Sen. Katie Britt drew on her skills learned from years as a congressional staffer when she worked with Democrats this summer to negotiate a spending bill filled with contentious issues such as border security. Then the Alabama Republican, believing it ultimately fell short, voted against it.
Senior Republicans have elevated the 41-year-old first-term lawmaker, the youngest Republican woman to ever serve in the Senate, to a coveted position on the Appropriations Committee and a seat at Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) leadership table.
As she endeavors to build a national profile, Britt is trying to follow the example of her old boss Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who was one of the chamber’s most powerful appropriators, by navigating demands of voters in a deeply conservative state while negotiating compromise bills on politically-charged issues.
“It’s easy to talk about an issue, it’s much more challenging to actually create a solution for that issue,” Britt said in an interview in her private hideaway on the third floor of the Capitol. “I’m interested in solutions, and hopefully that’s what I’ll be able to do here. That means being in the room.”
Britt serves as ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Homeland Security, where she represents Republicans in negotiations with Chairman Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) over funding for the southern border with Mexico, stemming the flow of fentanyl, and supporting refugee resettlement and disaster recovery.
It also gives her a perch from which she can direct funding to Alabama, by inserting almost $255 million of earmarks in funding bills slowly wending their way through Congress.
“She’s a tough fighter for things she believes in, but she believes in getting things done,” Murphy said. “That probably is a result of working for the person that she worked for who, you know, was very much from that mold.”
Murphy and Britt eventually settled on $61.3 billion for DHS (
The legislation has yet to come to the floor as senators prioritize less controversial spending packages. But it illustrates the balancing act Britt faces as she seeks to play a larger role in spending decisions that are a primary responsibility of Congress while addressing issues that animate her conservative base.
“Your goal is to move the ball as far down the field as you possibly can,” said Britt, the wife of a former New England Patriot football player, and “to use each opportunity to create the most conservative piece of legislation we possibly can, even if it’s one that you ultimately can’t get on board with.”
Not Your Typical Freshman
Britt’s in her first year as a senator, but not on Capitol Hill. She worked for two and a half years as Shelby’s chief of staff and before that as a spokesperson for his office and re-election campaign. Before her election to the Senate last year, she served as president and CEO of the Business Council of Alabama and as partner at regional law firm Butler Snow LLP.
“She understands a lot more than me,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), the state’s senior senator who has been on Capitol Hill about as long as Britt was Shelby’s top aide.
Britt is one of more than a dozen former congressional staffers elected just in the last year to either the House or Senate. Utah Republican Celeste Maloy is favored to win a special election next week to replace her former boss, former Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah).
Even as she is settling into her role as senator, Britt is cultivating a national reputation. She published a memoir last week entitled God Calls Us to Do Hard Things that advises readers to “own your space,” both in success and in failure, and details the 2011 tornado that destroyed her home and memorabilia from her childhood growing up in southern Alabama.
The book in part documents her ascension in Shelby’s office, where she started as a collegiate intern. After graduating from the University of Alabama and serving as president of the school’s Student Government Association, Britt writes that Shelby hired her as deputy press secretary after reading about her work in student government in the school newspaper, The Crimson White.
“I’ve seen you navigate challenging, highly scrutinizing waters with the campus press,” Shelby told her, according to Britt. “If you can duplicate that up here, you’ll be just fine.”
When Shelby announced his retirement, he and McConnell and their aligned political action committees boosted Britt in her successful bid against then-Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), a member of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus who briefly had the endorsement of former President Donald Trump. Her book came out Nov. 7, a day shy of a year after she handily won her first term by nearly 36 points.
‘Isolating Experience’
Britt said the key distinction between running an office and serving in one was management of her time, which competes for rare moments with her two children in Alabama or her pursuit of the working relationships necessary for bipartisan dealmaking in a body where “I don’t have a natural peer group.”
“It’s a much more isolating experience being a member than you would think,” Britt said. “You have to really be intentional to carve out time to forge those relationships with your colleagues.”
Britt’s next project will be helping to craft an emergency spending bill that senators hope funds security for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and the border. Britt is working to insert additional grants toward security of nonprofits like synagouges and mosques after Hamas attacked the Jewish state last month. Since taking office, she’s visited the US southern border repeatedly and traveled to Israel and the Arabian Peninsula.
Britt on some issues echoes populist rhetoric of the Republican Party, which controls the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature in Alabama. After the failure of mid-sized banks earlier this year, Britt used her time at a Senate Banking Committee hearing to scold regulators for seeking additional powers despite the fact they “should have known” the collapses were coming.
“That’s what people hate about Washington,” Britt said. “We have a crisis and you come in here without knowing whether or not you did your job.”
On other issues, Britt has had to balance appeals to the base with the more moderate positions of Senate leadership. She has criticized Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s performance but withheld judgment on whether the GOP-controlled House should impeach him.
Britt blasted the Pentagon’s payment of allowances for troops and their dependents who seek abortions out-of-state. But she also declined to endorse home-state colleague Tuberville’s unilateral delay of hundreds of senior promotions in protest of it.
“I am hopeful that we will find a path forward” for military promotions, she said.
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