Speaker of the House of Reprentatives Nancy Pelosi appeared as a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Nov 1, 2019. She pushed all the right buttons and pushed them hard:

“The patriotism. The Constitution is what this is all about.”

“As I said, this is about the Constitution and how we go forward with this.”

“How we go forward is a test for us to do so worthy of the Constitution. Worthy of our founders’ sacrifice when they established this Constitution.”

“This genius of the Constitution is three separate co-equal branches of government.”

“This is about the Constitution, so what we are defending is our democracy.”

Do you get the impression that Pelosi wants people to think she cares about the Constitution?

Eventually Pelosi settled down and told a story that any student of American history has heard many times before, about something that happened the day the constitutional convention ended and the delegates finally revealed their draft constitution to the public:

That day, when Benjamin Franklin walked out of Independence Hall they said, ‘What do we have? What do we have, Mr. Franklin – a monarchy or a republic?’ He said, ‘A republic – if we can keep it!’ And republic . . . the genius of that Constitution is three co-equal branches of government – a check and a balance on each other. Separation of powers. Not a monarchy. A republic.”

 This is a story Pelosi likes, because she repeats it a few minutes later (at 11:30) in the same Colbert interview. She repeats it often, as on September 23rd, 2019 according to The New York Times.

But she told it wrong. The founders didn’t intended “three co-equal branches of government.” They intended the Congress to be superior, and the judiciary to be the weakest. The proofs of this are found through my commentaries on the Federalist Papers.

Pelosi got another key detail wrong, and this is interesting. Franklin was speaking to a particular person in that famous scene. The question was posed not by a vague crowd - the “they” in Pelosi’s account — but by a particular person. It was a woman named Elizabeth Willing Powel. The Washington Post, in October 2019 told the story in fuller detail.

Powel was a prominent Philadelphia hostess. During that summer of 1787 she entertained several of the more prominent delegates to the constitutional convention. She no doubt asked probing and insightful questions of her guests while they sat at her table. At that time, high-toned social gatherings called “salon” were common, where dignified and respected women could exert influence without overstepping the traditional home-and-hearth role. Powel’s opinion probably influenced some of the important votes. So it was natural, as the convention ended and the delegates adjourned, that Franklin would seek her out and pay his respects.

Franklin’s answer to her question was that the future of the nation was in her hands — hers and people like her. She was an ordinary citizen, and, being a woman, not even eligible to vote. But Franklin told her that the country could stay a republic if “you” can keep it. He did not say, “If we can keep it,” but “If you can keep it.”

As Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi is tremendously powerful. Her power doesn’t derive from the consent of the governed, because the number of votes she received was insignificant on a national scale. When Pelosi was re-elected to Congress in 2018, she received 275,292 votes. She was later elevated to the Speakership by a bare majority of the 435 House members. And that made her immensely powerful. Not as powerful as the president, but certainly powerful enough to oppose the president (whose legitimacy rests on almost 63-million votes). Pelosi is third in line to succeed the president, despite receiving a tiny share of national votes.

Again, Pelosi’s power doesn’t come from the will of the American voters. And it doesn’t come from any clear and explicit clause of the Constitution. It says in Article I, Section 2, “The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker and other Officers. . . .” And that’s all the founders thought to say about the job. There’s no evidence that the founders intended the Speaker to be all-powerful. How could the representative of one district be more powerful that those of other dictricts? That would violate the principle of equality the Constitution was founded on. Instead, the founders expected the Speaker to be a servant to the rest of the members — to organize votes and preside over deliberations. But over time, the Speaker of other senior members have come to control the congressional process.

I imagine Pelosi has some honorable sense of doing what’s right. She has a sense of what would be good (in her opinion) for America, and she strives in good faith to accomplish that. But I also think that when she speaks of the genius of the founders, she can’t help but admire them for designing a scheme that advantages her so very much.

Control over national affairs by just a few people is called oligarchy. An oligarchy is not exactly a monarchy, but it’s not a republic, either. Pelosi would insist that her out-sized control over national affairs is grounded in procedure and precedent, and is therefore legitimate. She would not agree that her authority is oligarchical. But if Franklin could see the highly partisan modern Congress in action, I Imagine he’d say the republic hasn’t been kept.

Readers might ask why, epistemologically speaking, the Washington Post version should be considered more reliable than Pelosi’s account. Both are just sources, and both have been truthful about other things in the past. Well, in general, the source that provides more details probably has studied the subject more thoroughly. In this case, the Post points to its historical sources, and I looked at those. I also looked into the story myself and found several other sources, including HistoryNet and Mount Vernon) that corroborate the Post’s version of Willing Powel’s role.