I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: nancy pelosi

  • March Madness Away from Basketball

    March Madness Away from Basketball


    Although NCAA women’s basketball takes center court in our home during the month of March every year, Pretty and I also welcome an annual springtime celebration of Women’s History in March. Basketball bracketology should be discussed by experts, and neither Pretty nor I qualify. We were, however, both teachers at one point in our lives and did learn how to develop a lesson plan.

    My plan today features a civics lesson Americans have either forgotten and/or not been taught, so think of this as a brief refresher course that is not sanctioned by anyone and won’t require a registration fee. Hang on to your recliners, my friends. This is high drama. The United States government is structured with three separate but interdependent branches: the legislative (Congress), the executive (President and Cabinet), and the judicial (Supreme Court and federal courts), each with specific powers and responsibilities. Being a contrarian, let’s work backwards as we consider three women who have been leaders in each equal branch under the Constitution.

    Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s parents, Johnny and Ellery Brown, had a front row seat at their 51 year old daughter’s confirmation proceedings to be appointed the first Black woman to the United States Supreme Court during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s public hearings in April, 2022. Their faces remained noncommittal, even stoic, when their daughter’s faith, views on pornography, questions of character were attacked by the Republican Senators in the room.

    The confirmation hearings that began with President Joe Biden’s nomination of Judge Jackson had a zoo-like quality with the zookeeper a/k/a Chairman Dick Durbin doing his best to maintain order – decorum was out the window. Johnny and Ellery Brown had undoubtedly seen worse behavior as natives of Miami growing up in the Jim Crow South but as public school teachers in Washington, D.C., they had also seen the impact of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s which gave their children more opportunities for success. Judge Jackson was born on September 14, 1970, in Washington, D.C. She was confirmed to the Supreme Court by the Senate with a 53-47 vote on April 07, 2022, and was sworn in on June 30th. of that year.

    When Judge Jackson was 27 years old in 1997, a woman named Madeleine Albright, who then President Bill Clinton had nominated to become the first female Secretary of State, went through her own Senate confirmation hearings in an atmosphere much less combative than the circus Judge Jackson was forced to endure. Republican Senator Jesse Helms who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee led then United Nations Ambassador Albright through the process that ended in a unanimous Senate vote to confirm. Wow. Those were the days.

    Madeleine Albright was born on May 15, 1937, in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). In 1939 the Nazi occupation forced her family to become refugees in England, but they returned home after World War II; only to flee again when the communist coup occurred. Her father Josef Korbel had been a member of the Czechoslovakian diplomatic service and sentenced to death by the communist regime. The second time her family fled Madeleine and her mother Anna took a ship to Ellis Island in November, 1948; Josef joined them later. They eventually settled in Denver, Colorado, where Josef accepted a position at the University of Denver. These European immigrants had found a home.

    Madeleine Albright’s storied career represents to me the best of America. To be “the first” woman in any field, to be known as a woman who “tells it like it is,” to successfully navigate the political land mines of our nation’s Capitol to serve our country in an ever changing world – these are accomplishments we celebrate; but to achieve as an outsider, a refugee, merited our highest honors including the Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed by President Barack Obama in 2012.

    Madeleine Albright died on March 23, 2022, following a long battle with cancer. The first woman ever called Madam Secretary of State left us as the first Black woman battled for her position on the Supreme Court in a contentious, even embarrassing at times, public hearing while her parents, husband, daughters, brother and the American people watched. The coincidental timing was remarkable to me.

    Nancy Pelosi was born on March 26, 1940, and served as the 52nd. Speaker of the House of Representatives, having made history in 2007 when she was elected the first woman to serve as Speaker.  She made history again in January, 2019, when she regained her position second-in-line to the presidency – the first person to do so in more than six decades.

    Pelosi was the chief architect of generation-defining legislation under two Democratic administrations, including the Affordable Care Act and the American Rescue Plan.  She led House Democrats for 20 years and previously served as House Democratic Whip.  In 2013, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Seneca Falls, the birthplace of the American women’s rights movement.  In 2024, she was awarded by President Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

    Pelosi has represented San Francisco in Congress for 37 years,  currently serving as Speaker Emerita of the House and as the Representative for California’s 11th. Congressional District, but it is one picture of her during Trump’s first presidential term that occupies a place of honor in my office as the recipient of the Sheila R. Morris Calling It Like She Sees It Award.

    Speaker Pelosi at a cabinet meeting during the first Trump administration

    I had a vision of hope for the future when I heard Judge Jackson’s answers to the questions posed three years ago during her confirmation process, a glimmer of hope for equality and fairness for my granddaughters. I felt that same spirit of hope in the legacy Madeleine Albright left, her persistence in pursuing freedom for all nations from the position of an immigrant in this country, the world peace she strived for. Jackson. Albright. Pelosi. I salute all three of these warrior women during Women’s History Month for their shared destiny of becoming a “first” in the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of government in the United States of America – three women who broke not only glass ceilings in government but also understood that real power belongs to those willing to serve for a greater good.

    Class dismissed.

  • Hillary, Nancy, Ruth – Ruth?

    Hillary, Nancy, Ruth – Ruth?


    Nancy said know your why – what motivates you – what matters to you – what you believe – the why. Hillary said get the naysayers and the whiners and the snipers to go to the back of the room… this country can still do good stuff with Joe Biden. Ruth said educators have to be at the forefront of fighting the country’s impulses to become ignorant again. Three amazing women on TV this morning before 9 o’clock, and it’s September – six months after Women’s History Month in March. Such a wonderful surprise for me when, yes I admit it, I am languishing without tennis at the US Open. I needed a swift kick in the butt to energize me for 2024, to shake me out of my whining and naysaying, to remind me of my personal “why.”

    Nancy Pelosi is a household name and, depending on the household, revered as an American politician who led fierce opposition to a Republican president when she was Speaker of the House of Representatives the second time, just as fiercely led support for President Joe Biden that produced the most sweeping legislation the country has seen since the LBJ administration. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi was born in 1940 to a family with Italian heritage and a commitment to public service.

    Hillary Clinton is also a household name and, again depending on the household, celebrated as the first woman to be nominated by a major political party for the office of President of the United States in 2016, an election she lost to her opponent. Clinton was born in 1947, influenced during her college years by the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights movement, was a fomer first Lady of the United States, former US Senator, former Secretary of State. This year she will be a professor and fellow in global affairs at Columbia University.

    Dr. Ruth Simmons, on the other hand, is not a household name, but she is an American educator who became the first Black president of an Ivy League college, Brown University, in addition to serving as presidents of two other colleges: Smith College and Prairie View A&M University. She did her undergraduate work on scholarship at HBCU Dillard University in New Orleans, earned a master’s and Ph.D from Harvard. She was born the youngest of 12 children in Grapeland, Texas to a sharecropper’s family in 1945 when the message to people of color was you are not smart enough to ever become anyone. Her memoir Up Home: One Girl’s Journey was published last week by Random House and is already a New York Times Bestseller.

    Ok. Now I’m wide awake, feeling guilty for my fears for the future when I’ve heard three women who are in my cohort by age only (I was born in 1946), three women who refuse to give up on a flawed America too often characterized by our differences in world view rather than the similarities of our hopes and dreams for our children, three women who continue to look forward to change rather than fear it. May Sarton writes in her Journal At Seventy if someone asked me what are the greatest human qualities, I would have to answer courage, courage and imagination. If Sarton could have lived to hear these three extraordinary women this morning, I think she would agree with me that they all possess the greatest human qualities. They are women of courage, imagination and I would add perseverance.

    To paraphrase Nancy today, I am an optimist. But I have a lot of worries.

    ****************************

    Slava Ukraini. For the children.

  • new nanny in DC – Mary Poppins she is not


    Bervin was here first thing this morning as he had promised when he called me earlier in the week to arrange a time to come over and take care of our yard for Pretty and me – a job he has held at all four of the different places we’ve called home during the past 19 years. He met me at the door and said with a broad smile “those people in Congress look more like me and you now, don’t they?” Then we both laughed because Bervin is a very handsome middle-aged African American man and I am, well, an old white dyke; but our political beliefs have been as instrumental in keeping us together as the green grass in  summer and the brown leaves in winter. This first week of 2019 brought joy to both of us.

    Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is the best word I have for my feelings as the new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, took the gavel from a group of Republicans who were clearly out of sorts at this peaceful changing of the political guard in the House of Representatives of the 116th. Congress in the United States of America on January 3rd. When she gathered her grandchildren and the children of other House members to the podium as she took the oath of office in that hallowed chamber for a second time as Speaker, she smiled and smiled and even giggled a time or two. Her grandchildren called her Mimi in an atmosphere one reporter called akin to the excitement of a first day in school. I sat glued to the tv – wondering if this woman of slight stature should have dropped from the sky holding an umbrella instead of a gavel.

    I needn’t have bothered. Her first speech as Speaker was direct and unapologetic while offering olive branches to her colleagues across the aisle in an effort to raise the level of discourse between the two parties. She referenced the symbolism of her leadership in a year in which the country would celebrate the 100th anniversary of  a woman’s right to vote, a year where more than 100 women had been elected to serve in the lower chamber. As she spoke, tv cameras periodically panned the audience of women, people of color,  and people of different faiths now seated in positions of power. To quote my friend Bervin, these folks looked more like him and me than the usual Washington political crowd. They looked more like Americans really look. They looked more democratic with a small “d.”

    Last night I watched Nancy Pelosi’s first televised interview as Speaker. The setting was a town hall meeting on the college campus she graduated from in 1962. She fielded questions from commentator Joy Reid and from students in the audience. The topics were as diverse as the real concerns of the American people: climate change, government shutdown, health care, immigration, border security, clean air, clean water, shrinking middle class, wealth disparity, racism, sexism, lgbtq rights and on and on. Speaker Pelosi was forthright in her answers and any Mary Poppins worries I’d had vanished.

    Hey DC dudes, listen up – there’s a new nanny on Cherry Tree Lane and she’s no Mary Poppins. Here’s her first warning: “the culture of cronyism, corruption and incompetence in the federal government has to stop.”

    Thank you very much. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Honestly, people, enough is way past enough.

    Stay tuned.