gavel

And that day could unfold in very different ways depending on who has the gavel.

If Johnson passes spending legislation with Democratic support, however, he will enrage the same hard-line conservatives who already wrenched the gavel away from Kevin McCarthy, the last speaker who disappointed them.

In the book, Pelosi gets from A to B—acknowledging the difficulty, and being in “awe of the courage of the House Democrats” when she brought down the gavel—without delving too far into the grimy business of how the votes were won.

Dingell, in that 2009–10 Congress, was recently out of his long-held job atop the Energy and Commerce Committee after California Rep. Henry Waxman “had been elected by the members” to take the committee’s gavel.

This matter-of-fact description of how Dingell lost his gavel is Pelosi, and much of her book, in a nutshell, in how it elides the grisly details.