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WASHINGTON — All of a sudden, she’s Dirty Nancy.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 83, said Friday she will run for re-election to Congress in 2024 despite her advanced age because San Francisco needs her help cleaning up the streets.
Pelosi, in Congress since 1987, vowed that “there will be arrests” of shoplifters and drug users and that homeless people will be offered housing and if they refuse “there’s the ability to take them off the street.”
The Democratic icon rebranded herself as an anti-crime crusader during a Friday afternoon interview with MSNBC host Nicole Wallace in which she tried to justify her bid for another two-year term.
“The needs that our city has right now really call for me to stay another term,” Pelosi told Wallace.
“I have agreed to stay on another term in order to help meet the needs that we have now,” she said. “We’re a resilient city — we’ve had AIDS, we’ve had earthquakes, of course we’ve all had the pandemic. We intend to come out of this — resilient city that we are — even better.”
The only local issues that Pelosi addressed in her first interview since launching her re-election campaign earlier Friday were crime and homelessness — arguing that while the issues aren’t as bad as portrayed in the media, they still require action.
“We do have an isolated situation in downtown San Francisco, in the Tenderloin district and the rest,” Pelosi said. “We have just said to the people there and the rest, who are very much concerned about it, that if there is crime and there is violence and there are drugs, there will be arrests and that’s the way it is.”
She added, “And it doesn’t matter if the person is documented or not, they will be prosecuted.”
“And that’s something that we brought in from the Justice Department, the Operation Overdrive to address that problem. So it’s about mental health issues that leads to homelessness, it’s about drug use that leads to homelessness, it’s about affordable housing,” Pelosi went on.
“And we are providing housing, and people have to accept it and if they don’t, then there’s the ability to take them off the street. And taking them off the street takes some drug use off the streets, some drug sales off the streets.”
Pelosi’s husband Paul was brutally attacked last year by a mentally ill nudism activist who broke into the couple’s home and fractured his skull with a hammer.
The former speaker argued Friday that proposed budget cuts by House Republicans could harm anti-crime efforts and claimed that overwhelmingly Democratic San Francisco is “of one mind” on crime. Conservative politicians generally blame liberal policies such as lax bail laws for causing an increase in crime following large anti-police protests in 2020.
Pelosi said an uptick in crimes such as shoplifting is “not confined to San Francisco” but that within the city “we have great unity and a decision to get the job done.”
“Right now we’re of one mind: it’s over,” she added. “This has to end and that’s that. And at the same time, our city is alive and vibrant and thriving.”
Pelosi was elected the first female speaker in 2007, holding the post until January 2011 and again from 2019 through January of this year.
Although Pelosi’s hardline remarks on Friday follow criticism of her party as too lenient toward crime, she and other longtime Democratic politicians have been criticized in past decades for overly harsh legislation. For example, she voted in 1994 for then-Sen. Joe Biden’s anti-crime act that critics say contributed to the “mass incarceration” of minorities and granted life sentences to some marijuana dealers.
Pelosi stepped away from House leadership this year but has remained a member of Congress.
She handed over formal leadership of the Democratic caucus to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) after Republicans reclaimed control of the chamber in the 2022 midterm elections.
Her decision to remain in office rather than retire follows significant controversy in Washington over the old age and failing health of longtime leaders, including 81-year-old Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has frozen during two recent public appearances.
President Biden, 80, is the nation’s oldest-ever commander-in-chief and would leave office at 86 if he completes a full second term. He’s expected to face off against former President Donald Trump, 77, in next year’s election.
The speaker emerita helped Biden notch major legislative achievements during his first two years in office, including passing a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill with only Democratic support and an equally partisan environmental spending package, along with a major bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Pelosi also led Democrats in twice impeaching Trump — first in 2019 for pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Biden family and then in 2021 for allegedly inciting the Capitol riot that disrupted certification of Biden’s election victory.
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