EDFORD — It was a scene that might have boggled the mind not too long ago: The Speaker of the House talking about the prospects for impeaching the president while snuggling a pajama-clad baby.
But this is 2019, Nancy Pelosi is speaker, a mother of five, and grandmother of nine, who presides over a caucus that comprises a historic number of women, including far more mothers of young children than ever before.
So while Democrats’ takeover of the House this year has pushed talk of impeachment to the center of the national debate, it also has led to a heightened focus on issues affecting mothers, working families, and children.
Friday’s event, hosted by Representative Katherine Clark of Melrose, a member of Pelosi’s leadership team, was the first in a series of events Pelosi has planned across the country, launched after Democrats completed their first 100 days’ agenda. The panel discussion with Pelosi, Clark, Representative Ayanna Pressley of Boston, and Representative Lori Trahan of Lowell, followed a tour of Tuft’s Eliot-Pearson Children’s School, during which the lawmakers saw kindergartners learning about robotics and bio-engineering.
The subject matter reflected not only the fresh prominence that Democrats are giving family issues, but also how party leaders are increasingly emphasizing how these problems connect to other policy areas, such as economic growth, housing, and infrastructure.
“If we’re going to keep these women in the workforce — the way we’ve been boasting about more women in the economy, more women in the Congress, more women in boardrooms — we actually have to solve the problem of early child care so that they’re not making tradeoffs about working and engaging in our economy and staying home. . . because it’s their only option,” Trahan said.
Clark, a member of the Appropriations Committee, recently announced she had helped secure close to $4 billion in additional funding in a House spending bill for the Head Start early childhood education program and the Child Development Block Grant, a federal-state program aimed at helping low-income families pay for child care so they can work or go to school.
At the forum, she said she is is working on a new bill that would target student loan repayment to early childhood educators. “We know that investment of public dollars is one of the very best that we can make,” she said.
Massachusetts, on average, is one of the most expensive states in the country for child care.
Pelosi highlighted legislation introduced by Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, and Representative Bobby Scott, Democrat of Virginia, the Child Care for Working Families Act, which would cap the amount that working families pay for child care to 7 percent of their household income, for those earning less than 150 percent of their state’s median income. She also said she had told Trump in a meeting this week at the White House on infrastructure that Congress needs to better fund programs for children with a range of disabilities. And she noted that the mothers in the House had formed a “baby caucus” to focus on policy affecting very young children.
Attention to family issues extends beyond Congress to the crowded Democratic presidential primary field, which also boasts an unprecedented number of female candidates. Senator Elizabeth Warren in February unveiled a sweeping universal child care plan that she says would provide all families with access to affordable care, paid for by a tax on the “ultra wealthy.” Others emphasized support for paid family leave, universal prekindergarten, and equal pay for women.
Yet Friday’s event also underscored the difficulty that Democrats face in keeping attention focused on their push on this policy and others. Most of the questions that reporters asked following the event focused on President Trump and the ongoing drama his administration has brought to Washington.
Pelosi reiterated her view that the time is not right to initiate impeachment proceedings against the president, as some Democrats have urged, given what was in the Mueller report.
“Impeachment is one of the most divisive and dividing paths that you can take, and if you go down that path you have to have a prospect for success, and I do think that the path of investigation and getting more information — and you never know that one thing can lead to another,” said Pelosi. “Impeachment is never off the table, but should you start there? I don’t agree with that.”
Pressley, who has called for Trump to be impeached, said that focus on the disagreement among Democrats as to whetherto now pursue impeachment undercuts the caucuses’ broader unity on seeking truth for the American people.
“We might have different ideas about how to get there, sequentially, tactically, but we all want the same thing,” she said. “This is bigger than Donald Trump. This is no partisan witch hunt; this is about the institution and the office of the presidency.”
Victoria McGrane can be reached at victoria.mcgrane@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @vgmac.
