I don’t know if I have fulfilled what I set out to do.
—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
In the end, the 116th Congress may be less about the laws that are passed than the reinvigoration of an institution that many Americans have written off as dysfunctional and intellectually bankrupt—activated by a diverse group of women who are often in significant disagreement with one another about the political course of the nation. It may be a Congress judged less for what it did than for what it was.
House women made the case against President Donald Trump, even at a possibly high political cost to themselves. The Firsts—sometimes the progressives, sometimes the moderates—led the way on the most important policy debates, yet often it was less about their particular political convictions than what they brought to the table: a collective moral clarity. Whether or not the Senate would ultimately come along for the ride, these freshman congresswomen, captained by a flawed but indomitable political veteran, have made Congress essential again.
In just one short year, this group of women, as both products and drivers of a dynamic new political era, have helped reframe the national debate over impeachment, climate change, gun rights, foreign policy, and electoral politics, all with an extraordinary presidential election looming. Those people privileged enough to look out onto the House floor on any given day can see plainly that the Firsts have begun to change what power actually looks like, as blue suits and ties have given way to flowing scarves and member-pin necklaces, and the faces in the seats have begun to look a tiny bit more like the United States.
The Bibles they were sworn in on have been long tucked away, the magazine cover stories have slowed, and the lonely single pieces of art on office walls have been joined by photos, district maps, appreciation certificates, and Post-it notes. Frequent-flyer miles have been accrued. Secret routes traversing the Capitol have been memorized. No longer insurgents, the new women would soon be using their institutional advantage to keep their power as incumbents. This is the Washington story.
At home, things have remained mundane: town hall meetings, events to promote the Census, roundtables on prescription-drug costs, one-on-ones with local mayors. To the best of their ability, the new members have tried to serve the needs of the communities they represent both electorally and descriptively, by working to end the use of facial-recognition technology in public housing, improve black maternal health, protect poor people from predatory lending and high auto insurance rates, shore up legislation to shield victims of domestic violence and, as ever, get more money to their district’s projects. Given the deliberately nonfunctioning Senate, most of those legislative efforts have not made it into law. But here was a start.
The new women were also faced with the reality that unconventional biographies could hamper them, and that their gender—key as it was to their election—was still a liability in a fundamentally sexist institution.
In late October, RedState, a far-right blog, unleashed photos and texts that exposed an intimate relationship between Katie Hill and a campaign aide. In one photo, Hill was depicted naked, brushing the campaign aide’s hair. As Capitol Hill sex scandals go, this one was unusual. Hill’s aide was a woman—Hill was an out married bisexual—and the affair has included her husband. The story also said that Hill, by then embroiled in a bitter divorce, had also had an affair with her legislative director, which would be a clear violation of a rule change in the new Congress, one written with the help of Hill’s roommate, Lauren Underwood, barring lawmakers from engaging in sexual relations with anyone who works in their congressional office or committees on which they serve.
The House Ethics Committee announced that it was opening an investigation into the allegations, but Hill—who denies the affair with the congressional staffer—quickly announced that “with a broken heart” she would resign and focus on ending “revenge porn.” The poster child for power among freshmen had become the poster child for cautionary tales. “I made this decision so my supporters, my family, my staff, and our community will no longer be subjected to the pain inflicted by my abusive husband and the brutality of hateful political operatives,” Hill said in a video message. She added, “I never claimed to be perfect, but I never thought my imperfections would be weaponized and used to try to destroy me and the community that I have loved for my entire life. And for that I am so incredibly sorry.”
Many wondered how it was that Rep. Ken Calvert, a veteran Republican congressman from California, could still be in the House twenty-six years after he was caught in his car with a known prostitute by two Corona, California, police officers, and how Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) could continue to represent his district after being indicted on sweeping campaign finance violations, yet Hill couldn’t survive her sex scandal for two weeks. Hill’s biggest booster, Nancy Pelosi, quickly dismissed her in a starchy statement akin to an expulsion letter from Sunday school, noting that Hill’s “errors in judgment” made it “untenable” for her to remain in office. “We must ensure a climate of integrity and dignity in the Congress, and in all workplaces,” Pelosi wrote.
In a sense, the fact that one of the first to fall under new post-#MeToo rules on Congress was female is a demonstration of equality, but it is just as clear that the evolving gender roles in Washington were still evolving. While blaming her demise on gutter politics and misogyny, Hill still acknowledged her mistakes in her final speech on the House floor. “I wanted to show young people, queer people, working people, imperfect people, that they belong here,” she said. “To every young person who saw themselves and their dreams reflected in me, I’m sorry.”
The increase in the number of women in Congress in 2019 was symbolically important, of course. But during this tumultuous year, I came to believe that the congresswomen’s diversity—of age, race, religion, and economic status—could be even more transformative than their gender alone.
“The diversity of the caucus goes a long way in creating potential new leaders,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as we walked together one day between votes, while she nibbled at what often seems to be her late lunch, a cranberry muffin. “I do think geography and culture and background play a big role. People from my community understand me more than other people from other areas who happen to be women.”
She cited the example of Elijah Cummings, at the time chair of the House Oversight Committee, on which she and other new women sat, who was constantly giving them chances to schedule hearings on topics close to their hearts. “I think that as much as people don’t want to admit it,” she said, “leaders with a vested interest in the next generation of leaders tend to gravitate toward younger versions of themselves.”
A month or so later, I caught up with AOC again. (Same pastry, different day.) Did she believe she was making an impact herself? I asked her.
“I feel like there is some real woo-woo here,” she said, referring to the traditions and rituals of Congress. “I do feel I answered a calling in the larger sense by running, but I don’t know if I have fulfilled what I set out to do.”
This was a remarkable statement from a woman whose power and influence already far exceeded her age and experience; it was at once self-aware and prematurely self-deprecating.
For many Americans, the 2016 election marked the beginning of a truth-telling era. The country under President Trump has experienced not simply the faltering of American exceptionalism but a full unleashing of its most dangerous and base instincts, which had been set to simmer for generations. Many white citizens had believed they were living in a “post-racial” nation, whose scars had been smoothed by eight years of a black president, but Americans of color, aided by cell-phone cameras and social media, have started peeling back that blanket of self-assurance to reveal ongoing police brutality, inequities in the criminal-justice and education systems, and the enduring open wounds of the nation’s original sin.
White Americans have come face-to-face with symbols and pedagogy that academics and activists have been grappling with for decades. Confederate monuments have begun to come down, even in places like South Carolina, and state flags featuring the “Southern Cross” have been removed from a long hallway of the Capitol, where Democrats, led by black members from the South, beat back a Republican push to allow such symbols at national cemeteries on Confederate Memorial Day. The need for a deeper understanding of the role of slaves in the foundation of US culture has taken on a widespread urgency. All of this has been met with pushback.
Many southern plantations, including President Thomas Jefferson’s famous Monticello, have begun to include slave stories in their guided tours. Most visitors are moved and engaged by these additions, and in the case of black visitors, validated. Others, however, clinging to racist proclivities, post negative Yelp reviews, wondering why their garden tours have been tainted by an education into the dark truth of history.
Nonwhite Americans, understandably, were not particularly surprised by the surfacing of white nationalism in the Trump years, having absorbed the inner message of Tea Party slogans like “We want our country back” during the Obama years. But they may have been surprised by the rise of millennial and Generation Z voices, of social-media platforms and shifting political mores, of the surge of energy generated by the 2018 midterm elections, which has made people less afraid to yell back. One can peer out at the mass of furious climate-strike kids and see the future, one that some of the new congresswomen helped create an architecture for.
Indeed, the new class of women in the House, from its onetime refugee to its former CIA officers to its single moms to its former bartender, have formed a collective mirror of the broader cultural and economic shifts in American life—in which those previously toiling at the margins have found their voices and, in some cases, real institutional power.
The counterrevolution has come with its own verities, often demanding conformity of belief or silence, with the left creating its own tribes and criteria for belonging. In many workplaces, older workers have been marginalized and substantively suspect “cultures” have replaced traditional markers of measurable success. Most Americans sit comfortably in their silos of worldview self-selection and bias confirmation. But, oddly, as polarized as it is and as poorly as Americans view it, Congress sometimes feels like the last spot in the country left for authentic daily debate—where Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, must sit literally side by side in committee rooms, windowless offices, and the well of the House, and hash things out, however imperfectly. There are enforced rules against the ad hominem attacks so common on cable television and Twitter. Not all ideas are acted upon, but they are all heard.
In a nation that seems hopelessly cleaved, preaching for unity may feel somehow hollow, if not preposterous; Americans may feel the need to pick a side. In the Trump universe, this has come with a set of declarations: Send them back. Lock her up. Make America great again. On the other side, the rejoinder comes, yes, with some sloganeering, but also with a vivid manifestation of beliefs in human form: the group of women in these pages, and many others, including men, who are unapologetically outspoken, culturally modern, telegenic, intelligent, and fearless. Their lack of legislative power is inverse to their political capital among base voters.
“Since we launched our Black Maternal Health Caucus, every Democrat running for president has talked about black maternal health,” freshman congresswoman Lauren Underwood said during one of our winter chats. “Elizabeth Warren has a plan for it, and the Ways and Means Committee just had a hearing today. These things don’t just happen in this place. There are not political upsides for someone like me. I am just grateful that we are able to make a difference, because that is how I know we can still do great things here.”
During this past year, sometimes as an unseen observer of the class of 2019 and at other times as a question-asking irritant, I always felt like both a witness and a stalker, eager to find meaning in the journey of the Firsts. How will the women of the 116th be remembered in thirty years? No matter the long-term policy—and impeachment—outcomes, many of them, without a doubt, have been the sparks for progress. It remains to be seen whether the influence of money, the quest for endorsements, or the desire to rise in the institution will chip away at the Firsts’ initial distinctiveness. The desire to effect more than incremental change may prove frustrating to some, who may come to find themselves better situated on the picket line than in the Rayburn Room.
Among the many overlooked pieces of remarkable monuments on the grounds of the US Capitol is the Statue of Freedom, a bronze female figure who looms majestically atop the Capitol dome. Between dusk and dawn, the dome is illuminated, bathing Freedom, with her flowing hair, dramatic helmet, and cast-iron pedestal inscribed with e pluribus unum, in haunting yellow light. Below her, the tholos, a round lookout, also lights up when one or both chambers are in session, a reminder that the nation’s business goes on well after dark.
Freedom’s journey to Washington, DC, was arduous. The American artist who had cast a plaster model of the statue in Rome died suddenly in 1857, leaving his widow to send it in crates on a journey across the sea, during which the ship leaked, causing the crates to be hopelessly late. The casting of the final version was delayed by the Civil War. Finally, in 1863, the statue was installed in full, saluted by scores of guns near the Capitol and from twelve forts nearby.
This female warrior, constructed almost six decades before women were permitted to vote in the United States, has stood above the nation’s legislative branch as generations of Congress members have debated legislation about suffrage, abortion, child labor, equal pay, family leave, and women’s sports, and scores of other laws that have changed the lives of all Americans. Many of these laws were championed by women, more than half the nation’s population but still a perpetual minority in Congress.
Now, a new generation of lawmakers has come along to lay another brick in the country’s path toward self-actualization, with the hopes that others, too, will follow behind, to pave it forward, wisely, and on.