Nancy Pelosi’s legacy: Power above all

Nancy Pelosi is starting a new career at age 86, teaching at the Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy at the University of California, Berkeley.

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We applaud her for planning an active life in retirement after Congress. But the name of her new institute — well, that’s a bit rich.

A more accurate name would be: The Pelosi Institute for Partisanship in the Pursuit of Power.

Because that is a more accurate description of her career.

Pelosi became the first female speaker of the House — an achievement that, by itself, would have secured her place in history, and deservedly so.

But while she campaigned on a promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington, DC — long before Donald Trump would take up that slogan — she did the opposite.

Pelosi centralized power in the speaker’s office to an unprecedented degree. And instead of rooting out corruption, she overlooked it whenever necessary to achieve her political aims.

There were also questions about how she and her husband became fabulously wealthy while she was in office.

Pelosi pushed Obamacare through the House on a party-line vote in 2010. That doomed her party to historic defeat, as the Tea Party rose to lead the GOP.

But instead of resigning her leadership, as was the honorable thing to do, Pelosi ruled her depleted caucus with an iron fist. She destroyed anyone who tried to challenge her leadership.

Eight years later, she took back the gavel when Democrats won the midterm elections.

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Pelosi had foolishly predicted that Trump would never win the presidency. She set about rectifying that error by trying to remove him from office.

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She launched an impeachment inquiry into the president in September 2019 before she had any evidence of wrongdoing.

When, a few months later, President Trump delivered one of the most stirring State of the Union addresses in American history, she tore it to pieces — literally.

It was one of the nastiest partisan gestures seen in American politics since legislators came to blows on the Senate floor before the Civil War.

A year later, Pelosi’s decision not to add security around the US Capitol played a role in the subsequent riot.

She appointed the one-sided “January 6 Committee” to point the finger at Trump, and to evade any blame.

She leaves Congress more divided, and dysfunctional, than she found it.

We’re sure she has some lessons to share. But “representative democracy” isn’t among them.

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