Nancy Pelosi Is the Wrong Namesake for Berkeley’s ‘Institute for Representative Democracy’

The University of California, Berkeley, announced on Monday its plan to launch the new Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy (NPI). It will open next January, coinciding with Pelosi’s retirement from a near-40-year career in the House of Representatives, including two four-year stints as Speaker.

The NPI will serve as a nonpartisan “hub for research, teaching and civic engagement,” according to the U.C. Berkeley announcement, resting on four pillars: “strengthening America’s democratic institutions; overcoming America’s greatest challenges for our society, economy and planet; promoting human rights and civil rights at home and abroad; and ensuring political leadership that represents the full spectrum of perspectives and backgrounds in California and the country.”

Pelosi’s involvement with the NPI will not be limited to the superficial: She is slated to co-teach a course on the history of the U.S. Congress next spring.

But, of course, even to name a nonpartisan institute dedicated to “strengthening America’s democratic institutions” after Nancy Pelosi is baldly ironic, given her central role in degrading the public’s trust in those institutions. As the top-ranking House Democrat, Pelosi ruled her party with an iron fist. She disregarded transparency, imposing secret rules for committee appointments and forcing votes on massive spending bills without much floor debate or input, except from a select few lawmakers. Her suspicious investment practices have been the source of much ridicule, but perhaps more concerning was the role she played in abetting the gerontocracy that has taken over Congress and helped tank public approval of the institution.

And what about “overcoming America’s greatest challenges”? Does such a mission better befit the Pelosi name? In her time as the top-ranking member of the House Democratic Caucus, Pelosi certainly had challenges to overcome: the Great Recession, a confusing and expensive healthcare system, a global pandemic, and a moment of “racial reckoning.” But her track record in solving these challenges leaves much to be desired.

In response to the 2008 financial crisis, Pelosi helped George W. Bush and Barack Obama pump stimulus money into failing Wall Street banks, and brought the rest of the Democratic Party in line with punishing new financial regulations. She then spent a couple of years shoving the Affordable Care Act through the House, and on July 4, 2013, celebrated the “health independence” it had delivered to Americans (who were forced by it to buy insurance).

When the 2018 midterm brought an anti–Donald Trump blue wave, Pelosi became Speaker again. And as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic came, she returned to her old ways: ramming massive debt-financed stimulus checks through Congress.

Through the early 2020s, Pelosi, along with the rest of the Democratic establishment, tried to ape the growing, out-of-touch, critical-race movement. (A picture of her and other congressional leaders kneeling in kente cloths, in a moment of silence for George Floyd’s death, has become a shorthand for that entire fever dream of an era). Her second speakership—and leadership of the party—ended in 2023 after mediocre midterm results a few months prior, setting up the 2024 blowout that gave Trump a Republican trifecta.

That election was a disaster for Pelosi—who had said two years before that the prospect of a loss in the House made her “fear for our democracy”—and everything she had been working against. After all, a president who denied the reality of his loss in 2020—who incited an insurrection against the certification of that loss—could not be trusted with a sycophantic House full of fellow election deniers. 

However, it was Pelosi herself who helped fill the House with these election deniers. Under her leadership, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent millions of dollars on ads supporting anti-democratic and conspiratorial Republicans in their primary campaigns against principled moderates like Michigan congressman Peter Meijer. The idea was to make general elections easier for Democrats to win, but the result was the election of more extremists to the House and, subsequently, more polarization. A strange legacy to honor in an institute devoted to “ensuring political leadership that represents the full spectrum of perspectives and backgrounds in…the country.”

To be sure, for all her flaws, Pelosi has indeed been an impressive and notable figure. Her long experience in Congress speaks for itself; she has been, perhaps, the most powerful woman in the history of American government (save for Abigail Adams). But her power and her salience serve mostly to emphasize one thing: It would be nice if the government were less notable and less powerful.

Will the U.C. Berkeley NPI, in its “research, teaching, and civic engagement,” reflect that notion? Don’t hold your breath.