In the span of three days, former Vice President Dick Cheney died, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced her retirement from the House.
Rarely does one era yield to another with such brute cohesion. The post-Watergate dramas of American politics converge in this trio, culminating with this week’s progressive takeover of the Democratic Party.
Cheney’s time orbiting the center of American power spanned 50 years, a full one-fifth of the United States’s lifespan. His ascendence reflected his personal style: unrelenting, inscrutable, and ruthlessly effective. Catapulting from obscurity to the inner circle of presidential power — at 34 years old, he became former President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff — Cheney eventually led the Pentagon, a major energy corporation, and, some would say, the White House while serving as former President George W. Bush‘s vice president.
But history will remember Cheney as the architect of the Iraq War and the larger war on terrorism. Cheney pushed hard for the 2003 invasion while crafting the nation’s post-9/11 security architecture at home. He aggressively advocated waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” methods and was the driving force behind the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program.
Among his sharpest and most prominent critics was Pelosi. As House minority leader in 2002, Pelosi voted against the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq, lambasting Cheney for misleading Congress about Saddam Hussein’s phantom weapons of mass destruction stockpile in the year that followed.
Later, as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Pelosi condemned Cheney’s alleged wrongdoing over the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program. She voted against extending the Patriot Act, decrying its mass surveillance as unconstitutional overreach, and targeted Cheney for bypassing FISA courts and eroding civil liberties. The two frequently sparred in the media, with Pelosi urging Bush to “repudiate and distance himself” from Cheney.
Yet, while Pelosi publicly skewered Cheney, she privately blocked her party’s firebrands from impeaching him. In 2007, Republicans tried to force Democrats into a debate on the resolution sponsored by Dennis Kucinich. But Pelosi managed to thwart the move, saying “impeachment was off the table” and Democrats were better off focusing on their legislative agenda.
Pelosi proceeded to devote herself entirely to the crown jewel of that agenda: the Affordable Care Act. Corralling a fractious Democratic caucus of Blue Dogs and progressives, Pelosi brokered compromises and steered the bill toward former President Barack Obama’s desk by way of her signature two-step strategy. This involved passing the main bill as is in the Senate before using budget reconciliation for fixes, bypassing the Senate filibuster.
“She was the speaker who made it happen,” Obama later said of Pelosi.
Cheney would become a vocal critic of the new law, calling it a “train wreck” and expressing “grave doubts” about not only its feasibility but the government’s ability to manage it.
“If you can’t even set up the website, what else is there that’s flawed in the system?” he asked in 2013.
It’s easy to imagine Cheney enjoying wearing the critics’ shoes as Pelosi, Obama, and the Democrats ran into their own political troubles, including the Democrats’ congressional “shellacking” in 2010 and their loss of the Senate in 2014.
But the rise of President Donald Trump forced Cheney and Pelosi into an unlikely union. Though Cheney offered a qualified nod to Trump in May 2016 despite the GOP nominee’s barbs at his Iraq legacy, he and his daughter, former Republican Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, soon emerged as the unlikely torchbearers for the “Never Trump” movement. This new dynamic placed Cheney and Pelosi squarely on the same side — a development that would have been unthinkable only years before.
The culmination of their partnership came following the Jan. 6 riots on the Capitol, with Cheney calling Trump a “threat to our republic” and Pelosi adopting the event as her defining crusade.
“He’s got to pay a price,” she seethed of Trump.
Pelosi quickly launched the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, naming Cheney’s daughter as vice chairwoman. On Jan. 6, 2022, one year to the day after the Capitol riot, Cheney made a surprise visit to the House floor during a solemn moment of silence to commemorate the attack. Pelosi, along with other Democratic leaders and former bitter enemies, greeted Cheney with effusive applause.
But as the Pelosi-led Democrats, by then firmly in league with many old guard, Cheney-style Republicans, careened into a disastrous 2024 election, a new, young, and sharply progressive faction rose within her party. Suddenly, Pelosi and other party leaders, such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), appeared as relics of a corrupt system that needed toppling. Pelosi’s legacy as a master deal-maker clashed with “the Squad,” led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez‘s (D-NY) uncompromising moral purity and extreme policy stances.
In 2019, Pelosi dismissed their social-media bravado as “the Twitter world,” while Ocasio-Cortez fired back that Pelosi was “singling out women of color.” Their rift widened when Pelosi muscled through a bipartisan infrastructure bill in 2021 over progressive objections that it shortchanged climate and social spending. The Squad retaliated by tanking a stopgap funding measure. By 2023, Ocasio-Cortez openly accused Pelosi of “appeasing corporate donors” on drug pricing.
Emboldened by the national rebuke received by the Democratic establishment and their “Never Trump” allies in 2024, the rising progressives seized the party’s mantle in the first year of Trump’s second term. Mamdani’s successful campaign in New York City, with the help of Ocasio-Cortez and co., signaled what appeared to be a decisive win for the progressives.
Speaking after the results came in, Ocasio-Cortez celebrated the victory over Republicans and the Democratic old guard.
Mamdani echoed her sentiments from the victory stage that this wasn’t just a mayoral win, but “a victory that will resonate across the country and the world” — a blueprint for a party unmoored from its deal-makers.
Pelosi announced her retirement on Thursday. And on Tuesday, she remembered Cheney’s legacy with a statement celebrating him as “a patriotic American who loved his country. While we strongly disagreed on most policy issues, his patriotism was clear when he returned to the House Floor to commemorate the first anniversary of January 6th. We all saw then how proud Vice President Cheney was to see his daughter, Liz, follow in her father’s footsteps to serve in the House with courage and integrity.”
Mamdani, meanwhile, is a young man with places to go. And as he takes power, he sees no limit to his potential to reshape not only New York, but the nation.
NANCY PELOSI WILL NOT SEEK REELECTION IN 2026
“We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about,” Mamdani declared following his victory.
Yet voices of the past warn that not every good intention bends history to its will.