WASHINGTON — Katie Britt is two years older than me. Elder millennials, the both of us — except she’s the junior Senator from Alabama and I’m a reporter covering the Capitol hallways she used to work as a staffer. Britt tweeted at me last night for the first time:
I’ve never asked her about the border. I don’t live near it. I drove El Paso to Victoria, Texas four times in the summer of 2010, and that was enough to convince me that “secure the border” is a talking point built for small countries. America is enormous. When I hear the phrase, I assume the speaker is either a dumbass or a profiteer. Katie Britt is neither.
What she is, is one of the most effective sellers of legislation I’ve watched work a Capitol hallway. Watch this video. This is literally how she talks when she’s moving a bill — any bill, whether it’s named after a murder victim in Georgia or a teenager from Alabama who lost a hand and a leg to a shark.
That’s the thing about Britt. She’ll give you the same focused, warm, relentless pitch for Lulu’s Law — a shark alert bill — that she gave freshman Democrats John Fetterman and Ruben Gallego when she needed their names on the Laken Riley Act. I don’t know for a fact that’s how those conversations went. But I’ve watched her work, and I’d bet on it.
Neither Gallego nor Fetterman has spoken to me since that bill passed.
Britt has. So have the other 97 senators and most of the House. I want to keep it that way — which is part of why I’m writing this, and part of why I made this video.
Maybe 30 years from now I’ll paint her portrait for the Appropriations Committee room. Or maybe she runs for president. Who knows. But right now, she’s a freshman senator with a veteran operator’s instincts, a shark alert bill, and a way of talking about legislation that makes you think it’s already law. Watch:
