I think I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
—Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)
To be honest, my heart went out to Ben Carson one breezy May afternoon as I watched Katie Porter shred him like a ten-year-old bank statement. In her pointed, precise manner, during a House Financial Services Committee hearing, the freshman congresswoman asked President Trump’s secretary of housing and urban development why it was that loans from his agency tended to result in high rates of foreclosure, turning properties into REOs, or real-estate-owned properties.
“Do you know what an REO is?” she asked Carson, once an acclaimed pediatric brain surgeon, somewhat pedantically.
“An Oreo?” he responded, apparently guessing that the conversation had turned to a sandwich cookie.
“No, not an Oreo. An R-E-O,” Porter said. “REO”
Carson began to sound out the phrase. “Real-real-real estate.”
“What does the ‘O’ stand for?” she asked.
He didn’t know. “The organization.”
The exchange was devastating.
Lawmakers in both parties have always used hearings to grandstand. But the women of the 116th Congress instead started using hearings to share expertise from their prior careers or personal trials (rather than relying mainly on the notes prepared by legislative staffers, as is common), to question deeply and intelligently, and, yes, at times to fillet administration officials and corporate executives, giving the lawmakers’ work an investigative flair and showcasing both their preparation and professional knowledge.
These moments also seemed designed to give an emotional release to their voters, who enjoyed seeing such snippets of hearings flashed around social media. In the era of NowThis, a website dedicated to sending videos of liberal lawmakers into the political bloodstream with treacly music and dramatic slow motion, many of these exchanges, once limited to the C-SPAN set, went viral. The Firsts were making Americans pay attention.
When witnesses in 2019 came before the House Oversight Committee, a historical hotbed of partisan rancor, three members of the Squad—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley—often sat together, a gauntlet of inquiry, helping elevate not just their profiles but also the oversight work of the House. The committee assignment was a good one, at least for freshmen; it put them at the tip of the spear of clashes with the White House, providing high visibility.
In questioning Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell on the curious coexistence of low inflation and low unemployment, Ocasio-Cortez dropped the Phillips curve on him, a theory positing that low unemployment will inevitably bring higher inflation. Even Larry Kudlow, Trump’s senior economic advisor, with whom Ocasio-Cortez agrees almost never, was impressed. In an interview with Fox News after the hearing, he gave a “hats off to Ms. AOC” for her question, saying, “She kind of nailed that,” suggesting that the administration shared her view.
When Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, appeared before the committee, Ocasio-Cortez held her rhetorical fire and instead went into fact-finding mode. “To your knowledge, did the president ever provide inflated assets to an insurance company?” she asked Cohen.
He replied, “Yes.”
“Do you think we need to review his financial statements and tax returns in order to compare them?” she asked.
Cohen said that indeed they should.
AOC had just cleverly opened up an entire new avenue for congressional investigation—a rare turn of events in a high-profile hearing, where members usually prefer to lecture witnesses and show off for C-SPAN.
When Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Pressley returned from a visit to detention centers at the border, they used a hearing to provide powerful testimony about the conditions, keeping the pressure on the Trump administration but also displaying their own personal styles and backgrounds.
Ocasio-Cortez insisted on being sworn in, which is something not normally done for committee members and was a tad bit of grandstanding, because she said Republicans too often accused her of lying. She then used her Spanish-language skills as she interviewed a woman whose daughter had died shortly after being released from ICE custody and who testified, “I watched my baby girl die slowly and painfully.”
Rashida Tlaib, a former community activist who often leans emotional when describing children and families, wept as she talked about a child who had died in custody and the unbathed and suffering people she saw at the border facility. “I’ve been so deeply haunted by the unforgettable image of a four-year-old boy . . . [who] asked me in Spanish where his papa was,” she said.
As Tlaib wiped her eyes, Ayanna Pressley, a seasoned local lawmaker whose soaring and extemporaneous speeches were becoming her trademark, said, “Today, I do not speak on behalf of anyone, but I make space for the stories our nation so desperately needs to hear in this moment. . . . I cannot unsee what I’ve seen, I cannot unfeel what I experienced. I refuse to, although admittedly it robs me of sleep and peace of mind.”
Pressley has used hearings to raise issues that affected people with limited means, noting, for instance, that an online census process would be difficult for those who could not afford a phone and otherwise lacked access to the internet. She also worked over members of the Trump administration, who often interrupted her or declined to answer her pointed yes-or-no questions, at which juncture she would shoot back, “Reclaiming my time,” usually to an aged white man on the other side of the dais.
When Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, came before the committee to discuss the 2020 census, she took her dig, demanding to know if he had a generous-enough budget to conduct a canvassing of the entire country. Ross insisted he had requested a sufficient increase.
“Was it your testimony earlier,” Pressley said, “that Mr. Trump prepared a budget that did not include your input for what would be required . . . and that you had also not read it?”
Later, a flustered Ross replied, “I believe you’re out of time, ma’am.”
The Oversight Committee has been more than a just vehicle for members of the Squad to show off their questioning prowess; it became a place they could highlight their policy areas of interest. Now, in addition to the usual array of hearings on veteran health care and facial-recognition technology the committee was exploring childhood trauma and the threats posed by white supremacy.
The committee has also been a bit of a refuge. The freshman congresswomen had each other, of course, but for most of 2019 they also had the chair, Elijah Cummings, a veteran lawmaker from Baltimore, who took apparent delight in giving these young newcomers broad latitude and a platform. “Elijah Cummings has said, ‘I get so much energy from you three being on my committee,’ ” Tlaib told me. “There is something about us three that gives us all more intent and direction and passion. He has taken me and said, ‘Tlaib come here,’ and I think, ‘Oh no, I’m in trouble,’ and he just says, ‘You did a good job.’ What has been written about makes it look like we are isolated, but there are some incredibly thoughtful colleagues who are thrilled to have us here.” (Cummings, perhaps the greatest mentor to many of the new women, died at the age of sixty-sight in October 2019, in the middle of helping to lead the impeachment investigations into President Trump.)
Pressley told me, during a visit with her in the conference room of a public-housing complex outside Boston, that the childhood-trauma hearing was a highlight of her overall legislative career, because the topic was informed by her own experiences. “By the challenges of being raised in a single-parent home, in a neighborhood that often felt unsafe, regularly facing the threat of eviction, my father’s addiction battles and experience in the criminal-justice system, my being a survivor of a decade of childhood sexual abuse and, later, campus sexual assault. So it is not hyperbole, it’s not, you know, abstract for me, the impact of all of those issues,” she said. “With every fiber of my being, I’m in alignment with the contribution I seek to make. And I think I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. And so on the hardest of days, I don’t have any regrets. I’m so glad I’m exactly where I am. And glad to be doing it with who I’m doing it with.”
Katie Hill and Lauren Underwood have leaned on their backgrounds in advocacy and health-care policy, to flex their muscles at the sorts of companies that many Americans suspect are maximizing profits at taxpayers’ and consumers’ expense or at government officials overseeing policies that it often seemed they did not fully understand. In a May committee hearing for the House Education and Labor Committee, Underwood, who worked for years in public health, demanded of Alexander Acosta, then Trump’s labor secretary, whether he knew the cost of contraceptives or if he knew about uses for birth control pills other than preventing pregnancy. He did not, so she gave him a list. (Acosta later resigned amid an uproar over the sweetheart nonprosecution deal he cut as US attorney in Miami with the late convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.) Hill worked over a pharmaceutical executive, juxtaposing his $30 million signing bonus against the high cost of the HIV drugs he was selling, while Ocasio-Cortez looked on, grinning.
In one striking moment, during a hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security, Underwood accused the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security of taking part in the “intentional” deaths of migrant children held in detention centers. When the official, Kevin McAleenan, countered that she had made “an appalling accusation,” Underwood dug in, saying that the deaths were the result of “a policy choice being made on purpose by this administration.” Republicans on the committee made the rare move of demanding a vote to condemn her remarks.
They were joined by freshman Democrat Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who was sitting right next to Underwood as she cast a vote against her (a small but telling harbinger of an emotional debate over the border crisis that would soon come to a head). “Lauren is a friend of mine, and I respect her, and I thought most of her questions were good ones,” Slotkin told me a few hours later as she rushed to meet her chief of staff. “But at the end of the day, you have to do what’s right.”
I thought she was done, as Slotkin is not generally one to waste words, but she stared at me intently, her (mildly frightening) way of letting me know we were still having a conversation.
“As a former CIA officer,” she said, “I know what it’s like for people to think the worst of you.” She then zipped off into a waiting car.
Slotkin has proved to be a tough questioner herself; she just does it drawing on her own national security background and is careful to avoid any sort of hyperbole. When the previous Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, came to a hearing on border security to discuss the family separation policy, Slotkin did a careful windup before she began gently to chastise the secretary. “I’m also a former CIA officer and DOD official,” she said, “so I’m a big believer in border security and have spent my life preventing homeland attacks. But I also believe we have to be a country of morals and values.” Pointing out that the influx of migrants had also been a problem under the Obama administration, she said: “It didn’t matter who you were, where you got your news, the vision of a small child in a cage, separated and crying, I think just hits everyone’s heart, and we cannot be a country that perpetuates that.”
When Secretary Nielsen demurred, Slotkin leaned in further, but she never raised her voice. “I understand it’s complicated . . . ,” she said. “When you saw those pictures of babies in cages, what did you do? What did you do to just scream bloody murder up the chain to the president to say ‘I cannot represent an agency that is forcing its border patrol to do this?’ What did you do?”
Nielsen gave no real answer.
Likewise, Abigail Spanberger, who gathered intelligence and recruited foreign intelligence assets for the CIA, often prefaced her questions with the phrase “As a former intelligence officer.” During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on an $8 billion arms deal to Saudi Arabia, Spanberger sharply questioned the Trump administration’s decision to circumvent Congress and authorize a new emergency sale of high-tech arms to the Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthis in Yemen. Spanberger pushed the witness, Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs R. Clarke Cooper, to unpack the plans for their use.
“Can you explain to me the disconnect to why we’re providing offensive and extremely lethal weapons for apparently defensive purposes?” she asked, later noting that based on her experiences abroad, “These are not tool kits for diplomatic returns.”
Addressing Cooper’s complaint that Congress was taking too long to greenlight weapon sales for a war that an increasing number of lawmakers wanted no part of, she said, “I would remind you, sir, that the protracted process you are bemoaning is in fact the constitutional process that we as members of Congress have a responsibility to exercise when we are selling our weapons systems that are this lethal to countries abroad.” (Congress would later pass a bill to deny the weapons, which Trump promptly vetoed.)
But Katie Porter has really been the singular star in hearings. Early on, she became known for her ability to slice through an argument with the precision of a sushi chef, impressing her colleagues, and in some cases, terrifying them with her command of the issues and her sharp questioning, often supplemented with posters, calculators, or whiteboards.
Porter has often said she got her first taste of professional inspiration from the bankruptcy class she took at Harvard from then-professor Elizabeth Warren, now a US senator and presidential candidate, who was so impressed with her student that she hired her to help direct a research project that would eventually result in Warren’s book The Two-Income Trap. Porter later edited her own collection of scholarly papers for a book called Broke: How Debt Bankrupts the Middle Class, and Warren contributed a chapter. In 2012, now–fellow US senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris, then California’s attorney general, tapped Porter to oversee the distribution of a $25 billion settlement with big banks for the fraudulent foreclosures that helped tank the state’s economy in 2008. Porter’s meticulous command of her material set her apart, but she was not above a bit of preening and what could sometimes smell like manufactured outrage.
There was the time she worked over Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Kathy Kraninger about her plans to ease regulations aimed at predatory payday lenders. When Kraninger seemed flummoxed by the difference between the interest rate and an annual percentage rate, Porter said, “I’ll be happy to send you a copy of the textbook that I wrote,” brandishing her own monograph on contemporary consumer law. When Kraninger could not puzzle out a math problem involving a two-week payday loan for a car repair, Porter offered her a calculator.
When Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest US bank, came before the Financial Services Committee, Porter pushed him to explain how a bank teller could live on take-home pay of $35,070 a year. “I don’t know,” Dimon replied. “I’d have to think about that.”
“Would you recommend that she take out a JPMorgan Chase credit card and run a deficit?” Porter asked.
“I don’t know. I’d have to think about it,” Dimon replied, distinctly uncharmed.
Porter asked the head of Equifax, a company that once released the personal credit information of 143 million Americans into the world, to spit out his social security number at the hearing. When he declined, she said: “If you agree that exposing this kind of information . . . creates harm . . . why are your lawyers arguing in federal court that there was no injury and no harm created by your data breach?”
Among all the freshman women, Porter has always seemed to me to be the one most torn between her liberal proclivities as a lifelong consumer advocate and her Orange County, California, congressional district, where she was the first Democrat ever to win the seat. She can look back on her pre-politics life as a law professor elegiacally, not so much the happy political warrior as the harried political worrier. She can be seen at times alone on the House floor, poring over papers, or storming through the hallways with the determined yet frazzled look of a commuter about to miss the last train.
Although her skills in the hearing room have raised her profile, especially among television producers, she has not always been comfortable with the spotlight. Running as a Democrat in a traditionally Republican district was difficult enough, but Porter had something in her biography that she was terrified would come to light: she was the victim of domestic violence. By her own account, which has not been disputed by her ex-husband, she was repeatedly abused as she tried to end her marriage, forcing her more than once to call the police. Her ex-husband pushed her into a wall, she said, called her a “dumb bitch” in front of their three young children, shoved their one-year-old daughter across the kitchen in her high chair, and held open the door of Porter’s car to stop her from driving away from an argument. She filed for a protective order against him in 2013 and was granted custody of their children. After a short prison sentence for domestic battery, her ex was given some limited custody rights and now lives in Oregon.
Democratic advisors told me that Porter was extremely worried about discussing her abuse during the campaign. But once one of her primary opponents brought the restraining order to light, she found that many women and families related to her experiences, both with domestic violence and with her subsequent struggles as a single mom. She spoke through tears about her ordeal as she advocated for the renewal and expansion of the Violence Against Women Act, remembering how she faced the threat of her children being taken from her if she were to call the police repeatedly.
In the course of working on this book, I heard about and witnessed many tears shed over policy making, sometimes as the lawmaker recalled personal experiences connected to the policy at hand, sometimes over the draconian choices that policy makers face, sometimes just because the women were sharing their stories. Rep. Susan Wild, a new Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania, held back tears when she went to the floor in June to talk about her partner, who had died by suicide only weeks before. “We all need to recognize that mental health issues know no boundaries,” she said as she encouraged anyone who feels suicidal to seek help. Rashida Tlaib cried during numerous press conferences and hearings as she described the harm of children in government custody and the plight of undocumented immigrants.
Staff members told me they often witnessed tears that first year when various pieces of landmark legislation passed, even when they had no shot of becoming law. Veronica Escobar could not hold back her tears on the House floor describing the death of a migrant child, and several women, and men, wiped their own tears away as she spoke. In these cases, it struck me that the tears stemmed from a sense of momentousness: the lawmakers were highlighting issues that had for so many years been marginalized in the legislative discourse. I also witnessed “stress response” tears, congresswomen getting choked up in meetings with fellow Democrats when they felt attacked.
For women in the workplace, crying has never been a boon, and the workplace of politics is no exception. Many male voters often cite women’s penchant for being “emotional” as a reason not to elect them. But emotionality didn’t seem to affect the prospects of former Speaker John Boehner, who during his time in Congress, from 1991 to 2015, was frequently mocked for his bursts of tears, which were usually triggered by the testimony and celebrations of others. He cried generally, but not exclusively, at things related to kids, US troops, his parents, and, at least once, the pope. Boehner, a pristine white hankie always at the ready, was also often set off by Congressional Gold Medal ceremonies. His sobbing was so extreme as he awarded the astronaut Neil Armstrong with the medal in 2011 that Armstrong looked abashed; a Washington Post colleague of mine in the Senate press gallery pinned a photo of the moment above his desk. “He just had a soft spot for kids and anything that harkens back to the American dream,” one aide recalled. Tlaib addressed the issue of visible emotion once on Twitter: “I rather lead with compassion and show vulnerability,” she wrote. “We stay connected to the people we serve when we allow ourselves to feel their pain.”
Though Boehner was at times taunted for these displays, he was never penalized for them. Notably, Nancy Pelosi, who has been visibly choked up from time to time over the death of a colleague or a tragic news event, was never known for openly weeping at news conferences or difficult junctures with colleagues. (Indeed, Google the image of her sitting next to Boehner as Obama unveiled a statue in honor of civil rights activist Rosa Parks in 2013 to see which lawmaker is sniffling.) Her path was different than most of the new crew; she knew the business of politics, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and the pressures of making tough decisions.
And maybe, too, times have changed, and stoicism—not to mention a kind of female be-seen-but-not-heard deference—is no longer necessary. Katie Porter often moves between cheerfully harried and visibly cranky, from wry and amusing to biting and mildly unpleasant, like an underripe fruit that might be more inviting another day. I’ve watched her be warm and engaging with staff one minute, then swiftly move to note their failure to make the correct meeting a priority. She posts endearing and vulnerable photos of herself surfing—including ones showing near face-plants in the ocean—but can also be cutting in a way that seems designed to show off her law professor credibility, like during an appearance with the comedian and commentator Bill Maher on his talk show. When Maher admitted to Porter that he was “a little squishy” on the issue of abortion rights, because after his mother’s difficult delivery with his sister, his mother had been told “she shouldn’t have another one,” she shot back: “Look, your mom made her choice, and we’re all here with the consequences of that choice.” When I am sometimes confused by her seeming mercurial nature, I try to imagine her weekly commute across the country, accompanied by an hour plus drive in Southern California traffic, where she arrives home to kids who probably have unknowable questions about earth science and other homework conundrums.
Among her peers, Porter is deeply respected for her transparency both about her experiences with domestic violence and for the way she handles the difficulties of caring for school-age children while trying to serve in Congress. Porter is certainly not the only mother in Congress, but it is a major part of her identity, and she and other new moms have embraced that identity and worked to find ways to make Congress more inviting to parents.
The first time we met in her DC office, Porter was eager to show me her new shoes. “They’re Cole Haan,” she said, tugging open the box with the sort of enthusiasm that many people reserve for high-end chocolate and bourbon. “I’m superexcited!” She tried on the notably sensible low-heeled numbers and did a small strut around her office. “This is not something guys have to worry about,” she said, and mentioned her commute but also the miles she clocks racing around the Capitol all day. (Of all the overlapping things female lawmakers told me over the years, a need for comfortable shoes was high up there.) The shoes will stay in DC, so comfort will always be an arm’s length—or more likely a call to an overworked aide—away.
Among Porter’s congresswoman-mom coping strategies: always keep a hanger in your purse and minivan to hang your jacket on when you need to switch back to mom mode, and keep your watch on East Coast time, even when on the West Coast, though it’s not a cure for the constant strain of jet lag. “That’s why I want to kill my children at seven p.m.,” she said. “That usually happens at nine.” She also has an airtight network of friends back in Orange County who have created a system for picking up her kids from sports when her flight is delayed.
As we talked about school calendars, public policy, and footwear, a staff member tried to cut our conversation short. “In a minute,” Porter said somewhat testily, noting that little patches of time were some of the few things she was learning she could control in her nascent congressional life. “There is a huge swath of things you have no control over,” she said, and her own time was often one of them, perhaps her most precious commodity. She thought back for a second to the lottery that is held at the beginning of every new Congress for member offices. “I cling to something that Ayanna Pressley said to me when people were drawing their offices,” Porter said, recalling that people were getting increasingly annoyed about their lot. “She would shout out, ‘Still in Congress!’ I try to stay in that moment. If you spend all your time here worrying, you forgo the opportunity.”
When I visited Porter in her district a few months later during a House recess, the push and pull of her life as a single mom and a fairly liberal Democrat representing a traditionally Republican area were front and center. Her day began at 6:30 a.m. with a CNN hit—after what had already been a week of laundry, coupon clipping, grocery shopping, school drop-offs, and endless calls about legislation she was working on. Next stop, a visit at a hospital center, where she provided the staff with details about her emergency appendectomy, which would be the foundation for a bill she would introduce later to stem surprise hospital billing. She looked at her aides: What had happened to her coffee? Ugh. Whatever. She took a plastic cup of fruit off the buffet set out by the hospital staff. This would be lunch.
In the car on the way back to her district office, Porter did what most members do when they aren’t on the phone with donors, begging for money; she contacted constituents who have called her office, often with a complaint. (Yes, congressional staffers do indeed carefully take down every call and record the needs and opinions of constituents; no, they don’t care what you think about their votes if you do not live in their district.) She looked down the list and dialed while her district manager turned their Prius toward one of Orange County’s many highways, each connecting to yet another through a string of towns just inland from the Pacific Ocean.
“Hi, this is Congresswoman Katie Porter. I got your message about SALT,” she said, referring to the new tax policy that had hammered many residents of blue states by reducing their state and local tax deduction, a dagger in the heart of heavily burdened Southern Californians. Her Republican predecessor, Rep. Mimi Walters, who was so convinced she was going to beat Porter she had already begun to angle for a House leadership role before the votes were counted, had supported the tax legislation, which, it seemed, had cost her a vote with this caller. “Yeah, well, Mimi never called me after I won either,” Porter cracked.
She stuck a clipboard in front of her driving district manager, unnerving me (not the supremely unflappable staffer) slightly. “Is this person calling about the Green New Deal? Yes? Well, let’s call Marjory. She’s a frequent caller.”
Marjory was also mad about SALT, and she wanted some new gun-control laws.
The next call was to Brandon. “I heard you called about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” she said to him, before correcting his many misconceptions about how the agency raises its money.
“I appreciate you calling me,” I could hear Brandon telling her. “That says a lot. I am of the opposite party, but I can see you do care about the job you’re doing and you have integrity. That goes a long way.”
Her district manager slid the Prius into a one-hour parking spot. They would be there longer than an hour, so Porter directed her to move. “I’m a rule follower,” she said, to no one specifically.
Back in the office, it was time for a meeting with pilots from United Airlines, where the discussion turned to her beloved local John Wayne Airport, which does not have direct flights to Washington. She mentioned the Quiet Skies Caucus, a group of lawmakers dedicated to reducing airline noise. “Where they hear noise, I see economic opportunity,” she said. “So, yeah, dude, I will not be joining the Quiet Skies Caucus.”
One of the pilots was a mom friend from one of her kid’s schools, who asked Porter how she liked the new gig. “I had a good thing going as a professor,” she said, looking a tiny bit sad. “This is a mixed bag.”
Porter was running late for her next meeting. But first, a photo with airline pilots. Done. Now, a photo of her holding the flag of a university in the district. She smiled tightly. Done. An assistant takes the flag and hands her a Nowruz basket in celebration of the upcoming Persian New Year. Click. Photos taken, to be sent to the university and the Persians of her district.
Off to the elevator, she waved goodbye to her office staff. I asked her gingerly if she had time for coffee later. “No! I have been going since six a.m.” Into the elevator. Gone.
Some months later, Porter would become the first freshman House member from her state to call for Trump’s impeachment, and one of the few from a district previously held by a Republican. Because of her legal background and the respect she has among her colleagues, this move was considered a small turning point in the caucus that Pelosi had been carefully trying to prevent from leaning to impeachment. “I have not come to this easily,” she said in a video that felt half law professor lecture, half hostage tape. “I come to this decision after much deliberation, and I know, deeply, what this means for our democracy.”
Impeachment was a slow-motion crisis, and for someone like Porter, this type of decision was especially thorny. She was, after all, someone who, both personally and professionally, had on some level spent her life fighting against “the Man,” and now, as a member of Congress, in a way she had become the Man. But beyond that was the mystery of California, where Democrats had run the table, destroying Republicans in a manner unprecedented in the modern era. Had Porter been given permission by the changing demographics and sentiment in her state to embrace the positions favored by the base of the party, or did she need to be careful not to alienate the Republicans who helped put her in office in a fluke of a year?
Indeed, for members like Porter, killing it in an oversight hearing was never going to be enough to keep their seats in marginal districts. The so-called moderates had the numbers on their side to win policy victories in the House, but unlike the liberals who enjoyed strong support at home, they were often torn between the potential wrath of their various constituents. Their base voters wanted them to uphold party principles while their conservative voters expected them to cling to middle-of-the-road positions. It was a constant struggle, and many of them had fought hard to get there, fighting off primary opponents, then slaying Republicans, leaving behind exciting careers, only to find themselves cut off from the kind of alliances that had sustained them in their old professional lives.
Being a member of Congress is more like being a golfer than a football player—at the end of the day, there is only you back in the district, answering to thousands of people who sent you there and many who did not. There is also the undeniable addiction to power that hooks so many new members almost instantly. There is the power of making a difference in your community, of meeting interesting and compelling people, of having someone bring you a panini, of breezing past TSA agents at Washington’s airport, of getting invited to elegant events at the Library of Congress, of sitting on a parade float, of walking into a room back home and being the most prominent person there, the one for whom they have set up an entire table full of coffee and fruit cups and pastries—even if you don’t have time to eat.
Once in Congress, no one wants to lose. And for centrists, every day is borrowed time. After listening to a lengthy disquisition from one of the more liberal members of her conference one day on the need to never vote with Republicans, Native American congressman Sharice Davids of Kansas stood up in the meeting. “I may only be here for two years,” she said, according to people in the room, and which Davids later confirmed. “During that time, I want to do the best I can to live out my values.”