If I waited my turn, I wouldn’t be here.
—Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-CT)
After grueling campaigns, victory speeches in low-end hotel ballrooms, and a flurry of local news appearances, the triumphant class of incoming freshmen was ready to stride into Washington and do something big. In their collective imagination, they would sit in their offices writing robust bills to roll back years of Republican tax cuts, torch some Trump administration officials in oversight hearings, and hash out public policy over Chinese food with their new colleagues. They would form alliances with some key Republicans! They would visit the Kennedy Center! They’d guarantee health care for all!
What they found, however, was a sprawling Capitol complex of office buildings and basement byways they could barely navigate, a dizzying freshman orientation dominated by elections for leadership positions they had never even heard of, and the federal government in the middle of what would become the longest shutdown in US history. Republicans, when the freshman Democrats even saw them, had largely no interest in working with them. And dinner? That would likely be hummus and baby carrots at one of scores of receptions they were required to go to, at places like Sonoma, a wine bar near the Capitol, with groups eager to curry favor with the new lawmakers. “You know what it’s like on the first day of high school when you show up and you don’t know what’s going on but everyone pretends they do?” new congresswoman Sharice Davids said to me. “That is what it was like.”
Angie Craig arrived at the Capitol for the new-members reception, giddy with her good fortune, her wife, Cheryl Greene, in tow. But unbeknownst to them, their taxi dropped them on the Senate side of the campus, far from the House. Craig cheerfully asked a Capitol Police officer where she could find the welcome party. She was directed to the Lyndon B. Johnson Room, where a reception was well underway amid the glorious marble walls and period window cornices. She and Greene sashayed in, only to smack directly into Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Oops. This was a reception for Senate members and their spouses. “I had to pretend I was there to see Amy,” she said, referring to Amy Klobuchar, from her home state of Minnesota. “I walked over and whispered to her,” and the senator discreetly directed her to the other side of the building.
There is no instruction manual for being a member of Congress. The rules are, basically, there are no rules. Are you going to spend your money on as many full-paid staff members as possible or pay more money to fewer? Will you read every press release before it goes out, delegate that task completely, or do something somewhere in between? How many televisions should you have in your office, and what station will they be on? How many weekly meetings will you have, and who will attend them?
“We’re basically a small business,” Donna Shalala, at seventy-eight the oldest woman ever to be elected to the House, told me. She held several executive-levels jobs before making the somewhat curious decision to run for office. “We control our own salaries and set our own standards. We don’t even have human resources. Members of Congress want to be able to hire and fire at will. And they do.”
Most new members seem to be surprised by this, as if the secrets of the job will somehow be revealed in the intervening weeks between their election and starting the job. Nope. “Orientation was pretty content-free,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) told me. She is the first woman ever to be elected from her district, which she describes as “a complicated and eclectic purple place, which makes it critical to the national map.”
“It is literally where the red meets the blue in Pennsylvania,” she said. “In the east, there are affluent suburbs along the collar of Philadelphia. As you go westward, it transitions to rolling farmland, home to the mushroom capital of the world, and many dairy farmers.” She traversed the halls of Congress with her face pinched in what appears to be moderate terror. “They told us, ‘Here is your health insurance, here is how you get paid.’ Well, I could have figured that part out. I could have used more information about how you actually are a congressperson. How do you vote? How do you do a committee?”
Chrissy Houlahan—a US Air Force veteran with a Stanford engineering degree, who worked for several startups before becoming a teacher in North Philadelphia—is an example of the type of highly accomplished woman who won in 2018. She was inspired to run, she said, after Donald Trump won the presidency, because she feared for her father, a Holocaust survivor, and her lesbian daughter.
She soon began to wonder, however, as many of her colleagues did, whether she could accomplish more in her old job than she could being one of 535 members of a fairly dysfunctional institution. “I do feel so isolated as a member of Congress sitting in an office,” she said, glancing around at her government-issue furniture in a room bathed in wan winter light. “I am used to startups, and working on top of everybody.” But Houlahan recalled that just before she got to Washington, a wealthy donor in her nineties had taken her to the snazzy Pyramid Club in Philadelphia, with a plea to help build a more female Congress. “She said, ‘You have to promise me you won’t leave until there are more of you.’ ” Houlahan paused. “I am hopeful that I don’t become jaded. I want to remember what a privilege it is to be here.”
The animating force for the incoming freshman class, though its members did not know it yet, would be the battle to define the future of the party, embodied, eventually, in the 2020 race for the White House. That struggle began with a fight over the political future of Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi was, of course, the first female Speaker, who has lived for years under perpetual layers of myths and stereotypes, from the left and right, concerning her personal politics and leadership style. The truth about Pelosi is that in spite of the rhetoric, she is politically practical, to the extent that some of the constituents of her San Francisco district occasionally take to protesting outside her office as if she were conservative politician Sarah Palin. She is also an excellent bludgeon against her Republican colleagues, as many long gone from the Hill admit with grudging respect.
On one thing most can agree: Pelosi’s ability to manage her fellow Democrats has had few modern rivals. Although dismissed by many on the left as too cautious and overly wedded to the institutional traditions of Washington, it was Pelosi who almost singlehandedly maneuvered among them to bring the Affordable Care Act to life in 2010, rather than the small-ball bill to increase health care for children that Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s skittish White House chief of staff, had wanted. Pelosi also delivered President George W. Bush his Wall Street bailout in 2008, showing not only her ideological dexterity but her ironfisted control of the Speaker’s gavel.
Her dexterity (it should be noted that this is a woman who occasionally eats her beloved Dove ice-cream bars with a knife and fork) is matched only by her remarkable skills of self-preservation, even after years of calls from some corners of her own party that she go away. In 2018, Pelosi was seen by many Democrats as a political liability who needed to be replaced. Scores of freshmen had suggested during their campaigns that they would vote against her for Speaker, denouncing her as basically an anachronistic incrementalist who had been insufficiently resistant to the Trump administration.
Pelosi showed up in January 2019 seemingly many votes shy of the job. Most of those who opposed her—both old and new members—hailed from Republican-heavy districts where Pelosi was unpopular. Others, like Rashida Tlaib, who told a New York Times reporter, “Trump got elected on her watch,” were agitating for generational change.
One ally, Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA), frostily and publicly chastised his colleagues for launching a leadership challenge after a record-breaking year for female Democrats, crediting Pelosi with their victories. “The first thing we do is we thank that architect who happens to be the only woman speaker in the history of this body?” he said. “We don’t even give her a gold watch, just ‘thank you for your service and get out’?”
Pelosi, unlike her two Republican successors, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, understood how to bend members’ wills to her needs, through a complex web of cajoling, making offers that could not be refused, and sheer charm, and by pushing her hundreds of allies to do her bidding. Jon Soltz, the cofounder and chair of VoteVets.org, a liberal organization, got a call from Pelosi around this time. She had worked hard with veterans’ groups to get veterans and other service members elected, and was not keen on any of them signing a letter written by Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), also a veteran, pledging to vote against her. She hosted a breakfast for incoming freshman veterans, where she gently made the point that she had spent a lot of money on their races and that they had helped take back the House. “Pelosi and her allies probably spent thirty million dollars on veterans,” Soltz said. “It wasn’t a secret that I told people, ‘Hey it’s best to take a knee right now before you get into a situation with Nancy Pelosi that you can’t win.’ ”
Also unlike Ryan and Boehner, who did not have the patience or wherewithal for such intense member management, Pelosi met individually with every single freshman as well as potential senior opponents, reading their needs, making promises, and cutting deals. There were big jobs on committees to dole out, and issues that matter most for members to champion; she defused one member’s opposition by promising to push for his bill that would allow people to buy into Medicare well before retirement age. She also agreed to not serve a day past four years if elected Speaker one last time. It wasn’t that generous an offer—after all, she would be eighty-two by the time of her promised exit—but it bound the other members of her largely aged leadership team to her two-term limit, a gesture greatly appreciated by Democrats thirsting for a changing of the guard.
When carrots were not useful, there were sticks, some of them the size of a redwood branch, often delivered in a way that reflected Pelosi’s hardscrabble Baltimore political roots more than her genteel San Francisco neighborhood and demure day suits. When Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH) mulled a challenge to Pelosi for the gavel, reports suddenly materialized noting that in 2015 Fudge had sent a letter of support for a former Ohio judge, Lance Mason, after he admitted to beating his wife in 2014. (By the time the letter was reported—which Pelosi’s office repeatedly said it had nothing to do with—he had been convicted of his wife’s murder.) Pelosi also announced that as Speaker, she would appoint Fudge the new chair of the reinstated Subcommittee on Elections, which oversees voting rights issues, minutes before Fudge announced she would no longer seek to challenge her.
Votes were accruing, but freshmen were needed. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) and I were having a cup of coffee near the Capitol the day before she was sworn in, and her mood was nothing short of ebullient. The government was shut down and the party was in a tangle over its leadership slate, but Escobar had won the seat just vacated by soon-to-be Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, and she imagined a quilt of favorable circumstances spread out before her. As one of the first two Hispanic women from Texas ever to serve in the House, Escobar saw herself as a potentially important new voice at the border, and specifically in El Paso, where Trump had been threatening to build a wall.
Endlessly effervescent (the only time I saw her grimace in those early days was during a Judiciary Committee hearing when a Republican member from Florida accused immigrants of being criminals) and startlingly optimistic, Escobar reflected on the last big class of freshmen to roll into town, eighty-seven Republicans in 2011. “I think we have the opportunity to do some of the same things,” she said. “But they were a wrecking ball. It’s a lot easier to tear something down than build something. I think we have to rebuild democracy. It’s been eroded.”
Her cell phone rang, and it was Pelosi, whom Escobar had decided to support in her bid for Speaker, even as some freshmen continued to suggest they would look elsewhere for leadership. “Leader, how are you?” Escobar said, clearly thrilled. Pelosi asked if she would be one of three freshman women to give speeches supporting her nomination for Speaker of the House. “That would be the honor of a lifetime!” Escobar told her.
The next morning, I caught up with Escobar after her nominating speech before a giant crowd of her colleagues in a large hearing room on the Hill. “I started crying,” she admitted as she leaned near a bust of Nicholas Longworth, a onetime Speaker of the House. “I never get nervous before speeches, but these are people I respect and admire. It was intimidating. My heart was pounding. I feel grateful that she has identified me as an ally.”
All told, a mere fifteen of the scores of Democrats who had suggested they were gunning for fresh leadership actually voted against Pelosi. Tlaib? She voted for Pelosi (for the “future of our children,” she said). Ditto for Ocasio-Cortez, who had also once suggested she would not automatically be giving Pelosi the nod. So much for the insurrection, especially from the progressive left; indeed, they became the cornerstone of her Speaker reelection. Still, it had been a difficult few weeks for Pelosi, and it was hard not to feel that the fight had diminished her. She had won, but only through what had amounted to high-stakes groveling, often before people a third her age.
The rest of the country had marveled at her December 2018 takedown of Trump in the Oval Office live on television before strutting out into the street in her burnt-orange Max Mara coat. Early in the new Congress, as Pelosi appeared to unmoor the pugilistic president again, many would come to view their choice as profound and prescient, further emphasized when she held out for the right moment to begin impeachment processes against him. But Pelosi and her team had to understand the price tag on her power. The next generation had its foot firmly in the door.
Speaker of the House is a job that most Americans vaguely understand, but there are other leadership positions throughout Congress, and the majority of freshmen are not aware of the bevy of these positions they will be voting on, nor are they always familiar with the colleagues they will be asked to vote for, or against. There is the whip, who counts the votes and pressures members to fulfill the Speaker’s wishes, and the caucus chair, who tries to communicate the party’s message to other members and the press, as well as various other leadership and political positions. “That was unexpected for me,” Rashida Tlaib told me a week after orientation. “You’re thinking about hitting the ground running, and instead there are these layers and elections and processes. I didn’t expect that much competition even for freshman class president. It was never-ending and overwhelming to keep track of who was running.”
Tlaib, the oldest of fourteen children of Palestinian immigrants, was a longtime community activist and onetime state legislator from Detroit, perhaps best known for having been escorted, yelling, from the Cobo Center by security for heckling Donald Trump during a speech in August 2016, when he was his party’s presidential nominee. She continued to lead rallies right after being elected, still in the trenches of street political warfare. “Rashida has a totally different political background from most people here,” Rep. Debbie Dingell told me. The senior member from Tlaib’s home state has known the freshman for twenty-five years. “She has the courage to jump over a fence to say what she is thinking.”
Mercurial and prone to tears, especially during emotional speeches about her family, Tlaib would float down the hall to vote one day, smiling and laughing, and scowl at all comers the next. While an early and persistent proponent of impeachment, she spent most of her first days in Congress focused on local issues, like Michigan’s high car-insurance costs, and making big changes to her district offices to provide more services to her largely poor constituents. During the orientation sessions with freshmen, Tlaib was expecting long discussions about ethical landmines and cybersecurity concerns. Instead, she told me, “I could not believe that the number one question that came from the audience members was about sexual harassment.” Only when it was explained that each office would be responsible for any misconduct there did many members seem to wake up, she said. “The accountability shit is when the hands went up.”
Having defeated better-known, better-funded incumbents, many of the freshman women felt a deep confidence when they arrived to govern. But once in Washington, primed to change it, they found Washington eager to intercede. Exhausted by the campaign, Lauren Underwood had hoped to take some time off and regroup with her family. Her first taste of DC came from party leaders: No way, they said. There was orientation, management seminars, staff to hire, an apartment to find. There would be no rest.
Underwood was instantly bathed in a state of grievance. “I did not fully appreciate the dysfunction in our own caucus,” she said. “It permeates the place. We freshmen were unilaterally boxed out of all the key committee assignments. Health care was the single issue in my race—well, that and the chaos—but then we get to freshman orientation and no one mentioned health care!” Recovering from a cold, I began to cough incessantly, but Underwood, undaunted and voice rising, went on. “I thought, ‘Let’s review why we won,’ ” she said. “Was it to enjoy the benefits of being in the majority? I thought there would be at least a conversation.”
There was more. Offices were underfunded. Underwood felt pressures to pay interns, a noble goal, she conceded, but one that would cost her precious resources. She felt scrutinized for not having more black staff members. She saw her colleagues in mixed districts like hers “already running again,” by taking conservative positions that undermined the Democrats’ agenda, but she also saw those in safe districts needlessly fretting about their place in the pecking order on the Hill. “There is such a top-down approach,” she said. “As freshmen, our strength is in our numbers. A lot of our people are straight-up stars at home, and yet they are so worried about their reelection. I had a very long policy wish list when I got here, including equal pay, health care, reducing gun violence in a meaningful way.”
Like freshmen of both parties who arrive with dreams of legislating aboard a speedboat, she found she had arrived to meet a glacier instead. A senior aide to Democratic leaders told me that Underwood was simply impatient. Too many freshmen had arrived, the aide said, not understanding, for instance, the painstaking way that bills go from notions to carefully vetted pieces of legislation, and from subcommittee to committee to the House floor.
When I suggested this to Underwood, she raised a bullshit-detecting eye at the diagnosis, noting that many bills had been precooked by the leaders before the new Congress even commenced and were handed out one by one to some of the freshmen to “own” for quick victories up front to boast about back home. “We could have gone so much bigger,” she said. “It was really a missed opportunity.”
At times, Underwood can seem a bit like a serious student who refuses to go to football games or parties, preferring extra-credit homework and the Sunday crossword puzzle while swathed in a flannel bedtime ensemble. She declined to join the ideological caucuses, such as the Progressive Caucus (most progressive liberals) or the New Democrat Coalition (most moderates), where members tend to find cosponsors for their bills, discuss policy agendas, and make buddies. “It probably hurts me,” she said. “But I don’t fit neatly in any of those boxes. I don’t want to be defined by those. As a result, I sort of have my toe in all these different areas: making sure our economy grows, farmers are taken care of, not screwed by the president in trade wars.”
Her conservative dresses and perpetual smile often seem to be barely masking underlying irritation—with colleagues, hearing witnesses, sometimes maybe with journalists like me. Unlike the majority of other House members, she also does not fill her nights with receptions, which are networking opportunities or a chance to do something fun, like eat cheese at the French embassy. “I would say my approach is that we were given two years to do something impactful,” she said. “I worry about our ability to do that. I don’t know if we were given the complete set of tools. Or maybe I haven’t found a way to maximize the tools to be successful.”
Six weeks into the new Congress, Underwood held a town hall meeting in Sycamore, Illinois, ninety miles from the Iowa border. About 150 people had gathered in the high school auditorium there, and the new congresswoman sat in a classroom powdering her face, touching up her lipstick, and adjusting her own microphone. “We had a lot of antiabortion protesters yesterday,” she told me then, hoping that tonight’s meeting would draw a less conservative cohort. She knew she was under constant and clear fire. Only a few months into her term, she had three Republican opponents for 2020. She smoothed her sparkling jacket. Show time.
To every question posed—concerning gender pay disparity, the conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen, the Trump administration’s family separation policies at the US-Mexico border (hugely unpopular in this family-oriented semirural community), opioids, climate change—she would answer, “Thank you for your question,” then offer a careful and informed response. Her parents, who have attended the majority of her town hall meetings, drove her home.
Like all the black Democrats who won majority-white districts in 2018, Underwood seamlessly glides between the white working-, middle-, and upper-class spheres of her district and the power corridors of Washington, while remaining emphatically tied to black American culture and concerns. She stays in close contact with Alpha Kappa Alpha, her historically black sorority, and made the formation of a working group on black maternal health a top priority; an African American college friend of hers had died from complications related to childbirth. “I was standing at the press conference trying not to cry,” the generally poker-faced congresswoman said, describing the news conference to announce the new Black Maternal Health Caucus. She added: “We did this because women are dying every day, and I am the first and only young black woman who has ever been here. It actually has negative political ramifications in my district. I accept that, and I will take that risk.”
Underwood would quickly evolve into one of the most legislatively productive members of the freshman women, flying forty thousand feet above the enduring controversies and keeping her pen to pad, at times taxing her staff. Horrified by conditions at the border, she had her subordinates clear her calendar so she could draft legislation herself, which they were skeptical could be accomplished, to address sanitary conditions for children. Her legislation to protect children and domestic-abuse victims and her various health-care provisions and measures to help farmers were largely successful, impressing House leaders. They eyed her as a clearly rising star, if she could manage to stay in office.
The new majority in many ways reflects the political and cultural passage of time over the near decade since the party last controlled the House. Ten years earlier, there was a sizable contingent of Democrats opposed to abortion; now their numbers have been thinned to almost nothing as abortion rights has become a litmus test for both parties. Not long ago, support for gay marriage was an outlying position. Now, Democrats of every religious and geographic background advocate for gay rights. While views on gun rights still span an ideological arc, few are the Democrats who do not support more stringent background checks for gun buyers and new rules to allow law enforcement to confiscate weapons from those deemed a threat to themselves and others.
The incoming group was, however, heterogeneous when it came to matters of national security, foreign policy, immigration, and fiscal matters, and were generally divided on the best way forward on health care. But many Democrats who had just won Republican districts were terrified of voting against measures, even those offered by Republicans, that they thought might make their more conservative voters back home turn against them. This reluctance created an immediate and consequential wedge among the freshmen.
“What’s been a big surprise and disappointment is how much fear people are operating with here,” Katie Hill told me early on in a hallway between meetings, her blond bangs hanging in her eyes. “I’m not here to win reelection. I am here to do what I said I am going to do, and I am trying to set an example with taking risks.” This would be a theme among freshmen from tough districts for Democrats. Every minute someone stays in Congress generally makes them long for another, but many of these new congresswomen had left decent day jobs. Losing might not have been their greatest fear.
Hill, a social progressive who has also fashioned herself a pragmatist eager to cut legislative deals with Republicans, the daughter of a cop and a nurse, a gun owner and a married bisexual, a dog and goat owner, a girl-next-door athlete who brags about her “resting bitch face,” manages to seem less shape-shifter than simply a contemporary unfiltered product of her district on the northern edge of Los Angeles County. She was elected by her peers to be a leader of the class. This role, and her outspoken nature, also made Hill an early go-to for the news shows. “I go on Fox and I go on MSNBC and say the same things, and they both think I am with them,” she said with a shrug. She also plays pickup basketball games on Monday night. One week she was the only woman. “And one guy was the only Republican,” she said.
Katie Hill was an instant favorite of Nancy Pelosi, who liked her cheerful confidence and favored her laser-like questions in meetings about how to better market Democrats’ ideas. How, Hill wondered, could freshmen let people back home know the goodies they got for them in appropriations bills? How were they supposed to talk about a potential pay raise for House members? Pelosi made her vice chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, where Trump officials were expected to traipse through for questioning and chastening by the venerable Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD).
“I mean, WTF,” Hill said with no small amount of awe as we chatted in a hallway off the floor of the House between votes. “I feel like, ‘Wow, is this my life?’ ”
At the same time, she was quickly disenchanted by many of her colleagues, whose refusal to stop campaigning seemed to be getting in the way of some of the policy making she had hoped for. Republicans, short of tools in their newfound minority, would toss procedural measures known as “motions to recommit” on the floor to trip up Democrats. These measures, tacked on to bills at the very last minute, are full of inflammatory language meant to embarrass or shame people who wind up voting for what is otherwise a bill they support. But some new Democrats from Republican districts feared that voting against measures that called for things like denouncing anti-Semitism or curbing gun rights for illegal immigrants would hurt them back home, and so, imagining an easily cut thirty-second attack ad in the coming election season, they gave the measures a nod, at times giving Republicans victories on the floor, to the horror of Pelosi and other Democrats.
Hill had the Speaker’s back on this. She would eventually be given the assignment to stand on the House floor and speak against a Republican motion that would have prevented transgender kids from participating in some school sports. It had been tacked on to a bill to extend long-standing federal antidiscrimination protections to LGBTQ Americans. In a fiery retort in the spirit of a much more seasoned colleague, Hill excoriated the amendment and addressed Republicans: “You, my colleagues, are on the wrong side of history,” she said, “and we will be waiting for you on the other side.”
Among her more moderate colleagues, not everyone was charmed by Hill’s leadership. They worried she was too close to Pelosi to properly represent their interests. They were not sure their side of the story on these pesky motions to recommit was getting full consideration, or that she fully understood the challenges of districts where there were simply a limited number of Democratic voters. But many other members, and their young staff, were taken with Hill’s fresh and casual manner—she met in the kitchen of a gun-control advocate, her sockless feet tucked under her on a stool—and the progressives loved her advocacy that they thought pushed back against some of the older leaders.
Katie Hill and Lauren Underwood were both candid and at times biting about their own whirlwind rides to the Capitol. Hill is the occasionally potty-mouthed, somewhat messy Oscar-ette to Underwood’s preppy midwestern Felix-ette, a modern twist on the classic TV show The Odd Couple. Underwood once became flustered and apologized to staff members with whom she was stuffing envelopes while listening to Beyoncé, for a patch of R-rated lyrics; Hill’s sex life would soon become part of the sometimes-messy narrative of her class.
In some sort of one-day-to-be-unraveled metaphor, the roommates arrived in Washington and remained bedless for weeks. Hill’s bed was delivered not once but twice to her California home. Underwood bought a bed on sale at Crate & Barrel before leaving Illinois, but the mattress slats arrived too short. Then came new slats that were too long. As she contemplated where to get a hacksaw (I mentioned to her they actually make furniture in the House, but she quickly pointed out that asking Capitol workers for said saw would be a potential ethics violation), she slept on an air mattress on the kitchen floor. “So at eleven o’clock at night, we connect in our pajamas,” Underwood told me. “And this is what we are.”
For many of the new women, the thrill of victory was slowly being overtaken by the reality of the new job, both in its time-draining details and in the limits of their star power and novelty back home. The first time I met with Jahana Hayes, a few months into the new Congress, she was dressed in a Connecticut-neat yellow shift dress and matching cardigan. She settled into a comfy chair in her office and heaved a sigh, as if already exhausted by the week, the job, and me. Her outer office was filled with books about tennis, leadership, and black Americans in Congress. A map of Waterbury hung on the wall. She talked to me about the shocks of her entry into the DC world. It was hard, she said, after months of struggling to stand on a stage as a winner and a young, diverse majority maker, to find herself now subordinate to a group of septuagenarians who had failed to take back the House for nearly a decade and yet were calling all the shots. Minority women were left feeling isolated, their experiences back home with voters dismissed.
“There’s this idea that you worked really hard to get here, and you’re still trying to prove you belong here,” Hayes said, sinking deeper into her chair. “Minority women ran very different elections. We engaged with a very different group. Then you get here, and it’s like, ‘Trust us— this is the way it’s done. We appreciate you being here. Now, you need to change everything you did to get here.’ ”
Why, for instance, for every press conference, she wondered, do they have to line up by seniority, indicated by a number on the back of their member pin? Why was the length of term, rather than the difficulty of the race or the number of new voters brought to the polls, the measure of success and entitlement? And why, Hayes asked, was the Democratic leadership trying to prevent younger, insurgent members from joining their ranks?
It may come as a surprise, but House Democrats are more bound to tradition than Republicans. Under GOP control, committee chairmen (and they were virtually all men) were term-limited, guaranteeing fresh opportunities and frequent fights for supremacy. Democrats have stuck doggedly to the seniority system, largely because senior members are loath to jeopardize their primacy on committees. But that fealty to experience has consequences.
Before the class of 2019 was even sworn in, a fight had broken out over potential primary challenges to sitting members in 2020. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bold pickoff of Joe Crowley was an inspiration to other young hopefuls across the country who wanted to take on the old guard. The House leaders, assisted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which funds House campaigns, were seeking to tamp these upstarts down, and doing what they could to protect incumbents.
“If I waited my turn, I wouldn’t be here,” Hayes said. “There is a place for veterans in leadership, but there has to be a place for new members. They are telling us things to do to expand the electorate, and I am thinking, ‘I didn’t do any of these things.’ ”
Hayes offered insight about some of the specific sticking points dividing the generations. For instance, many of the older members were imploring the newcomers to tweet less, clearly unnerved by the platform’s ability to stir up tensions. “Take social media,” Hayes said. “They tell us to stay off. Well, that’s how we engage people.” There was also a lack of appreciation, she felt, for online fundraising, which was, she said, “a huge component and a huge reason we got here.”
Senator Chris Murphy has kept in touch with Hayes and understands her frustration. “She has done everything her way her entire life,” he told me. “She became a teacher her way. She built a campaign her way. And I think she is committed to being a congresswoman her way.”
Even more challenging, Hayes said, is the fact that in spite of the constant celebrations of diversity, her race still felt at times like a liability. “My chief of staff is a white man,” Hayes said. “So people ask me a question, then look at him.” Controlling gun violence was one of her signature issues, she continued. “People assume that is because I represent Sandy Hook,” she said, referring to the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, where in 2012, twenty children and six adult staff members were slaughtered in one of the most dreadful mass shootings in history. “But on my mind is also that I represent Bridgeport, and Waterbury,” cities where gun violence is present every day.
Being a new voice in Congress, Hayes told me, “is both empowering and exhausting.” Too often, she said, she would find herself expressing the views of a black member of Congress or framing issues around their impact on communities of color, only to find that perspective met with stony silence. At an education hearing, she turned a policy discussion toward how a proposal would impact young black boys. “You wait for someone else to see it and to agree with you. On the one hand, it’s frustrating.” She sat up a bit in her chair for the first time over our forty-five-minute discussion. “On the other hand, it’s perfect. This is why I am here.”
The new congresswomen were realizing that their days were more jam-packed than they could have ever imagined, and that control over their own time was often a luxury, their meals even less so.
A typical day for a House member is basically this: wake up, maybe go to the House gym. Most days, Rep. Mike Thompson, a California Democrat, will be leading a spin class. If it’s Wednesday, the class will be taught by Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who once served in the House and whose spin class was very popular. A trainer would occasionally teach yoga. From there, the day is a block of fifteen-minute meetings with constituents and interest groups: Hi, nice to see you, National Air Traffic Controllers Association, National Association of Chemical Distributors, National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, and National Association of Letter Carriers!
In between, there are hearings, meetings with fellow Democrats, racing across the street to the DCCC office to make calls to donors (it is illegal to do that at the Capitol), and more meetings. Evenings bring receptions—with donors, interest groups, clubs, sororities, foreign policy panels. Usually, there is food, but members can’t avail themselves of much more than a random goat cheese–stuffed date, lest their mouth be full when someone wants to meet them, bend their ear, take a selfie, or push a cause. Dinner is often a PowerBar and a handful of cashews. Ditto for snacks. “I try not to eat a bag of chips from the gas station,” Angie Craig told me.
Members of Congress fly home at taxpayer expense when the votes are done for the week, which can change by the hour. (One of the hardest jobs on the Hill has to be that of the office schedulers, who live their lives with a Google Calendar that is a veritable Rubik’s Cube, with multiple flight selections always on alt screen.)
Americans see very little of this. They assume that when members go home, they are sitting with their families in front of football games for a week, when, in fact, time back in the district usually means a grueling schedule of daily visits with local mayors and other officials, from health-care centers, chambers of commerce, and veterans’ groups, along with attending events like kindergarten graduations and job fairs.
Many people accept the notion that when former TV host Jon Stewart comes to the Hill and goes viral-video ballistic, demanding to know why so few members have shown up to listen to him and 9/11 first responders testify on a health-care bill, that those members must be in secret meetings with shady donors. In fact, they are likely at one of many other hearings, which tend to be held simultaneously, another nod to a manic tradition of House scheduling, and a central complaint of many new members.
On nights without receptions or fundraisers, sometimes members work until 3 a.m., hashing out the rules for a bill, or poring over thick binders of policy notes over a microwaved Wawa burrito. It is arguably a ridiculous life, or, as one senior staff member characterized it, a frequent brew of “ambition, treachery, social awkwardness, and sexual frustration.” But it isn’t leisurely.
The challenges of the schedule are particularly hard for parents. A generation ago, members of Congress tended to move to Washington with their families in tow, returning to their home districts mainly at election time. Members got to know one another and each other’s families, which at times created genuine bonds and helped to tamp down partisan rancor. That practice fell out of favor, however, as the public’s desire for their representatives to show up in the district grew and the notion of “going Washington” became an increasingly pejorative term. Women with children were often frowned upon by their colleagues, constituents, or both. “Bella called me and said, ‘I hear you have two children,’ ” Pat Schroeder told me, recalling, decades later, how her excitement in hearing from pioneering congresswoman Bella Abzug quickly evaporated. “She said ‘I don’t think you can do it.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, Bella doesn’t think I can do it.’ ” (She did it, with a supportive husband and the time-management skills of a Martha Stewart calendar.)
A single mom of three children, Katie Porter has often noted that Congress “is not built for people like me.” Her first move when she got to Washington was to hire a “manny,” who lives with her kids at home in Orange County, California, during the week. She has an old-fashioned paper wall calendar in her office, on which she keeps meticulous track of how many days her children have her at home. In January, it was nineteen days “with mom” and twelve without. On the day that the first recess was canceled because of the government shutdown, there is a hand-drawn sad face.
In a House Financial Services Committee hearing one day, she was marking all of her days off, and two other freshman mothers sitting near her, Rashida Tlaib and Cindy Axne (D-IA), clucked with sympathy. “Having two moms on that committee, that is psychologically helpful to me,” Porter told me. Tracking the days on her calendar also helps her manage emotionally. “I’m trying to be intentional about how this is unfolding,” she said, “and not just letting this happen to me. I need to preserve the energy and passion that brought me here.”
As difficult as it is to be a parent and a congressperson, the new cohort has it relatively good. The first congresswoman to give birth while in office was Rep. Yvonne Brathwaite Burke (D-CA) in 1973; she hung it up six years later to return to Los Angeles. “I didn’t leave Congress because I did not enjoy it. I enjoyed it very much,” she said in an interview with the National Visionary Leadership Project decades later. “But by the time my daughter got to be old enough to go to school in first grade, it just was going to be impossible, so I had to make some choices.”
In 2019, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican from the state of Washington, became the second woman to have three children while serving in Congress; the prior year, Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, became the first woman to have a baby while serving in the Senate. Both births felt like tipping points to me. As I stood in the Speaker’s lobby gazing at the House floor in June of 2019, Herrera Beutler walked onto the floor with her five-week-old baby in tow, something I had never seen before. She struggled to simultaneously vote on a bill while also removing her crabby newborn from her baby carrier, at one point gently settling her onto the floor. Members from both parties walked over to admire the squalling cutie. “She wants a boob,” Herrera Beutler said to one of the women as she frantically bounced her daughter while staring at the timer on the vote. “She’s had it.”
An hour later, I walked across the steaming-hot Capitol complex to visit with Democratic senator Patty Murray, who ran for office decades ago as “just a mom in tennis shoes” and who also happens to be from Herrera Beutler’s home state. She listened to my story with wide eyes. “Just the ability for Jaime to bring her baby on the floor, that never was allowed,” she said. It was a small but stunning bit of progress, Murray said. She noted that just a year prior, there was a fight in the Senate to allow Duckworth to bring her baby on the Senate floor, because some of the male senators said they were afraid of being distracted by crying.
Men’s and women’s bathrooms now have changing tables, and in 2019, pumping areas for breastfeeding mothers were added to the House. Katie Porter had a provision written into a House bill that would codify a rule allowing working parents running for Congress to use campaign funds for childcare costs, a measure that the Senate will likely never consider under Republican control.
Children are slowly becoming a fixture on Capitol Hill. A decade ago, it was a novelty when New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand had her young sons linger in the cloakroom while she voted. Now, kids can often be seen on the last days of the session, when school is out, wandering with their parents in the halls and sitting on the House floor, staring into space, while their parents debate the finer points of election law. Jahana Hayes won’t let her staff schedule lunch meetings, because she uses the break to FaceTime with her daughter. She and the other women in the “Moms’ Caucus” successfully pushed for the legislative calendar to more closely follow the school year.
The Senate, as ever, lags, with the leaders of that body prone to scheduling votes late at night or sometimes even on the weekends. “You can see in the women the stress of ‘How am I going to balance that with what I told my kids—I would take them to dinner, because I’ve not been able to do that,’ ” Murray told me. “It’s more often than not men who go, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna be here,’ ” she said, as if late-night votes were a signal of their tenacity. This is a hot topic at the bipartisan dinners that the women of the Senate attend nearly religiously every six weeks or so. “We really listen to each other,” Murray said of those dinners, which were started decades ago by now-retired senator Barbara Mikulski, the longest-serving female senator ever. “You know, we talk about everything. How do you live in a place like this? Is it hard to be yourself? Where’s the best place to get your clothes cleaned when it’s midnight? How do you take care of your family? What do you like to do in the summer? Also heavy-duty policy issues, like what’s happening in Iran. And how do you guys see this?”
The new freshmen also didn’t know how good they had it in another important area: the ability to get media attention. Many had arrived on the Hill with a Rolling Stone cover, a glowing women’s magazine profile, or a series of news program interviews already under their belts. They had no sense of how extraordinary this was, as some of their older colleagues had had to wait for years for reporters to come anywhere near them for a quote. A few freshmen were in the enviable position of already being household names, perhaps a boon not only for them but for an institution that attracted at best disinterest and more typically derision from average voters.
But long before they could pass a single bill, the freshmen arrived to a shut-down government and very little to actually do. The shutdown had begun in the prior Congress over a dispute over border-wall funding, which President Trump was seeking and Democrats and some Republicans were refusing to give him as part of a general spending agreement. In the new Congress, House Democrats had passed a variety of bills, absent wall money, to reopen the government, but because Trump insisted that he would veto any bill that did not appropriate money for a border wall, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to bring any bills to the Senate floor.
The impact on federal workers was devastating, particularly among Transportation Security Administration agents and air traffic controllers, who spent the December–January holidays working without pay. The shutdown went on so long that some US government employees, in Washington and all across the country, were forced to line up at food pantries.
Powerless freshmen wanted to help. Some had reached out to Republican members at a bipartisan government retreat early on, only to be rebuffed. They called Nancy Pelosi’s office, to ask: How could they, a high-profile bunch of members, draw attention to the shutdown and make it clear to people who understand nothing about Congress that this was all the Senate Republicans’ fault? They were insiders now and wanted a piece of the action.
One day in early January, as the shutdown dragged into its third week, a group of freshmen, led by Katie Hill, decided the way to go about this was to hold a press conference outside the Capitol, and then go over to Senator McConnell’s office and demand a meeting.
On cue, shortly after a midday vote, a dozen House members marched down the steps of the east side of the Capitol to the “Senate Swamp,” a grassy area across the complex, outside the Senate door. They seemed mildly perplexed about what to do next. “How is the media going to find us?” asked one.
This was not a problem. Piles of photographers had lined up to catch the members walking through the icy afternoon across the cobblestones.
Katie Hill spoke first: “The dysfunction has to change,” she said, before others took to the microphones to denounce Trump, McConnell, and the Republicans in general. “We were sent here to restore order,” said Lauren Underwood. Ilhan Omar cracked, “This feels like a poorly scripted scene from House of Cards.” A few more members spoke.
Everyone shivered. “I am starting to question my judgment here,” grumbled one Washington Post reporter as the members droned on in the cold. (An outdoor press conference in the winter is rarely a crowd-pleaser, especially a long one.)
At last, Ayanna Pressley took to the microphone and the cameras focused in on her frame, coatless but perhaps owing to her Boston-ness seemingly impervious to the thirty-four-degree chill. “We are representatives of democracy,” she thundered.
With that, the members turned to the right, intent on storming McConnell’s office, which sits not far from the Capitol Rotunda. But first, they had to get there. None of them seemed quite sure of the route and looked to amused reporters, who were there to cover the story but not advise on it, to tell them which stairway to use.
As the members, their young staffers, and the media formed an odd-looking parade, an unanticipated bottleneck developed at the entrance; the members had not taken into account that their staff and the reporters chasing them would need to go through the metal detector. On top of that, Katie Hill’s spokeswoman had forgotten her ID and had to have the congresswoman come back and dragoon her through. The media scrambled to keep up.
Finally, the new members marched into Senator McConnell’s ornate office, where they were greeted by two staff members. The freshmen glanced around at the chandelier, the gilded rococo mirrors, and the silk-covered couches; the Republican majority leader’s suite was the Ritz-Carlton to their freshman offices’ Red Roof Inn. McConnell was not there. “He’s on the floor voting,” someone said.
After a few minutes, the jig was up. “We left a note,” Ilhan Omar told the reporters, as if the members had popped in to see the principal about their errant teenager who had been caught skipping first period at Au Bon Pain. (A spokesman for McConnell, Don Stewart, seemed puzzled later. “No note,” he said, looking around.) Hill then turned to walk back to the House side of the Capitol but went the wrong way. “Um, Katie, the House side is to the right,” an aide said.
The next day, the group returned with an actual letter in hand, signed by scores of freshmen, demanding that McConnell, who had been largely silent for weeks, work to reopen the government. As they blasted through the Capitol, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate, passed them in the Rotunda. “What’s going on here?” he asked with amusement. No one appeared to recognize him.
The women, along with a handful of men, once again found their way into the yellow room with the giant chandelier, where this time McConnell’s staff was ready for them with chocolate sea-salt almonds and an offer of coffee. The freshmen then realized that they had failed to make a copy of their letter. McConnell’s scheduler gamely took the piece of paper down the hall and copied it for them.
Next, AOC, Hill, and Underwood ran around the Capitol creating the video meme “Where’s Mitch?” while some of the more conservative members with military and service backgrounds, led by Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), got themselves an invite with some Republican colleagues to the White House to try to negotiate directly with Trump. None of these efforts had much impact, and Pelosi moved to cancel the president’s State of the Union address.
In retaliation, Trump canceled the military plane that was meant to be used by Pelosi and other members to visit US troops in Afghanistan for the weekend. Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA), a twenty-year navy veteran and the only freshman who had been invited to join that delegation, issued a starchy statement: “The President’s comment that lawmakers visiting Afghanistan is a ‘public relations event’ is an insult to the brave men and women serving in harm’s way. . . . It is my duty to support our troops and learn everything I can about their mission.”
Pelosi’s office was pleased, and promoted both efforts, #wheresmitch and the bipartisan Problem Solvers group. Pelosi joined the unified front to reopen the government in spite of significant policy differences over border security, because she believed that all the new members, led by women, were succeeding in embarrassing and cornering congressional Republicans and Trump.
Because of the shutdown, Democratic leaders canceled the week off, but members were permitted to go home for the Martin Luther King Day weekend. (Cue the benighted scheduler, clicking on the American Airlines website once again.) I followed Omar as she went home to Minneapolis. The shutdown had dragged into its thirtieth day. The airport and the TSA workers I encountered seemed dejected and angry. One got tears in her eyes as I expressed my sympathies. When I offered to buy coffee for the staff at DC’s Reagan National Airport, a supervisor told me, “We have tons of coffee. What we need is to get paid.” He stared angrily across his security podium. “Congress and Trump can fight over whatever they want, but why would you not pay people?” he asked indignantly. “I gave twenty years of my life to this country in the military, I guess stupidly.” He turned away, disgusted.
On January 25, the shutdown ended. There was no new money for Trump’s wall. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that it cost the US economy at least $11 billion. The hope was that now, maybe, at least some governing would begin.