Her Key to the House
By Edward Epstein, CQ Staff
With a testy, weary House clamoring to start its summer recess, leaders of a sharply divided Democratic Caucus met Aug. 3 to decide whether to accept an extension of the government’s powers to eavesdrop in terrorism investigations, which the Senate had just passed before leaving town, or fight on for the civil liberties protections that many liberals were demanding. And congressional Republicans and President Bush, anticipating the Democrats would take the latter course, were revving up their attack: The new party in charge of the House, they said, was willing to coddle terrorism suspects — a charge that stung for the moderate Democrats who held their seats by close margins.
In the end, it was Nancy Pelosi , who had spoken often and sharply about what she saw as an erosion of civil liberties because of the Bush administration, who decided to try to cut her party’s potential losses and ward off such criticism. She shut down the intramural debate, overrode her own liberal allies and announced that the caucus would accept the Senate bill for six months and come back to fight anew in the fall.
“As romantic as it would have been to stay on, it wasn’t going to lead anywhere,’&;#8217; recalled Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, who was at the side of the Speaker of the House when she made the call. “If she listened to the more passionate members, we could have descended into disunity.”
In the year since the Democrats won control of the House for the first time in a dozen years, Pelosi has made it clear that while she is an activist — a decisive and partisan Speaker who often gets involved in the nitty-gritty details of legislation — she also is a pragmatist who is unafraid to disappoint her liberal base in the cause of maintaining or even expanding her party’s House majority in 2008 and beyond.
The decision to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allowed her to extract herself and her party from a difficult situation, even though her caucus is still wrestling with Republicans on the issue. She has also tread carefully on questions of taxes, followed a non-activist path on social issues such as gun control and abortion and completely closed down talk of presidential impeachment.
“She has lived down the image of a San Francisco liberal,’ said Florida’s Allen Boyd , a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition — Southern-dominated, fiscally conservative House Democrats who now meet regularly with Pelosi. “She’s a very practical, tough strategist who knows what people can do and what they can’t.”
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