The Hill: The political pendulum is swinging back from conservative control in so many ways

Last time Nancy Pelosi took office as Speaker of the House in 2007, it was in the last Congress of George W. Bush’s Republican presidency. She came in on a wave election, gaining the Senate and the House after a long exile of Democrats from the Speaker’s seat dating back from 1994. She would hold the seat for a short four years, losing it in 2010 during Barack Obama’s first midterm. 

This time, Nancy Pelosi has done something that Democrats haven’t done since 1930: flip the House and take the Speakership in an opposing President’s first midterm. Within the same period, Republicans have done this 3 times: 1946, 1994 and 2010. The latter two happened during the post-Civil Rights era described in this article. 

Because this is such a rare event, Pelosi is now garnering comparisons to other Speakers of the House who used their bully pulpit to rhetorically oppose the White House within the last century: Democrats like Tip O’Neill, Republicans like Newt Gingrich and John Boehner. But Pelosi will take office in an era closer to the hyper-partisanship of the latter two GOP speakers, and will have the chance to hew herself closer to or distinguish herself from O’Neill, who managed to find ways to work with Reagan and his Republican Senate. By comparison, Gingrich and Boehner fought desperate knife-fights with their Democratic presidents to make them one-term presidents. 

She may have to find a way to use all of those three examples, but her prior experience in the Speakership – with a weakened President on his way out as well as a Senate in her party’s grasp – will be less useful. She has a creepy President who values loyalty, uses his opponents to shield himself from scrutiny, and abuses his authority flagrantly. Can she milk this President, or will she have to get into a knife fight for the next two or more years?

That may be a good measure of how intense the swing away from this party era’s conservatism may be.