Politics & Power Quote by Christine Pelosi

A neat piece of political jujitsu: Christine Pelosi frames accountability not as revenge, but as momentum. “We should go forward” is doing heavy work here. It borrows the language of progress and national recovery, repositioning what could be dismissed as partisan score-settling into something like civic housekeeping. The verb choice is tactical: investigate, don’t relitigate; move ahead, don’t look back. It’s a rebuttal to the post-9/11 reflex that inquiry itself is a destabilizing luxury.

The paired institutions, “courts and Congress,” signal a dual-track demand that’s both legal and democratic. Courts suggest rules, evidence, and personal liability; Congress suggests public record, policy reform, and institutional culpability. That coupling also widens the target from individual interrogators to the architects of policy: “post-9/11 interrogations and the decisions leading to them.” The subtext is that the moral breach wasn’t only what happened in rooms with no windows; it was the chain of authorizations that made those rooms possible.

Context matters: post-9/11 interrogations are shorthand for torture debates, CIA “enhanced” methods, and the political bargain that national security can suspend norms. Pelosi’s intent is to break that bargain by insisting that exceptional times still answer to ordinary mechanisms of oversight. She’s also wagering that transparency is strategic: investigations are not just punishment, but a way to restore credibility, deter recurrence, and force a public reckoning with how fear got translated into policy.