The Once and Future Speaker?

Here,” Nancy Pelosi likes to say, “the currency of the realm is the vote.”

With a majority of the votes in Congress, you have power. Without them, you have nothing. Pelosi, the House minority leader, knows it as well as anyone in Washington. She had the votes to make history in 2007 when she became speaker of the House, not only becoming the first woman to hold that title but in the process, rising higher in U.S. electoral politics—and closer in the line of presidential succession—than any woman before or since. Four years later, the votes were gone, washed away in a Republican wave that relegated Democrats back to the minority. Now, with Democrats poised to make a run at recapturing the House majority this fall, Pelosi has a chance to set another mark: the first person to reclaim the speaker’s gavel in more than 60 years and the first ever to do so after so long an interval.

But a small group of restive Democrats is gunning for Pelosi. They’re maneuvering in public, and recruiting support behind the scenes, to force her departure. They want to set off a generational shift for Democrats that they believe is long overdue. And their efforts—joined to the familiar attacks from Republicans, who have made them the linchpin of their bid to retain the House—are calling Pelosi’s political future into question just as she sits on the cusp of regaining power.

Pelosi, who turns 78 in March, does not talk about the possibility of becoming speaker again. She has said that if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency, she was prepared to retire—knowing both that the legislative legacy she shared with Barack Obama would be safe and that a woman would have not just a seat at the leadership table, but the most powerful one. And there are a few Democrats who believe she will step down after the November elections regardless of the outcome. “I would expect that we would have, win or lose, new leadership by January 1, 2019,” Representative Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, a Democrat who’s been both for and against Pelosi’s leadership over the years, told me. “She would love nothing more than to win, and then she’ll get out.”    

But her allies and opponents alike generally presume that she wants a second shot at making history. They see her battling President Trump and congressional Republicans with the same verve, legislative savvy, and fund-raising prowess that carried the Democrats back to power, and her into the speaker’s office, once before. Anyone doubting Pelosi’s energy need only have witnessed her eight-hour speech in support of “Dreamer” immigrants last week—an address that smashed a 109-year-old House record, demonstrated her resolve to an anxious party base, and proved that well into her eighth decade, she could stand and talk longer than any filibustering senator and do it in four-inch heels. “I would have gone to the bathroom well before then, let me tell you,” quipped Speaker Paul Ryan.

She maintained remarkable unity among her Democratic ranks during the first year of Trump’s presidency, losing not a