because after attending school in Washington, D.C., and then graduating from a local college, she married Paul Pelosi from San Francisco, whose family there was also very involved in local politics.
Once married Nancy and Paul Pelosi relocated to San Francisco, where Paul Pelosi began a very successful career in finance, but Nancy Pelosi began to exercise her own political ambitions, first as a volunteer, later with statewide gubernatorial appointments, and then most importantly, in 1987, when she ran in a special election to fill that house seat in San Francisco. Once elected to the United States House, Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi never looked back, and the Democratic Party recognized that they now faced a formidable political figure. From the beginning, in terms of the congressional district representing San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi represented a very liberal congressional district; liberal even by standards of the Democratic Party.
Over time, she would identify more and more with the liberal wing, even though as Speaker and party leader, she had to read some rather pragmatic decisions, but she pushed her own party to the left, and even if she was challenged in later years by the group known as The Squad, she made very clear that she was publicly identified with the left wing of the Democratic Party long before many of them had actually had a political thought. It’s important to recognize that Nancy Pelosi exercised her leadership, and she ascended, in terms of influence, in the Democratic caucus in the House. In 2002, she was elected the Democratic whip. The very next year, in 2003, she was elected the Democratic leader, that is the leader of the House Democratic caucus, and then after leading her party to a congressional victory in the 2006 elections, she was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, taking office on January the 4th, 2007.
She continued in that role as Speaker until January the 3rd of 2011, when Republicans gained another majority, and she reached her second speakership, continuing her leadership of the Democratic Party, entering the speakership on January the 3rd, 2019. Her term will come to an end either today or tomorrow, depending upon when the Republican majority is able to elect a new Speaker. Presumably, that takes place today or at least tomorrow, but at this point, that’s only presumably. There are some big political and worldview issues for us to consider here, because Nancy Pelosi wasn’t just a Speaker, she wasn’t just a very powerful Speaker, the Nancy Pelosi age, you might say, in Congress, reminds us that something is passing here, and it’s not just a gavel, because in the Democratic Party when you’re looking at Nancy Pelosi, you also have to take into account that young, even more liberal Democrats wanted to see new leadership in the Democratic caucus.
Not only once, but twice, she had to negotiate with the left of her own party to maintain her leadership role, and it was clear that that had come to an end even as the Republicans had gained a bare majority in the new Congress. Nancy Pelosi is also 82 years of age, and so the last 30 years have really represented a great deal of change, not only in her life, not only in Congress, but in the entire nation, but there’s something else for us to consider, especially as conservatives, and that is this: Nancy Pelosi was identified with the left wing of the Democratic Party, and yet, she ascended to the role of Speaker and as democratic leader, only to be exceeded in liberalism by the resurgent, even more progressive liberalism that marks the current direction of the Democratic Party, but it’s also important to recognize there will not be another machine democratic leader like Nancy Pelosi, because this isn’t the way politicians are made now.
It was the way her father was made, and it was the way many congressional leaders, including some of her colleagues in the retiring leadership of the House, as the way they were made, and it certainly is the way she was made, but the Democratic machine that produced a Nancy Pelosi, or for that matter, a Thomas D’Alesandro, that machine basically doesn’t exist anymore. That machine has not been replaced by a vacuum, however; it has been replaced in the age of social media, and in an age of woke progressivism, by an even more liberal democratic caucus, a democratic caucus that has left the very liberal Nancy Pelosi behind. But there’s something else we need to recognize, and that is that there is no Republican Pelosi, and there probably never will be, and that raises the question, “Why?”
Well, it’s not because Republicans have never had a political machine, it’s just that compared to the Democrats, the Republicans have never had much of a political machine, especially when it comes to the kind of urban politics that marked Thomas D’Alesandro, and later Nancy Pelosi, but there’s something else here, and that is a fact that for at least the last century or so, the Democrats in the main have been the Congressional Party far more than the Republicans. You ask the question, “Why? Why has leadership and power in Congress been so important to the Democrats for so long, and why have they been relatively so good at it, rather than Republicans?”
Well, there are a lot of arguments to be made here, but one of them is this: Democrats, especially since the ages of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not to mention Lyndon Johnson and beyond, they have been the party of activist expansionist government. Just consider the $1.7 million budget reconciliation bill that was pressed through just before the end of the year. You’re talking about massive amounts of federal spending, you’re talking about massive expansions of the federal government, you’re talking about massive expansions of the administrative and regulatory state, and all of that has basically taken place with a great deal of congressional initiative, or at least congressional allowance, and much of the energy has come from the Democratic leadership in Congress over the course of the last several decades, which just points to another worldview consideration.
Political energy tends to go towards the activist wing, rather than towards the reactive wing, or the wing opposed to that kind of action, and that puts conservatives in the United States at a permanent disadvantage, and in this case, with the Republicans being the more conservative party, the Democrats being, well, let’s just state the obvious, the far more liberal party, that means that congressional energy tends to reside more than often with the Democrats than with the Republicans, and furthermore, you have the leadership of someone like Nancy Pelosi that is basically without parallel on the Republican side, and that’s not really a fault of the Republicans, it’s just a fact of congressional politics.
To put it another way, there’s more political energy behind making promises that will be fulfilled by an ever-expanding government and ever-expanding government spending than trying to say, “You elect me, and I will put the brakes on that, or at least try to put a stop to that.” That’s the most important conservative message, but it’s a very hard message to sustain when put alongside the activist expansionist big spending vision, the big government vision of the Democratic Party in the modern age. But even beyond those party differences in Congress, the rise of social media and of the kind of political platforming that takes place now makes it very difficult for someone like a Nancy Pelosi, who began at the very most local level of democratic politicking, to rise to the summit of the speakership and hold on for so long.
You have people who are becoming rather instant celebrities being elected rather instantly to Congress, and far more interested in building a platform and a personal brand than in long-term congressional power. By the way, as the 118th Congress convenes on the Democratic side, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, New York, a very liberal democratic figure, will be the new Democratic leader, and should the Democrats gain a majority in the House in the 119th Congress, it can be assumed he is likely to become the first African-American Speaker of the House, but there’s something else to note here, and that is a switching of the coast in terms of politics and energy in the Democratic party.
Hakeem Jeffries represents Brooklyn. Just remember this, the Democratic leader in the United States Senate, Chuck Schumer, is also not only from New York, but also from Brooklyn.
Part III
Leaving the House (Far) More Liberal Than She Found It: The Political Legacy of Nancy Pelosi
But as Nancy Pelosi passes from the scene of Speaker, she is at least remaining in Congress for a time as an elected member of Congress, and some believe she’s trying to hold that seat in order to have a very strong voice in choosing her successor in the next Congress, but we also need to recognize that Nancy Pelosi was legislatively effective in a way very few have been, and we need to understand how powerful that is. For conservatives, we have to say a very effective power on many, many, if not most issues, in exactly the wrong direction.
It was Nancy Pelosi, really, not Barack Obama, who got Obamacare through the United States Congress. It was she who seemed to have greater confidence than the President that she could get it through Congress, and she did, deal after deal, remember the favor file, but in a way that really didn’t mark previous even democratic speakers of the House. On moral and cultural issues, Nancy Pelosi was decidedly on the left. On the issue of abortion, she was pro-abortion. She opposed basically every restriction on abortion imaginable, and she was consistent on that issue. She was tragically consistent throughout her career in Congress, not to mention in her powerful position as Speaker of the House and as the House Democratic leader.
On the issue of the LGBTQ revolution, and the larger sexual revolution, Nancy Pelosi, remember, she has represented for all these years a district in the city of San Francisco, she has been one of the most powerful agents for the revolution in human sexuality and gender understanding to be seen anywhere on the American political landscape, and again, we know what we’ve been dealing with Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, but what should concern us all is that on the issue of abortion, and on the issue of the sexual and gender issues, the representative leadership within the House on the Democratic side is likely to be even more progressive and more woke than Nancy Pelosi. If there’s something to keep you up late at night as you think about American politics, that should be at least one fact.
Also, keep in mind that Nancy Pelosi and President Joe Biden are probably the two most famous Catholics, that is, Roman Catholics, in the United States of America. Both of them operate in politics, in direct defiance of the official teachings of their church, on issues of abortion and human sexuality, and especially on the issue of abortion, Nancy Pelosi has been barred from taking communion in the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Francisco by the Archbishop of that diocese. The fact that she and the current President of the United States can so openly defy a central and important teaching of their own church and a church so closely identified in so many ways with the families of Joe Biden and Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi, and still get elected Speaker, and win by margins of over 70% in the United States Congressional District dominated by Democrats.
That tells you a great deal about the political landscape of the United States, and remember this: she’s not retiring believing that she was losing when she left office, but rather, that she was winning. She hands over leadership in her own party not to those who would move it to the center, but rather move it even further to the left. That’s a lot for us to ponder.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing.
For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can find me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.
I’m speaking to you from Orlando, Florida, and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
