Pelosi faces tough baptism as the first queen of Capitol Hill

When the Democrats won the 2006 congressional elections it was widely seen as a repudiation of the past six years of Republican rule and President George W. Bush. Budget deficits, an increasingly partisan and corrupt atmosphere in Washington and, above all, the war in Iraq drove Americans into the arms of Democrats, who this week took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 12 years. Now it is up to Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House, to figure out how to begin to solve the problems that Mr Bush has created (or ignored) since 2000. Mrs Pelosi, 66, is the highest-ranking woman ever in the US government. As the first woman Speaker she presides over the House of Representatives, and is as such the primary public face of Congress. The Speaker is also second in line to the presidency, so in the unlikely event that the president and vice-president die at the same time, Mrs Pelosi would become president. Mrs Pelosi was born in Baltimore, Maryland, where her father was mayor and a congressman. She met her husband in college and moved with him after graduation to his hometown of San Francisco. She was a stay-at-home mother until the last of her five children was grown, and then started getting involved in Californian Democratic politics. In 1987 she was elected to US Congress, and became House leader of the Democrats in 2002. San Francisco is one of the most liberal places in America, and while Mrs Pelosi is probably more conservative than most San Franciscans, she is still liberal by the standards of the rest of America. She has staked out strong positions on traditional liberal causes like abortion rights, gun control and civil liberties. She voted against the Iraq war resolution in 2002 and during last year's campaign, Republican congressional candidates across the country used the spectre of an out-of-control liberal Mrs Pelosi as Speaker to scare up votes. She's known for her understated, elegant fashion sense. But she still tried to project a homey image in her campaign, frequently talking about herself as a grandmother. When Mr Bush called her after the November election to congratulate her on her victory, she joked that she was hoping it was instead news that her sixth grandchild had been born. As a liberal, Mrs Pelosi was perfect for angry Democrats who had been out of power since the early 1990s. And as a Democratic victory in November began to look likely, she faced demands from other liberals in her party to act strongly if she took control of Congress. But during the campaign, she struck a more bipartisan tone. There were calls to impeach Mr Bush, which she explicitly promised she would not do - thus taking a potentially controversial topic out of the election campaign. But almost as soon as Democrats got over their victory hangovers, Mrs Pelosi made a series of missteps that caused people to judge her dedication to bipartisanship and ethics. There was an ugly internal fight over another House Democratic leadership position, in which Mrs Pelosi backed an unpopular and ethically challenged colleague, John Murtha, who lost. She also backed another unpopular congressman for the sensitive chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee - passing over the Democrat with the most seniority on the committee, and despite the fact that her preferred candidate had, during his career as a judge, been impeached by the House for bribery and perjury. To many, it struck the wrong tone for a party that came into power promising to rid Washington of the scandals that had erupted - mostly around Republicans - over the past two years. 'Pelosi's endorsement of Murtha, one of the most unethical members of Congress, shows that she may have prioritised ethics reform merely to win votes with no real commitment to changing the culture of corruption,' Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, said. Mrs Pelosi then raised eyebrows again by appearing to renege on the Democrats' campaign promise to include Republicans in the lawmaking process, arguing that they would just slow down the agenda. Nevertheless, the Democrats are so far showing much more inclination to work in a bipartisan fashion than Republicans have lately, according to Thomas Mann, a scholar on Congress at the Brookings Institution in Washington. 'Bush's view of bipartisanship is for members of both parties to agree with him,' he said, whereas congressional Democrats actually have entered into substantive consultations with Republicans. Now Mrs Pelosi is touting a '100-hour' plan for their first days in Congress, vowing to enact several laws in the first 100 hours that the House meets. The plan includes reforms to the budget, curbs on contacts between lobbyists and members of Congress and raising the minimum wage from US$5.15 an hour to US$7.25. The 100-hour agenda 'is about political advertising', Mr Mann said. 'It's a way of demonstrating an interest in or concern about an issue.' By shutting Republicans out of that process, however, the Democrats may have squandered an early opportunity to start off in a bipartisan fashion, says Alice Rivlin, another scholar at Brookings. 'My main feeling is that a lot of the issues [that will be dealt with in the first 100 hours] are good ... but they are missing a golden tactical opportunity to go across the aisle and work on bipartisan solutions to big and large problems.' The biggest test of Mrs Pelosi's ability to get her agenda enacted - and her ability to work with Republicans - will be when Congress starts to debate what the US should do in Iraq. Mr Bush has reportedly decided to increase the number of troops in Iraq by up to 40,000 - despite an apparent mandate from voters in November that they wanted the US to begin pulling out, not escalate the conflict. Mrs Pelosi, in her first speech as Speaker on Thursday, made it clear she and the Democrats would not go along with that. 'The American people rejected an open-ended obligation to a war without end. Shortly, President Bush will address the nation on the subject of Iraq. It is the responsibility of the president to articulate a new plan for Iraq that makes it clear to the Iraqis that they must defend their own streets and their own security, a plan that promotes stability in the region, and that allows us to responsibly redeploy American forces,' she said. But Congress cannot decide how many troops are sent somewhere - that's a decision for the president. The greatest power that Congress has over a war is that it controls the nation's purse strings - for example, Congress cut off funding for the Vietnam war in 1975. So far, Mrs Pelosi has not suggested that she will move to cut off funding for the war. But she and other Democrats have promised to hold tougher, more frequent hearings on Iraq. And the inevitable arguments over Iraq are likely to poison the relationship between Mr Bush and congressional Democrats in working on domestic issues - on which there is more agreement. On immigration, another hot topic, Mr Bush and most Democrats favour similar, moderate proposals, while congressional Republicans in general support strict crackdowns on immigrants. But it is not clear whether Mr Bush will risk his support on Iraq from Republicans for the sake of pushing them on immigration, Mr Mann said. 'The dilemma here is that if there is in fact a war between the president and Congress on Iraq, the president's most stalwart supporters will be those who oppose his position on immigration and the question is whether or not they can separate that out. Is the president willing to enter into a serious negotiation on immigration in which he would go against the majority of his party members in the House and possibly even in the Senate?' He added: 'My worry is that if the president seems to be going off on a course in Iraq that is so controversial in the country and the Congress it could poison efforts across the board.'