Nancy Pelosi Is Voted Speaker of the House, Which Means Democrats Are Officially in Control

Let the oversight begin.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California is applauded at the Capitol ahead of the vote that made her speaker of the House for the second time.Carolyn Kaster/AP

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On Thursday afternoon, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was elected speaker of the House for the 116th Congress. In the biggest swing toward Democratic power since Watergate, Democrats gained 40 House seats in the 2018 midterm elections.

Pelosi formerly held the speakership between 2007-2011, at which point Democrats lost the House majority and were replaced by a wave of tea party conservatives. She has since served as House minority leader. Pelosi is the only woman to ever be elected speaker, and is the first speaker to serve two non-consecutive terms since former Texas Rep. Sam Rayburn, who served three non-consecutive terms as speaker between 1940 and 1961.

The new Congress includes a number of firsts for female politicians, including the first Native American and Muslim women elected to Congress, as well as the youngest woman elected to Congress.

The first act of the new House will be attempting to pass a spending bill to end the government shutdown that began on December 22 and has continued through the new year. President Donald Trump has said he will not sign the Democrats’ bill, which will not include funding for his border wall. Democrats have also promised a robust oversight agenda, which will include a number of investigations into Trump and his campaign.

Watch Pelosi’s first remarks after retaking the speaker’s gavel below:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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