Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader who imposes her agenda on Biden

Party discipline is very elastic in the United States, as President Joe Biden well knows.

Leading Democrats, almost always the usual suspects (Joe Manchin, Kirsten Sinema), behave like loose cannons, tripping up White House-sponsored bills and sometimes derailing them, but none had gone so far as to push the world to the brink of an incendiary conflict.

Nancy Pelosi (Baltimore, 82 years old), president of the House of Representatives and third authority in the country, was awarded that dubious honor thanks to her controversial visit to Taiwan this week, in which she confirmed her commitment to the free world.

“The determination of the United States to preserve democracy in Taiwan and around the world remains unshakeable,” she said last Wednesday in Taipei.

“The United States has come to make it clear that we will not abandon Taiwan,” she added,

Pelosi is one of the heavyweights of the Democratic 

, white and manifesting historical figures like herself, almost eternalized in politics: a congresswoman from California since 1987, she has held the presidency of the Lower House for two terms, between 2007 and 2011, as part of Barack Obama's term, and since 2019, is the first woman to hold this position.

Therefore, despite Biden's warnings about the inconvenience of visiting the island, her initiative does not seem like the decision of a novice, but rather one that responds to her own agenda, and probably also to that of Congress, including many Democrats, in favor of a more determined support for Taiwan than that offered by, in her opinion, timid Washington diplomacy.

Hawks from both parties push Biden to toughen his policy towards China and the Senate had planned to send 4,500 million dollars in military aid to Taiwan last week,

Politics runs in the family of Nancy Pelosi.

Her father, Thomas D'Alessandro, was a prominent Democrat at the time of President Roosevelt's 

.

Pelosi is her married surname, also of Italian-American origin and she is faithful to certain cultural traditions such as a large family (five children) and a cultural Catholicism, though not exempt from friction with the curia, such as her defense of the right of women to abortion.

Like Biden, he too, a Catholic, that position has caused him more than one headache.

The first, being denied communion by the archbishop of his diocese of him.

In late June, on a visit to the Vatican, Pelosi, dressed in stark black, took communion at a mass celebrated by Francis in St. Peter's Basilica.

There are no images of the communion, which was confirmed by two witnesses next to her, but Pelosi and her husband were photographed with the pontiff before the Eucharist.

After graduating in Political Science in Washington in 1962, and spending six years raising their children in New York, the Pelosi family moved to San Francisco in 1968, where she began her career as a Democratic volunteer.

She was soon recognized for her talent in fundraising campaigns, a key factor in the success or failure of a politician in the US.

From there she made the leap to the Democratic National Committee, the party's bridge of command, and, shortly after, to the State Congress.

Leader of the party in Congress since 2003-another breakthrough the glass ceiling-Pelosi uses her personal experience de ella to arbitrate between opposing factions of the formation.

She calls it the “mother of five children” strategy.

Despite the balance that she advocates in favor of party unity, she has given numerous signs of aligning herself with the most open or liberal faction ―although the affiliations are 

 in the US, without allegiance to the precise definition of the concept―, voting in favor of arms control measures and the right to abortion, or against the war in Iraq.

Her critics blame her for her “west coast leftism”, also called “left coast”-a copy of the European caviar left-, keeping her detached from the real country.

The political microclimate of San Francisco, like that of Washington, was one of the targets chosen by Donald Trump to successfully attack the self-absorbed Democratic elites alienated from ordinary Americans.

As a member of the elite, Pelosi is wealthy.

Her husband, businessman Paul Pelosi, owner of the Sacramento Mountain Lions football team, has been involved in several financial operations that sometimes border on insider trading.

At the end of July, Paul Pelosi sold nearly 5,000 shares of chipmaker Nvidia for $4 million, just days before the House approved a major legislative package that provides subsidies and tax credits to boost the US semiconductor industry.

This is not the only dubious example, but the Speaker of the House has always closed ranks with the father of her children de ella, even after he was arrested in May in California for being drunk while driving a Porsche that was involved in an accident.

The leader's husband pleaded not guilty last week in court.

After the arrival of Obama to the presidency, and during the Great Recession, Pelosi helped the president carry out his stimulus program, worth 787,000 million dollars, in February 2019 in Congress;

and a year later, the health reform known as Obamacare.

Pelosi has never spared support for social measures such as those that Biden encourages today.

Her role was also decisive in preventing the closure of the Administration during the last stretch of Trump's mandate, when she managed to twist his arm from him.

In January 2020, she opened the proceedings of the first impeachment against the Republican, of which he was acquitted, and a year later, she championed the creation of a commission to investigate the assault on the Capitol by insurgent Trumpists.

In the US, representatives are responsible to their constituencies and voters, rather than to the party and, of course, to any other earthly or heavenly authority.

Faced with the dilemma posed by the conservative Archbishop of San Francisco, also Italian-American Salvatore Cordileone, retracting from defending the right to abortion or taking communion, Pelosi has responded by qualifying the repeal of the 

 doctrine by the Supreme Court as “scandalous and heartbreaking” a decision that succumbs to the “dark and extreme objective of the Republican Party to take away the right of women to make their own reproductive health decisions.”

The fact that Pelosi does not shrink even before a world power is evidenced by the continuation of her visit to Asia while the Taiwan Strait literally sparked.

For those who demonstrated in 1991 in Beijing's Tiananmen Square with a banner dedicated “to those who died for democracy in China”, even an incendiary act such as this doesn't seem excessive.

Translated by Xanthe Holloway.