Longtime Bay Area House Rep. Jackie Speier, who just ended a 15-year stint in Congress, has revealed her next chapter, and it is going to keep her on local TV screens talking politics for the foreseeable future.
Speier announced her retirement in November 2021 but declined to elaborate on what else she had planned. Her term just ended last month, and at age 72 she will be taking on a new role, as political analyst for ABC 7/KGO. The station announced Monday that Speier will begin her stint by providing commentary tomorrow evening, February 7, after President Biden's State of the Union address.
After that, the station says, she will "make regular appearances on ABC7 News programs, offering expert knowledge of the inner workings of the political system happening at the local, state and national levels."
KGO is the second-old TV station in the Bay Area, after KPIX, and having launched in 1949, it was the 50th broadcast TV station in the U.S.
Speier has spent much of her life in politics, beginning as an aide to Congressman Leo Ryan, in the late 1970s. She and Ryan were both shot on the tarmac at the airstrip in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978, while they were on a fact-finding mission about People's Temple members, who were almost entirely from the Bay Area. Ryan was killed, and Speier survived after playing dead, and then waiting 22 hours with five gunshot wounds, until help arrived.
She has said, while she waited to saved, "I vowed that if I survived I would dedicate my life to public service."
She later served in the state Assembly from 1986 to 1996 and the state Senate from 1998 to 2006, before her run for Congress. While in Congress, she has been a staunch champion of abortion rights and gun control, and she worked to remove cases of sexual assault from the chain of command in the U.S. military justice system.
Speier was succeeded last month by former Assemblymember Kevin Mullin, representing California's 15th District, which encompasses most of the eastern side of the Peninsula, along with Daly City and a small swath of San Francisco proper.
Biden's State of the Union will air on most broadcast stations Tuesday starting at 6 p.m. Pacific Time. This is Biden's second State of the Union address, and there is some speculation he may use it to signal whether he plans to run for a second term as President.