Nancy Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi before the first bailout vote, September 29, 2008 With markets falling, the House took up the Wall Street rescue, and the Speaker's closing speech blamed the crisis on "a right-wing ideology of anything goes," with no supervision, discipline or regulation. The bill failed 228 to 205. John Boehner said her remarks sent Republicans who had planned to back it the other way, and the Republican whip, Roy Blunt, said a dozen Republicans switched to no after the speech. Democrats replied that Republican leaders could not deliver even a third of their own members. Nobody has named the members who switched, so this is the contested case: proof that a speech gets the blame when a vote fails, if not proof that it decided it.