Nancy Pelosi, Confident: ‘I Will Be the Speaker of the House’

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday that she is “confident” that Democrats will win the midterm elections on November 6 and that she will be elected Speaker of the House.

Pelosi told Amanpour — who praised her as a “trail blazer” and told her she had “achieved incredible things” — said that she might have stepped aside to make room for new leadership if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, because she wanted to protect Obamacare — a law about which she said she felt “very proprietary.”

However, she said, since “45” had won — she declined to refer to him as “president” throughout the interview — she would stay and run for speaker, partly to inspire other women:

PELOSI: … If Hillary Clinton had won and the Affordable Care Act was protected — I feel very proprietary about that — I was happy to go my way. We didn’t know who would come forward, but that’s up to the caucus, they give me the honor of serving and it’s up to them to choose who comes next. But to have no woman at the table, and to have the Affordable Care Act at risk, I said as long as he’s here, I am here. So — 45 — not to be disrespectful, but —

AMANPOUR: You mean President Trump, “45.”

PELOSI: Yeah. So, no, but I have always been opposed — I think there was one election for leadership that I was not opposed in. People like to get started on what they think comes next, and that’s up to the caucus to decide. But I feel very comfortable about the support that I have in the caucus and that I will be the speaker of the house.

AMANPOUR: You definitely are going to stand and you definitely think you are going to win?

PELOSI: I think it’s really important, though, for women to see as well, because you can’t run away from a fight. You are in the arena. So when some people come forward and say, well, we should have somebody new, okay, you are in the arena, when the Republicans have such a poverty of ideas that the only thing they can put in their ads [sic] is that I am a San Francisco liberal who supports LGBTQ rights, I can take the heat. I don’t like implying that that’s not a good thing, our San Francisco values. But I want women to know that this isn’t easy. Power is never given way and it always has to be fought for and this is, again, a constitutional office and I feel very confident about the support of my colleagues as well as the fact that we will win the election.

Pelosi added that while she did not want to talk about impeaching President Donald Trump, she also did not oppose the idea, if “the facts are there.”

Pelosi served as speaker from 2007-2011, the first woman to hold the post. She pushed Obamacare through Congress, infamously saying, “We have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” Her stance cost her party control of the U.S. House in the 2010 midterm elections.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.