Pelosi unswayed by Reid’s retirement

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) retirement will shake up the face of Democratic leadership heading into the next Congress. But it will have no bearing on the plans of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

“She’s on her own trajectory and her own timetable,” a source close to Pelosi said Friday.

Pelosi, the House minority leader who celebrated her 75th birthday on Thursday, has been the top lower-chamber Democrat since 2003, and faces no real challenge to that position.

But some Democrats have grumbled about the need for new faces in the party’s leadership, and each recent election cycle has been accompanied by rampant questions about whether Pelosi would choose to remain — a question on which she’s maintained a steady silence.

Addressing looming shakeups caused by House Democrats jumping into 2016 Senate races, Pelosi herself has advocated for a younger crop of Democratic leaders.

{mosads}”My view is bittersweet. … I want members to reach their own personal fulfillment and they’d be great [senators],” she said earlier this month. “I also want to see some generational change in the House, and I don’t mean members of the House going over to the Senate. It means generational change here in the House.”

She didn’t say when.

Pelosi and Reid have worked closely together over the years, and as the respective leaders of their chambers during President Obama’s first term they did the heavy lifting to ensure passage of some of the president’s signature initiatives, including the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law.

“I have a great working relationship with the Democratic leader,” Pelosi said Thursday of Reid.

Pelosi has been a juggernaut fundraiser for the party, raising more than $100 million in the 2014 cycle alone. And she’s been highly successful in uniting House Democrats behind divisive legislation — a dynamic that was on full display in recent weeks when she helped secure passage of a clean Homeland Security funding bill and legislation providing long-term stability to physician payments under Medicare. 

The source close to Pelosi noted that House Democrats simply don’t have anyone approaching her level of fundraising, unlike in the Senate, where Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is also formidable.

“Unlike Reid, she has impossible shoes to fill,” the source said.

Reid announced Friday that, after five terms in the Senate, he would not seek a sixth at the end of 2016. The 76-year-old Nevadan, who has led the Senate Democrats since 2005, quickly endorsed Schumer, the third-ranking Senate Democrat, to replace him.

Obama was quick to praise Reid’s service, but the White House declined to endorse a successor.

Looking ahead to 2016, Pelosi has been a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential contender, but has declined to say whether the prospect of serving alongside the nation’s first female president would sway any decisions about her post-election plans. 

“I just go one day at a time,” she told The Hill in January. 

— Updated at 4:09 p.m.