53 pages • 1 hour read
Nancy PelosiThe Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Political Context: The House of Representatives and the Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi’s political power and negotiations occur in the context of the constitutionally-defined roles of the House of Representatives and the Speaker of the House, so an understanding of those two roles is essential for following the sometimes-dense explanations of the passage of bills in the book.
The House of Representatives is one of two chambers of Congress, the legislative branch of the government. It comprises members from all 50 states, with the number of members allocated per state based on the population of that state. Members serve for two years, which Pelosi points to as the reason members are so responsive to the needs of their constituents. The constitutional responsibilities and powers of the House of Representatives include introducing bills that eventually make their way to the Senate for debate and then back to the House for reconciliation if passed. The House also has “the power of the purse,” meaning that it allocates funding for legislation. It also has the power to initiate impeachment proceedings against the president of the United States.
Getting a bill passed begins with a bill that originates in either chamber of the House, continues with work on the bills in committees, passage of the bill through a vote on the floor of the legislative chamber, and sending the bill over to the other chamber of the House. From there, that chamber goes through the same process of vetting and voting on a bill. If passed, the bill then has to go through a process of reconciliation (Pelosi describes this in detail in her description of the passage of the Affordable Care Act) by both Houses, then on to the president for signing into law.
The Speaker of the House is the leader of the House, and her role is constitutionally-defined. She is third in line in the order of succession after the vice president—an indication of the importance of the role. Members of the House select the speaker, with the majority party exercising the greatest control over that process due to their majority. The speaker is powerful because she gets to set the legislative agenda for the House and shepherds legislation through the floor for discussion and votes.
As Pelosi observes, the speaker must be politically agile enough to address the different aims and cultures of the White House and the Senate. Pelosi’s long experience and deep relationships with members of the House and, to a lesser extent, the Senate are key elements of her ability to get things done.
Genre Context: Political Memoir
The Art of Power belongs to the genre of political memoir. Examples of contemporary political memories include Michelle Obama’s Becoming, Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, and Alicia Garza’s The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart. Like the more general memoir, the political memoir focuses on specific events from a defined period in the writer’s life (as opposed to autobiography, which attempts to cover the entirety of a person’s life). The defining traits of the political memoir are related to its particular purposes and conventions.
A political memoir may serve several purposes. Its purpose might be to influence political conversations around specific issues, to justify the writer’s decisions as a political figure, or to cement the legacy of the writer. Pelosi is likely using The Art of Power for all three purposes. Throughout the book, she attempts to make the case for ending the vitriol that has infected political discourse in the US. She offers explanations for controversial actions she took, such as when she used reconciliation to get through key pieces of the Affordable Care Act. Finally, Pelosi stepped down from the Democratic leadership in 2022 and is likely on the latter part of her career as a politician. This memoir offers her the opportunity to shape public opinion about what she has accomplished during that career.
The Art of Power relies on several conventions of political memoir, including Pelosi’s use of retrospection and her foregrounding of political ideology. Retrospection occurs when a writer looks at events after the fact. The writer relies on her current knowledge to make sense of events in the present. When Pelosi offers that she would never have gotten into politics had she known it would result in physical harm to her husband and threats to other members of her family, she engages in retrospection.
The memoir is also deeply grounded in political ideology associated with the Democratic Party and progressive politics specifically. The central ideology of the politics displayed in the book is that government has a central role to play in securing the good of people at home and abroad. This ideology explains in large part Pelosi’s motivations, legislative agendas, and perspectives on other politicians (especially anti-government Republicans) in the book.
