Nancy Pelosi’s Sudden Conversion Experience

By Jeffrey Blehar

Monday, June 26, 2023

 

What I value most about MSNBC’s new lineup is the ability of its hosts to do hard-hitting interviews with adverse guests. No Fox News–like softballs here; instead we get former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki interviewing former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the results are every bit as explosively contentious as you would expect from two people who have been blowing kisses to one another over an explicitly shared political agenda for the last several years. (I assume it was not Psaki’s bona fides as a commentator wot got her the job as the Biden administration’s mouthpiece.)

 

Among the hard questions Psaki put to Pelosi: Just how disappointed is she in this conservative Supreme Court? (“Are you concerned the Supreme Court has lost its legitimacy?” she boldly challenged her.) But I’m not really here for media critique today and besides, the shameless by definition cannot be shamed. Instead I’m here because Nancy Pelosi’s lengthy response to that creampuff was a farrago of lies, cynical politicking, and howling personal hypocrisy notable even for her. When she wasn’t gleefully throwing gasoline onto the fire by saying that in her opinion “30% is high” as the Supreme Court’s proper approval rating, she was seeking to casually revise the U.S. Constitution: “But there certainly should be term limits, and if nothing else there should be ethical rules that should be followed.”

 

First of all, to revisit a point that has likely already been made a hundred times before at National Review: Even if you foolishly think there should be term limits for the Supreme Court, the Founders did not, and they have tied your hands here decisively. Article III, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states clearly that “the Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” In other words, all federal judges hold life tenure unless impeached. Impeachment is how “good Behaviour” is enforced — even judges who have been convicted of felonies and sent to prison have to be formally impeached by the House and removed by the Senate.

 

It is true that practitioners and legal observers often grumble about elderly judges who refuse to take retirement despite clearly no longer being able to properly shoulder the work; few still remember William O. Douglas’s shameful final years on the Court. But life tenure means life tenure, and if you want to change that you need either to muster a bare majority in the House and two-thirds of the Senate or to pass a 28th amendment to the Constitution. (Or stage a revolution. I’d be curious as to which option Pelosi prefers, because it is increasingly difficult not to suspect that many on the activist left prefer the third one.)

 

But there was something even more risible about Pelosi’s sanctimony when it came to term limits: If there’s anyone who should be sympathetic to the idea of life tenure in office, surely it is Nancy Pelosi. This is a woman who took her House seat during the Reagan administration as the handpicked successor of her district’s previous representative, spent the next 36 years accumulating power and gaining, losing, and regaining the speakership, and finally handpicked her own successor before stepping down. So either she is the world’s biggest hypocrite, or she hasn’t gotten over the fact that Ruth Bader Ginsburg did a world-historically terrible job of timing her retirement. (Readers are already asking: “Why not both?”)

 

Finally, Pelosi is probably one of the worst people to go around preaching about ethics standards to anyone right now. I qualify with “probably” because I suppose a lecture from Hillary Clinton on the subject would be more obnoxious, but in that case there’s at least a chance she might be in on the joke. Meanwhile Pelosi was recently embroiled in a potential insider-trading stock-dump mess the precise outrage of which is that, even if proven, it might be legal, owing to lax House ethics rules Pelosi was certainly in no hurry to revise or update or strengthen herself.

 

Nancy Pelosi, in both the minority and the twilight of her career, is inclined to grandiosity; it is a typical consolation for waning power. But the rest of us are not required to treat her opinions like anything but self-serving garbage. Her sudden adoption of virtues she herself notoriously lacked throughout her four-decade career reminds one of a pagan king’s deathbed conversion to Christianity just in case. One imagines Pelosi is familiar with St. Augustine’s ironic prayer as a wild youth: “Give me chastity and temperance — but not yet!” Since I’m an open-minded man, I’d like to believe Nancy Pelosi’s conversion, at age 83, to term limits and ethical propriety is sincere; it’s a shame it took an entire political career for her to suddenly get there.