As Pelosi Exits Stage Left, She Will Leave Behind a Losing Legacy

When the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act came up on the House floor on April 5, 2000, it had significant bipartisan support. Sixteen Democrats cosponsored the bill, and 77 voted for it.

As explained in its official summary, the bill would prohibit “an abortion in which the person performing the abortion deliberately and intentionally (1) vaginally delivers some portion of an intact living fetus until the fetus is partially outside the body of the mother, for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the fetus while the fetus is partially outside the mother’s body; and (2) performs the overt act that kills the fetus while the intact living fetus is partially outside the mother’s body.”

One Democrat who did not vote for this bill designed to protect innocent human lives was Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California.

Partial-Birth Abortion

She went down to the House floor and spoke out against it. “I rise in strong opposition to the so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Act,” Pelosi declared.

“This is a very sad debate today,” she said. “Abortion is a failure in every respect. We want to keep them safe, and we want to keep them legal.”

When the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act came up again in the House in 2003, Pelosi again voted against it. But that year, then-President George W. Bush signed it into law.

Pelosi on Thursday formally announced she would not seek reelection next year after 40 years in Congress, but her support for taking the lives of unborn and partially born children will forever be at the dark center of her legacy.

Tax Cuts

Another part of her legacy will be her advocacy for higher taxes.

When President Donald Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was considered in the House in December 2017, Pelosi was an adamant opponent. As analyzed by The Heritage Foundation, this act cut taxes for working Americans. “The reform will produce larger incomes, more jobs, more investment, and ultimately, more economic opportunity,” said a Heritage Foundation report. “In 2018, taxpayers will save an average of $1,400, and married couples with two children will save $2,917.”

But Pelosi condemned this bill as a tax cut for the rich.

“Today is a very sad day in the history of America because we have, on the floor, probably the worst bill in recent times to come to the floor,” she said when it came up for a vote on Dec. 20, 2017.

“Today, the Republicans take their victory lap for successfully pillaging the American middle class to benefit the powerful and the privileged,” she said.

“It is all about the Republicans in Congress,” she said. “They have in their DNA trickle-down economics.”

Border Wall

After Trump took office in 2017, having campaigned on building a wall to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, Pelosi not only opposed the project, but said something about it that she would not have said about taking the life of a partially born baby. She declared it “immoral.”

“The Democrats do not support the wall,” she said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on April 23, 2017.

“The president, I think, talking about this wall is expressing a sign of weakness,” she said. “He’s saying, ‘I can’t control our borders. I have to build a wall.’ We certainly would like to—we have a responsibility to control our borders. Building a wall is not an answer, not here or any place.”

From 2007 through 2010, during Pelosi’s first term as speaker of the House, more than 2.5 million aliens were apprehended trying to illegally cross the southwest border, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump’s strategy was to stop this massive flow of illegal migrants.

“Before [then-President Joe] Biden stopped new construction on the wall,” U.S. News & World Report reported in 2021, “the Trump administration had built 458 miles of what it dubbed ‘border wall system,’ according to final figures compiled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and provided to U.S. News.”

In Trump’s second term, the number of illegal crossings on the U.S.-Mexico border has now dropped to a half-century low. “Unlawful crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2025,” reported CBS News, “plummeted to the lowest level since the early 1970s, amid the Trump administration’s sweeping clampdown on illegal immigration, internal federal statistics obtained by CBS News show.”

Does anyone hear Pelosi applauding?

In an interview with The New York Times after the 2024 election, Pelosi claimed that the number of illegal aliens entering the country during Biden’s term had been less than during Trump’s first term. “I don’t think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Biden than came under Donald Trump,” she said. Politifact’s Maria Ramirez Uribe then published a story countering this claim.

“Border Patrol agents have encountered people trying to illegally cross the border between official ports of entry 7.2 million times under President Joe Biden’s administration compared to 1.8 million times under President-elect Donald Trump,” wrote Uribe.

Pelosi will be remembered as a Democratic leader who opposed some of the most positive things the federal government did during her time in office.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is seen here on Jan. 24, 1990, early in the second of her 20 terms in Congress. (Bettman Archive via Getty Images)

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