The Alabama senator disdains the politics of hate, rarely mentions her party’s frontrunner and favors robust aid to Ukraine. That positions her well to lead a party digging out from Trumpism.
Sen. Katie Britt confers with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito during a Senate Rules and Administration Committee hearing in February. Britt has become a sought-after inside player in a way that’s unusual for a non-celebrity senator during their first months in office. | Francis Chung/POLITICOTommy Tuberville has received months of attention this year for his blockade of military promotions, but the more consequential GOP Alabama senator is his newly elected counterpart, Katie Britt.
“If she aspires to rise through elected leadership, I see a pretty clear path forward,” Sen. John Cornyn told me. Britt and Cornyn co-hosted a fundraiser for the Senate GOP campaign committee in Birmingham earlier this month and the next day attended the Crimson Tide’s opener against the University of Texas before setting off to South Texas and joining a handful of other senators on a dove hunt.
“You know, I am the only Republican female with school-aged kids in the entire United States Senate,” she told me. “There’s actually only three women with school-aged kids in the entire U.S. Senate.” She’s the only member of Alabama’s GOP congressional delegation who has yet to endorse Trump. Britt has avoided doing so via a fig leaf of neutrality she claims from her service on a Republican National Committee panel. It’s a dodge that senior Republicans find laughable but, as one party official told me, “I’m happy for her to get away with it because I want her to be successful.”In Alabama, though, Republicans don’t just pretend to support Trump.
Britt is rooted in the pre-MAGA party, but she has to toe a rhetorical tightrope representing a state where the former president is held in the same esteem as air conditioning, the New Testament and Bear Bryant. “The people of Alabama sent me up here to be a workhorse not a show horse and I am interested in achieving solutions and working diligently to learn the issues and to build the relationships because when you merge those two things that’s when you can actually get something done,” she said. Later this year, however, she will step out, “God Calls Us To Do Hard Things,” that chronicles her upbringing and recounts both her successes and setbacks.
With Shelby’s strong encouragement and financial help, Britt and her husband traversed the state, both considerable draws in football-mad Alabama, and outfoxed the competition. It may prove hard to sustain that approach, however, if she continues to straddle between the pre- and post-Trump party. The only grumbling about Britt to be heard in Washington so far is owed to that straddle.
“There’s nothing like a hotly contested election to help you understand where voters are in the present moment,” as Sen. Tom Cotton put it. Without looking for it, I heard of four instances of Republicans under 50 who made a point of having their children’s picture taken with Britt at events this year.
She explained her support for spending money on Ukraine’s defense in a fashion that echoed McConnell’s argument. She was nearly as restrained when I asked her about Tuberville’s hold on military promotions in protest of the Biden administration providing service members with abortion access, a blockade that has irritated many Senate Republicans. In fact, she dodged my question entirely when I asked her if her fellow Alabama senator is doing the right thing.
Regardless of Britt’s national ambitions, there was once a time when she’d be an obvious Capitol Hill comer, poised to accrue seniority, build alliances across the aisle and become a one-woman spending spigot for her state. “There’s a reason all these military bases are still in the South,” quipped Byrne, the former Alabama congressman.
That tradition has lingered into the 21st century. In fact, this is the first year in two decades that neither the chair nor the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee hasn’t been a Southerner.
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