Nancy Pelosi is one of the most powerful women in American history. The only woman to serve as speaker of the House of Representatives, she is the country’s highest ranking female officeholder ever. Daughter of one mayor of Baltimore and sister of another, one could argue politics is what she was born to do.

Pelosi is currently serving her second term as speaker after leading Democrats to victory in the 2018 midterms, becoming the first speaker to reclaim the gavel after losing it in nearly 75 years. Her return to power eight years after losing it cemented her legacy as a party leader, master legislator, and the most powerful speaker in decades.

But sequels and second acts are often less successful than the original. Despite her formidable reputation, Pelosi has not been immune from this rule. From her condescending dismissal of the so-called Green New Deal to her fractious relationship with the group of young female Democratic freshmen representatives known as the Squad, her first year back in power was fraught and turbulent.

The second year of her second tenure as speaker is off to an even worse start. Indeed, there’s no way to put a fine point on it: Nancy Pelosi has had a horrible 2020.

It started with her botched handling of the articles of impeachment against President Trump. Making the fatal error of reading the comments — in this case Twitter and various left-wing pundits — Pelosi convinced herself after the House impeached Trump in late December that she had leverage and embarked on the delusional gambit of withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate to force Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to establish the parameters of Trump’s trial first.

The land resounded with cries of “You go girl!” and “Slay kween!” from her cheerleaders in the media. Another bold stroke from a political master, they insisted. Once a committed opponent of impeachment, Pelosi had now seized control of the process. The ball was in her court. Unless McConnell agreed to her demands for witnesses and documents during the trial, Pelosi wouldn’t serve it. There was nothing he could do.

As it turned out, McConnell was perfectly content doing just that. (He’s not known as the Turtle for nothing.) He insisted to all who would listen that he’d prefer never getting the articles at all. He didn’t want them, his caucus didn’t want them; Pelosi could keep that lump of coal as long as she liked. As for her demand that he release the resolution for organizing Trump’s trial before she sent them over, the senior senator from Kentucky was adamant that the House would run the Senate over his dead body.

In early January, three weeks after approving the articles of impeachment, Pelosi relented and dispatched them to the Senate. Her vaunted leverage had not budged McConnell an inch. In the end, it was the San Francisco Democrat who got nothing and had to like it.

Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

Pelosi’s doomed impeachment scheme was a harbinger of her second failed stunt in three months. As the Senate neared a bipartisan agreement on a third relief package to deal with the coronavirus crisis, Pelosi flew in from San Francisco and blew the whole thing up.

Dissatisfied with what Senate leaders from both parties had negotiated, Pelosi introduced her own bill. Taking her cue from House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), who proclaimed “this is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision,” Pelosi larded her proposal with one progressive fantasy after another.

Among the provisions in her bill were a bailout of the Postal Service, a requirement for airlines to reduce carbon emissions, mandates for corporations to promote “diversity and inclusion initiatives,” partial student loan forgiveness, and rules forcing every state to allow early voting, same-day registration, and voting by mail. What these had to do with preventing the coronavirus pandemic from ruining the economy still isn’t clear.

All Pelosi accomplished was to provoke even more acrimony and antagonism in Congress and delay much-needed action to protect an economy on the precipice of calamity. As Commentary’s Noah Rothman wrote, “most of these provisions are of little relevance to the Americans suffering amid an acute crisis that demands immediate action.” Yet Pelosi pushed them anyway, her draft legislation encapsulating her party’s drift to the left almost to the point of caricature. If holding the economy hostage was what it took to make the left’s dreams come true, so be it.

Those dreams would have to wait. Except for a few modest alterations, the bill President Trump signed on Friday was substantially similar to the one Senate leaders had negotiated a week earlier. None of Pelosi’s Christmas list made it in. Her maneuver flopped and she acquiesced to the “improved” Senate bill, emptily spinning her surrender as a great victory for workers. In truth, she had once again folded like one of her famous pantsuits.

That a supposed master legislator and tactician should have grossly miscalculated not once but twice in so short a span indicates one of two things: either her reputation was never what it was cracked up to be, or she isn’t what she once was. If the latter, that would be no surprise. Time, after all, is undefeated.

As Dan McLaughlin suggested in National Review, Pelosi and Clyburn’s “tone-deafness… raises real questions about the judgment of the geriatric leadership of the Democratic caucus, and whether they are truly in charge anymore or getting pushed around internally by their party’s ideological extremists.”

For Tiana Lowe of the Washington Examiner, Pelosi’s “humiliation” was proof that she was indeed no longer in charge. “How did one of the most ruthlessly effective Democrats in the country turn into a feckless avatar of woke virtue-signaling? Easy: she succumbed to ‘the Squad.’”

Detail of a Baltimore Fire Department fire boat named after Nancy Pelosi’s father. Credit: the Author (2009).

There was no talk of humiliation in coverage of the final version of the third coronavirus bill by the mainstream media, which curiously — or not so curiously — made no mention of the fact that none of Pelosi’s outlandish demands made the cut. That was not a story the media wanted to tell.

Instead, it preferred to write the same fawning, gauzy profiles about Pelosi it always has, this time on the occasion of her 80th birthday last week. Such as this hagiography by the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty, which was replete with anecdotes about the former Nancy D’Alesandro’s childhood and allusions to her historic career. Any mention of her recent failures or the fact that her birthday meant that she had graduated from the class of septuagenarians running the country to a new one of octogenarians was discreetly omitted. Why spoil the party?

Why indeed. That’s something she’s capable of doing all by herself. As she’s done twice this year already. Which is why so far Nancy Pelosi has had a terrible 2020.