By Richard Cowan and Idrees Ali
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi was injured on a trip to Luxembourg and has been admitted to a hospital for evaluation, her office said in a statement on Friday.
Pelosi, 84, was the first woman to serve as speaker of the House and had also been a longtime leader of the House Democratic Caucus.
“While traveling with a bipartisan Congressional delegation in Luxembourg to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi sustained an injury during an official engagement and was admitted to the hospital for evaluation,” Pelosi spokesperson Ian Krager said in a statement.
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“Speaker Emerita Pelosi is currently receiving excellent treatment from doctors and medical professionals. She continues to work,” he added, but did not say what caused Pelosi’s injury.
She is the second senior member of Congress to suffer an injury this week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, 82, sustained minor injuries after falling in the Capitol.
Like Pelosi, McConnell did not seek another stint as leader in party elections that were held following November’s elections. He will be succeeded when the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3 by 63-year-old South Dakota Senator Jon Thune.
For several years now, aging party leaders in the House and Senate have been under pressure to open the way for a new generation of younger office-holders.
The San Francisco congresswoman stepped down from her role as speaker — a powerful position second in line to the presidency after the vice president — in 2023, when Republicans took majority control of the House and the speaker’s job.
She was reelected on Nov. 5 to a 20th consecutive two-year term with 81% of the vote.
Pelosi played a key role in passing Democratic President Joe Biden’s sweeping $1 trillion infrastructure bill in 2022 and famously feuded with Republican Donald Trump during his first four years in office, culminating with the moment when she tore up his State of the Union speech on national television in 2020.
Pelosi has been a prominent figure in the U.S. capital over a tenure spanning seven presidential administrations. She first served as House speaker from 2007 to 2011, then regained the job in 2019 after her party took back control of the chamber in the 2018 midterm elections.
Democrats lost their House majority in 2022, and Republicans will again hold a narrow majority next year, when President-elect Trump returns to the White House.
(Reporting by Idrees Ali and Richard Cowan; Editing by Scott Malone and Bill Berkrot)
