The title of Dean Acheson’s memoir, “Present at the Creation,” spoke volumes about the former secretary of state’s arrogance that fueled limitless executive power and a warfare state and found expression in gratuitous, unconstitutional misadventures in Korea and Vietnam.
The title of Nancy Pelosi’s recently released memoir, “The Art of Power,” similarly bespeaks the former House speaker’s disregard for justice as the north star of politics. James Madison, father of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, elaborated in Federalist 51: “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society.” And perfect justice is making every person’s station in life correspond to their character and accomplishments — period, no commas, question marks or semicolons. But neither justice nor James Madison are afforded even cameo appearances in Pelosi’s memoir — a sanitized narrative of her life and political career.
Pelosi has exhibited more the character of Lady Macbeth than the wisdom of Madison during her prolonged partisan political career, making periodic Faustian bargains for the aphrodisiac of power. Pelosi conceals them in “The Art of Power” because they are indefensible.
Congresswoman Pelosi opposed President Bill Clinton’s impeachment for committing perjury before a liberal federal judge, Susan Webber Wright, who held Clinton in contempt of court for giving “intentionally false” testimony about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit. Judge Wright rebuked the president for giving “false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process.” She concluded that, in order to “protect the integrity” of the judicial process, “sanctions must be imposed, not only to redress the president’s misconduct, but to deter others who might themselves consider emulating the president of the United States by engaging in misconduct that undermines the integrity of the judicial system.”
Pelosi found Clinton’s obstruction of justice a venial sin. It was not that she loved her constitutional oath of office and the rule of law less but that she craved power for herself and the Democratic Party more.
Another untold tale in Pelosi’s memoir pivots on her cowardly refusal as the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee to reveal the Bush administration’s waterboarding, i.e., torture, in questioning al-Qaida suspects in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As reported in the New York Times, Pelosi knew by February 2003 that the Central Intelligence Agency was waterboarding suspected terrorist detainees. Exhibiting a profile in cowardice, she refused to reveal the torture on the floor of Congress or in a congressional hearing despite knowing that she would have been shielded from sanctions under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. Pelosi’s cowardice has confounded prosecutions of the 9/11 terrorists before military commissions at Guantanamo Bay for two decades.
Pelosi made history in 2007 by becoming the first woman House speaker. She also made history the year before by airbrushing impeachment out of the Constitution she was sworn to uphold and defend in decreeing: “I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table.”
Support was then growing for impeaching President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to secure congressional acquiescence in an illegal war of aggression, authorizing the torture of al-Qaida suspects and flouting the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act through warrantless, dragnet surveillance. Pelosi made a political calculation that impeachment would handicap the Democratic Party in winning the White House in 2008. She instinctively made the rule of law subordinate to her love of power.
Pelosi defended President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional war against Libya to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi after he willingly gave up his own WMDs, a move that stupidly fueled the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea. Pelosi absurdly declared that the U.S. strikes on Libyan forces did not meet the threshold for war.
Speaker Pelosi was a dictator in her congressional domain. She controlled what legislation came to a vote, what amendments would be permitted, which Democrats would be committee and subcommittee chairs and the funding of committees and rank-and-file offices.
The result was to lobotomize Congress and shrivel its ability to oversee the multitrillion-dollar executive branch or to challenge Pelosi’s tight grip on power. Her Democratic colleague, the late Bill Pascrell Jr., in 2019 wrote in the Washington Post, “Why is Congress so dumb?” “Our available resources and our policy staffs, the brains of Congress, have been so depleted that we can’t do our jobs properly,” Pascrell said.
Nancy Pelosi has served 37 years in Congress during which the institution has been diminished to a constitutional ink blot — an appendage to an extraconstitutional White House exercising limitless power. Her memoir sleepwalks through this alarming transformation. It fixates on political fleas but ignores the embarrassing elephants. As a substitute for thinking, Pelosi hymns the meaningless refrain, “for the children, for the children, for the children.”
In sum, “The Art of Power” is first cousin to a reading of “Hamlet” without the Prince of Denmark.
Bruce Fein (X: @brucefeinesq; www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com) was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.”
