DAVID MARCUS: Nancy Pelosi’s legacy is the socialist takeover of her party.
The year was 1987 and the Democrat speaker of the House of Representatives was a moderate Texan named Jim Wright, the Senate majority leader was West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, and socialism was a dirty word in the Party of Jefferson and Jackson.
This was the year that San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi would begin her career in Congress, and regarding both her and her Democrat Party, we can surely say, you’ve come a long way, baby.
Former Speaker Pelosi announced this week that she would not be seeking a 900th (or whatever it is) term in the House, and at 85 years old, she leaves a Democrat Party that has all but fully embraced socialism. She is arguably the biggest reason why.
Last month, amid growing pressure from the left, Pelosi’s hand-picked successor to hold the House gavel, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., endorsed a full-on socialist to be mayor of his hometown of New York City in what looked like a hostage video.
Pelosi is praised to high heaven by both parties for her ability to rule her conference with an iron fist and brook no quarter to opposition, but in practice, this clearly alienated moderate Democrats. In the case of New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew, he became a Republican.
There is no indication that Pelosi is upset that hers is now the Democrat Socialist Party in all but name. We can imagine former GOP Speaker John Boehner ruefully deploring how the Tea Party and Trump captured his party over a cigarette and glass of red wine, but Pelosi seems pleased as punch.
Who will replace Pelosi in Congress? Two names have been floated so far, California State Sen. Scott Wiener and Saikat Chakrabarti, AOC’s former chief of staff. First up, Wiener: Scott Wiener Makes Pelosi Look Normal, and He Wants to Fill Her Seat.
A sanitized, family-friendly Wiener biography would show that he’s a Harvard‑trained lawyer and longtime San Francisco resident who began his public career on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2010. There, he built his reputation as a progressive advocate on issues ranging from civil rights to public health. In 2016, San Franciscans promoted him to the California State Senate. As with Pelosi herself, the state’s government unions, especially firefighters, love Wiener.
But in the legislature, Wiener has established a record that might have given Pelosi a case of the fantods. Of course, Wiener’s success there is not his alone. He has operated in a political environment shaped by Governor Newsom, progressive state legislators, and a San Francisco electorate that repeatedly sends him to office.
But the record he’s built there is entirely his own — a made-for-Netflix tragicomic collection of utterly bonkers legislation that would almost certainly weigh on Democratic candidates everywhere, offering proof that their party cannot be trusted around children.
In 2019, Wiener authored SB 145: “Ending Discrimination Against LGBTQ People Regarding Sex Offender Registration.” The bill amended California’s sex offender registry law so that judges have discretion in cases involving sex between minors as young as 14 and adults within ten years of that. Wiener claimed that he was merely bringing parity to the way in which judges handled cases involving sex between straight adults and their under-18 sexual partners. He might more reasonably have simply said there should be no judicial discretion when it comes to adults, whatever their gender or self-declared “identity,” having sex with kids.
Wiener’s SB 107 made California a sanctuary state for kids seeking medical support for their desire to transition, regardless of where they live in the United States or what their parents say. Team Wiener says the law, which Newsom signed in 2022, protects vulnerable kids from bad parents and regressive red-state policies. You might say it violates parental rights, encourages runaways, and makes those kids vulnerable to abuse, including sex trafficking. In 2023, Wiener championed SB 407, which required foster homes to provide explicit support for LGBTQ youth and regular assessments of their putative needs.
Then there’s Chakrabarti: Who will replace Nancy Pelosi after she leaves Congress in January 2027?
[F]ormer Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur Saikat Chakrabarti, had well beforehand launched a primary campaign against Pelosi.
Chakrabarti was New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign manager during her 2018 primary upset against incumbent Joe Crowley, which kicked off Ocasio-Cortez’s meteoric rise. He got his start in politics working on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and is a founding engineer of the online payment platform Stripe.
Chakrabarti told ABC News in April that he felt he could beat Pelosi in the primary because he saw echoes of the 2018 “blue wave” in 2025: a post-Trump election environment marked by frustration among Democrats over their party’s defeat. “That moment of change, in my opinion, is dwarfed by the moment of change you see right now. The level of anger at the Democratic Party for failing is huge,” Chakrabarti said.
In a statement on Thursday, Chakrabarti thanked Pelosi “for your decades of service that defined a generation of politics and for doing something truly rare in Washington: making room for the next one. Our campaign is ready to build on that legacy by fighting to create a San Francisco and an America that works for everyone.”
The filing period for California’s congressional primary does not open until February 9, 2026 and closes on March 6, so there is still plenty of time for other challengers to enter the ring.
Chakrabarti carries a fair amount of baggage of his own. In addition to ghostwriting the infamous “farting cows and airplanes” first draft of the Green Nude Eel in early 2019, Chakrabarti was tossed overboard by AOC later that year, possibly in order to distance herself from this story: Feds probing AOC’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti after sudden resignation.
The brash Chakrabarti, who masterminded Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign and steered her proposed Green New Deal, had caused uproar in the halls of Congress with a series of combative tweets that contributed to a rift between his rookie boss and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“People were not happy that he used his Twitter account to comment about members and the bills that he and his boss oppose,” a senior House Democratic staffer said. “There was a series of colliding and cascading grievances.”
The two PACs being probed, Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, were both set up by Chakrabarti to support progressive candidates across the country.
But they funneled more than $1 million in political donations into two private companies that Chakrabarti also incorporated and controlled, according to Federal Election Commission filings and a complaint filed in March with the regulatory agency.
Then there were his sartorial excesses: AOC chief of staff criticized for wearing shirt touting Nazi collaborator:
Chakrabarti’s choice of apparel is receiving a fresh round of criticism after Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, positively quoted Nazi sympathizer Eva Perón, the former first lady of Argentina.
Saikat Chakrabarti, the chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, came under scrutiny for having worn a T-shirt that featured Nazi collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose.
In December 2018, following his boss’s congressional victory, Chakrabarti did a video with NowThis News, titled “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Chief of Staff on Acting Fast in Congress,” in which he wore a T-shirt with Bose’s face.
If he wins and takes office at the beginning of 2027, I assume Chakrabarti would want to pack in as much legislating as possible before it’s too late (possibly working with potential Senator Graham Platner, another enthusiast of Germany’s post-Weimar era, if he’s elected as well). While Chakrabarti was serving as AOC’s ghostwriter, she assured us all that the world would be coming to an end in 2030.
UPDATE: Christine Pelosi passes on bid for retiring mother’s House seat.
