Pelosi’s Legacy as Speaker: Debt and Disaster

Then U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi delivers remarks at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Oct. 31, 2019. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Commentary

Although she will remain in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco steps down from her leadership post in January. She has headed her party in either that job or as House Minority Leader when Republicans ruled the roost for nearly 20 years. Her powerful position also let her advance California’s interests. That could continue should Republicans make Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, currently the Minority Leader, the new Speaker.

And in many ways, Pelosi is the epitome of California today: Although from Baltimore originally, she fit right in with the state’s more cosmopolitan culture. She’s politically and culturally liberal. She also possesses the haughtiness San Francisco politicians commonly do—other examples being Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, and former Senate President pro tempore John Burton.

Pelosi also ran the House with an iron fist, making sure every member voted in lock step on the most important bills, such as the recent ones on marriage, Ukraine funding, and the $1.7 trillion spending bill. By contrast, McCarthy has so little control over his own caucus, he might not even receive its nod to become speaker, although that’s still most likely.

Pelosi’s two-decade tenure at the top brought with it debt and disaster for America.

Record Deficits and Debt

Let’s start with the annual budget, the most important thing any legislative body does. “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other Bills,” reads Article I, Section 7, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution.

However, that latter clause actually allows the Senate sometimes to become the main crafter of budget bills, then send them to the House. That just happened with the $1.7 billion spending bill, which includes a lot of tax elements. Still, that happens only with the permission of the House.

When she became Minority Leader on Jan. 3, 2003, U.S. debt stood at $11 trillion. Since then, it soared to $31 trillion. Here’s a chart from the U.S. Treasury Department. Notice the debt actually was starting to be paid off in 2000-01, just before Pelosi rose to lead the Democrats.

Next, let’s look at the annual deficits. Again, notice we actually enjoyed a small surplus of $0.13 trillion in 2001.

When she took over as minority leader in 2003, there was a deficit, but a relatively modest one of $0.37 trillion.

Now look at the deficits of the last three years (each fiscal ends on Sept. 30 of the indicated year):

• 2020 $3.13 trillion
• 2021 $2.17 trillion
• 2022 $1.38 trillion

Sure, COVID-19 hit in 2020. And President Trump signed off on the first two of those spending binges, while President Biden did on the last one. Yet Pelosi as Speaker drove all those bills into law, with no consideration for the future.

And it’s that wild spending that most economists say led to the current inflation problem, to the subsequent increases in interest rates by the Federal Reserve Board to cut economic activity, and to a recession anticipated for next summer.

Immigration

The ongoing immigration crisis also exists because Pelosi led a House majority that refused to protect the country’s borders. Over the past two years, more than 4 million illegal aliens have poured into the country, with almost no checks on their legal status or even their health. The Pelosi Congress is complicit in this lawlessness.

Worse, the open border has let illicit fentanyl flow into America, killing more than 100,000 people a year. According to a Dec. 8, 2022 report by the Congressional Research Service, “China Primer: Illicit Fentanyl and China’s Role”:

In the years immediately prior to 2019, China was the primary source of U.S.-bound illicit fentanyl, fentanyl-related substances, and production equipment. PRC traffickers supplied fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances directly to the United States via international mail and express consignment operations. Trafficking patterns changed after the PRC imposed class-wide controls over all fentanyl-related substances, effective May 2019. Today, Mexican transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) are largely responsible for the production of U.S.-consumed illicit fentanyl, using PRC-sourced primary materials, including precursor chemicals that are not internationally controlled (and are correspondingly legal to produce in and export out of China). According to DEA assessments cited by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in 2021, PRC traffickers and money launderers appear to have increased cooperation with Mexican cartels.

Obviously, not only Pelosi but Biden could do something about this by securing our border and conducting a sensible foreign policy with China. Surely, all those PRC products flowing through our ports and heading to Walmart shelves provide sufficient leverage to stop the Beijing regime’s profits from fentanyl.

Obamacare-Pelosicare

You could write a book on Pelosi’s faulty policies. But let’s just go with one more: the 2010 Obamacare bill, which Pelosi rammed through Congress. Time magazine reporter Molly Ball’s biography, “Pelosi,” provides the details on how the bill actually was crafted mostly by the Speaker, not the President.

It was a disaster from the beginning. A friend of mine got stuck on it, paying high fees for almost no coverage. That’s an anecdote. But Pacific Research Institute health analyst and President Sally Pipes wrote:

Nearly every major provision of the Affordable Care Act has proven a failure. And yet, the Democrats’ approach to this failure of government intervention into the healthcare marketplace is to promote yet more government—whether through a new public health insurance option or outright single-payer health care.

Take Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, arguably the reform’s most consequential component. In an effort to increase coverage rates, the law made all Americans at or below 138% of the poverty level eligible for Medicaid. That strategy has turned out to be an ineffective and expensive means of trying to safeguard the health of Americans.

For starters, there’s compelling evidence that Medicaid doesn’t do much to improve patient health. One famous study compared patients in Oregon who had been randomly selected for Medicaid with a group of uninsured Oregonians. The authors concluded that, after two years, “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes“ for enrolled patients as opposed to those with no insurance at all.

In other words, Obamacare brought 17 million Americans into a health program that fails to improve health. And it did so at astronomical cost to taxpayers.

Conclusion

Give Nancy Pelosi credit. Not many leaders of legislative bodies possess the talent and the gumption to accomplish as much as she has. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson from the 1950s comes to mind, as described in biographer Robert Caro’s “Master of the Senate”—essential reading for understanding American politics today.

Another was Willie Brown back in the 1980s and early 1990s when he was California’s Assembly Speaker. Indeed, Willie still is wielding clout as the mentor of Newsom and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Part of this is because Democrats, much more than Republicans, understand power in a Machiavellian sense. The Florentine’s advice could be Pelosi’s motto: “Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.