Nancy Pelosi has laughed off suggestions she forced Joe Biden to drop out of the election against Donald Trump.
The former House speaker was widely accused of being one of the Democrats most involved in convincing the 81-year-old president to step aside.
Pelosi was speaking about her efforts to get more women to run for office when Bill Maher interrupted her with a thinly veiled barb about Biden.
‘Many times when I’m encouraging people to run, especially more women, to run for office,’ she said on Maher’s Real Time show.
Nancy Pelosi has laughed off suggestions she forced Joe Biden to drop out of the election against Donald Trump
‘Nothing more wholesome in our political process than that, aren’t we excited about…’ she said, before Maher interjected.
‘Yes, and sometimes you’re discouraging people to run… we’re not going to get into that,’ he said to laughter from the studio audience.
‘Well, people make their own decisions,’ Pelosi replied.
Maher, not appearing to believe her for a second, said: ‘Oh absolutely they do’, followed by even louder laughter from the audience.
‘But I want to say, from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for what you didn’t do.’
Pelosi was speaking about her efforts to get more women to run for office when Bill Maher interrupted her with a thinly veiled barb about Biden
Maher then asked Pelosi about whether she wanted an open competition to replace Biden, instead of just anointing Kamala HarrisÂ
‘When Joe stepped down, did you want it to be an open convention as opposed to going right to Kamala?’ he said.
Pelosi replied: ‘It was open. Anybody could have gotten in. She wrapped it up, you have to give her credit for that.’
Maher, who for weeks at the time advocated replacing Biden with Harris to avoid a chaotic brokered convention, expressed his relief that was what happened.
‘I do, totally, and the Democratic Party – that’s the smartest thing they did,’ he said.
‘Because they just had a big internal fight [about whether Biden should run], they couldn’t afford another one.
‘They would have looked like what we always think, oh they’re disorganized, but they got their you-know-what together.’
President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, after weeks of public and private hand-wringing by democrats following his disastrous June 27 debate performance
Maher and Pelosi also discussed immigration during her appearance on the show, including a bill in California to help undocumented immigrants buy houses.
Pelosi didn’t have an opinion on the legislation itself as she wasn’t aware of its details, but said she agreed generally with the American Dream being available to more people.
She instead remarked how the two partiers used to be much closer on the issue.
Pelosi referred to Ronald Reagan’s final speech, where he declared that immigrants were one of the country’s greatest strengths.
‘While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.Â
‘This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.’
Pelosi told Maher to ‘Google it, it’s a fabulous speech’ and said George HW Bush continued this pro-immigration policy.
Maher said the policy was for undocumented immigrants, which was why it was controversial.
‘Well, what I would like to do is move them to documented,’ Pelosi replied.
‘One of the best things we can do for our economy is to pass comprehensive immigration reform.’
