Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Leigh Ann Caldwell. Happy Presidents’ Day weekend, especially to the T.S.A. agents who may not be getting a paycheck soon because the Department of Homeland Security has been “shut down” since Friday at midnight. I’ll have more below on the standoff over federal immigration tactics that has precipitated the third shutdown of this Congress.

The Munich Security Conference appears to have been another diplomatic roller coaster for America’s allies, and Trump cronies seem annoyed that A.O.C. has been getting so much media attention on her first major international excursion. My Puck partner Julia Ioffe had boots on the ground, and will have more juicy details for you tomorrow.

Today, I’m exploring Republican Sen. Katie Britt’s evolving ambitions. She’s a young, refreshing former staffer who has impressed the right people while deliberately trying not to piss off the wrong ones. Despite her relative youth, she’s also an old-school senator at heart—a dealmaker and believer in the institution—who nevertheless must remain in step with the Trumpier side of her party in Alabama. Usually she manages it with a smile, and that could take her far. But the path ahead ain’t easy.

Mentioned in this issue: Katie Britt, Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, John Thune, Peter Welch, John Fetterman, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, and more…

Notes from the D.H.S. shutdown: Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer appeared on the Sunday shows to press their case for shutting down the Department of Homeland Security, which ran out of funding Friday night as the White House failed to reach an agreement with the Democrats over their demands to rein in ICE. And there’s been little progress in the talks since the White House sent Democrats their counteroffer late last week.

On CNN’s State of the Union, Schumer reiterated the Democrats’ three demands for ICE: a prohibition on roving patrols, accountability for officials’ tactics, and clear identification of agents—rejecting the Republican argument that immigration agents can’t remove their masks because of threats against them and their families. “Look, every other police department in America is unmasked. ICE can do the same,” Schumer said. “This is a rogue force.”

Calling some of the Democrats’ demands “unreasonable,” Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, specifically rejected requiring officers to obtain judicial warrants before making an arrest. The proposed prohibition on stopping people because of their race or ethnicity wasn’t necessary, he said, because “there is no racial profiling.” He also stood firm behind masking, adding, “Why don’t [Democrats] talk about maybe passing legislation to make it illegal to dox agents or something like that?”

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Homan vs. Noem: D.H.S. Secretary Kristi Noem has been sidelined, functionally replaced with Homan. But it’s unclear whether this maneuver is a temporary deescalation, or if Noem is actually toast—a fate that few Republicans on the Hill would bemoan. Homan acknowledged the rift on Face the Nation, something he never would’ve done without a nod from the White House. “Do me and Secretary Noem agree on everything? No,” Homan said. But he insisted it’s “one team, one fight.”
The Minnesota wire crackdown: The Treasury Department’s FinCEN bureau, which investigates money laundering and terrorist financing, is now demanding that U.S. banks report additional information for certain international wire transfers originating in Hennepin and Ramsey counties in Minnesota, according to screenshots of the new requirements that were sent to me. The move is part of the federal government’s investigation into fraud in the state, which led to the enhanced immigration crackdown allegedly targeting the Somali community.

Banks will now have to collect the address, date of birth, and contact information of any international recipient receiving a wire of $3,000 or more from either county, and turn that data over to the government. “This Order will better equip Federal, state, and local law enforcement by providing them with additional information to assist in their investigations of government benefits fraud,” a notice on FinCEN’s website said. “It is expected to advance prosecutions and assist in the recovery of funds laundered internationally.”

Now on to the main event…

The Britt Factor

An Alabama conservative, Trump ally, and Democrat whisperer, Katie Britt has built a career on charming both parties. But triangulation has a short shelf life in Trump’s Washington.

Leigh Ann Caldwell

Katie Britt, the precocious junior senator from Alabama, was recently handed a task seemingly designed to stretch her formidable talents. Senate Majority Leader John Thune had tapped her to secure a compromise on funding for the Department of Homeland Security amid a heated standoff with Democrats over ICE tactics. As the Republican chair of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, it was her bill to get through the Senate—and she likes being in the middle of thorny fights. But in the weeks after federal agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota, this one was particularly difficult, and Democrats had no intention of giving ICE more money without major reforms.

In the end, getting to yes proved too much even for Britt, an institutionalist who grew up professionally in the Senate and has become a preferred intermediary for Democrats. Hoping to rid themselves of a toxic fight, Republicans kicked the talks to the White House; D.H.S. ran out of funding on Friday night and remains shut down. Meanwhile, Britt—a happy warrior constantly in search of a solution—remains in constant contact with her Democratic and Republican colleagues, liaising between them and the White House while probing the parameters of a possible deal.

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It’s a familiar position for the 44-year-old freshman. In her three years in the Senate, Britt has tried to stake out a unique position as, simultaneously, a pro-Trump warrior, serious legislator, dealmaker, and reasonable human being—a hodgepodge of identities that are frequently in tension. At times, she seems to make the balancing act work through relentless charm, hard work, and innate political skills. “She makes the Energizer Bunny look like a slacker,” Sen. Susan Collins told me. “When I’m faced with a particularly thorny issue, I often turn to Katie to assist in the negotiations.”

But Britt’s character and her ambition are not always compatible. “She’s got two things that are intentional, but not irreconcilable,” one Democratic senator told me. “One is that she’s a former chief [of staff], and she believes in the Senate and wants to make this place work. The other is that she’s a senator from Alabama, so there are certain things her constituents expect.” Among them is lockstep fealty to Donald Trump, who soured on Britt after she spoke out against his vile recent posting of a racist video depicting the Obamas. (CNN reported that she’s now “dead to him.”)

It’s fair to speculate that Trump was likewise disenchanted earlier this month after The New York Times published a glowing profile of Britt, headlined “The G.O.P. Senator Who Can’t Stop Thinking About the Boy ICE Detained.” The senator whom Trump once praised as a “fearless America First warrior,” and who was lampooned on SNL for her rebuttal to Biden’s final State of the Union speech, is at constant risk of finding out in real time just how quickly this president’s goodwill can evaporate.

Fast Senate Friends

Britt’s supermom posture helped get her elected as Alabama’s first female senator, and she remains the chamber’s third-youngest member. She walks briskly through the halls of the Capitol in sneakers and sheath dresses, always seemingly late, but apparently happy to talk to anyone. She agonizes over missing her teenage daughter’s volleyball games in Montgomery, while also making it clear she’s ready to work.

Her drive and approachability are the kinds of traits that can win you many allies in the Senate. Her familiarity doesn’t hurt, either: Many of Britt’s current colleagues also worked beside her former boss and predecessor, Sen. Richard Shelby, a crafty dealmaker who served in the upper chamber for 36 years and sent billions of dollars back to Alabama as a top appropriator. After being elected in 2022, Britt became fast friends with Democrats in her freshman class, double-dating with Vermont Sen. Peter Welch—34 years her senior—and their spouses. Welch, too, had succeeded a grizzled power broker, in his case Sen. Patrick Leahy, the longtime top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. “We really wanted to see if we could replicate that and carry on that Alabama–Vermont tradition,” Welch told me.

Sen. John Fetterman became another Britt homie, joking that he was stunned to meet an even larger person than himself when he was introduced to her husband, former Patriots tackle Wesley Britt. When Fetterman checked himself into Walter Reed with severe clinical depression in February 2023, Britt was one of the few senators to visit him. “If I had to save my life to find something bad [to say about Britt], I couldn’t,” Fetterman told me. “I would die, because she is the best.”

For his part, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made a point of taking the new senator under his wing when she arrived back in Washington, putting her on an informal advisory committee with no real power but a clear view into how leadership makes decisions. And he ensured she was among the freshman members to accompany him to the Munich Security Conference in 2023; he’d been trying to teach the next generation of Republicans about the importance of NATO at a time when the party’s isolationist wing was questioning the alliance.

In that old-school, Chamber of Commerce, pro-NATO Senate—which essentially died when Trump’s comeback campaign roared back to life soon afterward—Britt was perhaps on the fast track to Republican leadership. She still could be, but the politics under Trump complicates things. Indeed, she was slow to endorse the president, and was the last member of the Alabama delegation to do so. But she saw clearly where the party was moving, and eventually dusted off her MAGA contacts and forged some new ones.

Not that her execution was always flawless. Britt’s breathy, made-for-SNL delivery of the Biden rebuttal in the early spring of 2024—delivered in her kitchen—attempted to echo the fear-mongering of Trump’s rhetoric and play into widespread anger over Biden’s border policies. But the speech dripped with inauthenticity and proved a rare misstep, after which she vanished off the radar for some time.

She quickly recovered her footing, however, and when she reemerged months later, it was on the long list of potential V.P. candidates. On the first night of the Republican National Convention that summer, she delivered a Trumpy five-minute speech lamenting Biden’s “weakness” and declaring that “under President Trump, we had the strongest economy in history.” Later, she calculated that backing Sen. Tom Cotton for a leadership position as Republican conference chair—and delivering his nominating speech in the closed-door elections—was the right move in the new Trumpian era.

Yet in doing so, Britt was endorsing against Sen. Joni Ernst, a friend and mentor who’d been one of the first people to endorse her in her Senate race. This hard-nosed decision baffled some Republicans, who previously saw Britt as a gregarious, go-along-to-get-along colleague. But they surmised that she’d wanted to hitch her support to the winner and the person with more influence with Trump. (Cotton did indeed prevail.) She continued to make trade-offs: getting behind DOGE, despite millions of dollars’ worth of cuts impacting Alabama; sponsoring the Laken Riley Act, which required ICE to detain and deport immigrants with criminal records, paving the way for the aggressive tactics that currently seem to haunt her; as well as making other plays for White House favor, such as by popping up on Katie Miller’s momosphere podcast and fighting on the Senate floor with Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, her D.H.S. Appropriations counterpart, over the administration’s rescissions.

But as Trump’s popularity has dipped and he has threatened the appropriations process, Britt has reverted to form, choosing to insert herself into complicated stalemates and emerging as a key Democrat whisperer, while making sure to keep her Alabama constituents happy and Trump at bay. During the fall government shutdown over Affordable Care Act subsidies, for example, Collins said Britt was “instrumental” in bringing Sen. Tim Kaine, a needed vote, to reopen the government. Britt made sure the White House understood that the price of Kaine’s vote was back pay for furloughed federal workers. “It takes a lot of energy, and she’s got that legislative mentality that I think people who are successful around here have,” Welch told me.

Finding solutions and appealing to Alabamans aren’t always the same, of course, and Tommy Tuberville, Britt’s fellow Alabama senator, operates purely from the right. While Britt touts that she votes in lockstep with the president, she’s probably lucky that she doesn’t have to run for reelection until 2028, when the party will likely be remaking itself again as the Trump era winds down. If she’s as deft a politician as many believe, she knows that time is on her side.

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