A Quiet Soldier in the House Ethics War

WASHINGTON — The House ethics process is nearly in shambles, the partisan combat more rancorous than anyone recalls. But during a brief lull in the fight over Speaker Newt Gingrich’s fate, like any combatant marking time in front-line trenches, Ethics Committee member Nancy Pelosi reaches for photographs of loved ones.

From a desk in her office across from the Capitol, she grabs a snapshot of herself and her husband, Paul, cradling their first and only grandchild, Alexander Theodore Prowda. He is just 9 days old, and the San Francisco Democrat, at 56, smiles, contemplating grandparenthood. “I’m long overdue,” she says.

The moment passes quickly. Pelosi is in the thick of hostilities. Last weekend, she and ranking Democrat Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) took the rare step of attacking Republicans on the committee about the panel’s crucial scheduling. Now, on Tuesday afternoon, she knows that within a few hours, McDermott will stun observers by withdrawing from the panel under a firestorm of protest over his potentially illegal role in leaking a tape of an intercepted Gingrich telephone call.

She won’t talk about McDermott. In a few days, the committee is supposed to enter its most critical phase as a public hearing opens on punishment for the speaker. The House is to vote on that punishment early next week. Gingrich has admitted violating House rules in connection with a college course he once taught.

Right now, this is the biggest story out of Washington. Yet, folks back on Nob Hill and in Chinatown and Pacific Heights didn’t even know their lawmaker was on the Ethics Committee until the recent hostilities broke out, Pelosi says.

She’s had the assignment for six years, most of that time working necessarily in secret. The assignment ends next week. She calls it a terrible job. “To pass judgment on your colleagues is not something you look forward to doing,” Pelosi says.

She warns that if the ethics process is derailed by controversy and the Gingrich violations unfairly resolved, hope of peaceful coexistence within this new 105th Congress will be all but lost.

“It will be the equivalent of the Treaty of Versailles,” she says. “People will just be getting ready for the next war.”

She is one of two Democrats on the bipartisan investigative subcommittee that brought the charges against Gingrich, to which he admitted last month. It is not a congressional achievement for which Pelosi wants to be forever remembered.

An unabashed liberal from a progressive district, Pelosi says her proudest work has nothing to do with bitter partisan combat, but rather her success on the House Appropriations Committee in winning increased funding for such health care issues as AIDS research and demanding punishment of China for its human rights abuses.

After her nearly 10 years in the House, “being around her is invigorating in the sense that she still has that sense of mission,” says California Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), a close friend.

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The current House acrimony, while at an intensified pitch, is nothing Pelosi says she didn’t learn about while growing up in the politics-steeped household of her father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., former congressman and mayor of Baltimore. The children in that home were christened in the sacrament of public service, the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party, in that order, Pelosi says. Her brother Thomas D’Alesandro III also served as mayor of Baltimore.

She points to photographs on her office wall showing her dapper, mustachioed father on the House floor during an address by Winston Churchill and the swearing-in of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for committee testimony.

Pelosi and her investment banker husband, Paul Pelosi, raised five daughters, now 26 to 32, in San Francisco, where the lawmaker’s popularity grows stronger with every election. She won 85% of the vote in November.

“I think everyone really likes Nancy. You can disagree with her on an issue, but in terms of warmth, approachability, determination and enthusiasm, she’s really wonderful,” says Laura D’Andrea Tyson, a Californian and former chief economics advisor to President Clinton who grew to be friends with Pelosi in Washington.

The trim congresswoman admits to one major weakness: a love of chocolate, the darker the better. Back in San Francisco, where Pelosi flies each weekend eager to resume the home-life routines she cherishes--”I think it’s important to be normal”--she has a favorite sweatshirt with the inscription: “Hand over the chocolate and nobody will get hurt.”

But this weekend, Pelosi remains in Washington for perhaps one of the most critical 72 hours of her congressional life with the anticipated public hearings on the speaker’s fate.

Says Pelosi: “The next few days are going to be a little wild.”