A strange puff piece
The NYT's glowing Britt interview reveals the extent of her influence. It isn't much.
The New York Times ran a pretty flattering profile of Sen. Katie Britt (R-Alabama) this week, but it’s a strange one that’s been kind of gnawing at me.
In general, I’ll concede puff pieces have some value. Obviously reporting on news and conducting deep investigative journalism should be a newspaper’s priorities, but there’s some use in the occasional flattering profile and interview. In this case, it tells use about of the goals and operating mode of someone who may be in the Senate for decades to come. What’s more, the 44-year old Britt stands to be influential in the Republican Party long after the Trump Era is over, and understanding where she fits in and how she’s positioning herself is useful. These kind of puff pieces may be helpful for the Times, as well, allowing them access to her on more substantive stories down the road.
It is notable in this piece how Britt positions herself in the party. She has seen others before her openly defy Trump on occasion, only to end up quickly out of a job. She’s also seen others completely kowtow to Trump, only to end up looking like lickspittles (Lindsey Graham) or losing their careers anyway (Elise Stefanik). She’s trying to chart a different path here, publicly being very supportive of Trump (a “killer” for him, in her words) but privately and subtly trying to sway him.
And in a few cases, at least according to this account, that has borne some fruit. While she’s voted 100% for Trump’s priorities, she has steered him a bit on IVF as well as some other issues:
A call to the Pentagon restored the training materials on the Black airmen from Alabama, the people said. A call to the White House got Mr. Trump on board with funding body-worn cameras for ICE agents. And a call to Mr. Trump directly restored billions of dollars for research last summer to the National Institutes of Health.
That’s kind of an interesting model, and it’s a more nuanced view of Republican officeholder behavior in response to Trump than you might get from most Congress news coverage.
But what surprises me here is that the whole piece is positioned around Britt’s concerns about abuses in immigration enforcement. Specifically, she claims to be haunted by the image of 5-year old Liam Conejo Ramos, the boy with the blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack who was used by ICE agents to lure his parents out of their house and then shipped to a detention facility 1,000 miles from home. The case has, at least according to the article, offended her Christian sensibilities and caused her to cry. And it was enough to get her to call Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to register some dissent. That’s all well and good.
Except… this led nowhere. As the article reports,
When she reached Ms. Noem on the phone, the secretary told Ms. Britt exactly what she was hoping to hear, Ms. Britt recounted later: The boy was never used as a pawn. ICE agents had cared for him after his father fled the scene. The agents followed proper procedures. And, as Ms. Noem has often said in response to public criticism, the media had contorted the story.
“Thank you so much,” Ms. Britt recalled saying to Ms. Noem. “This is so helpful to hear.” […]
But Ms. Noem’s facts did not match the accounts coming from local officials. Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of the boy’s school district, told reporters that masked agents had instructed the 5-year-old to knock on the door of his home to see if others were inside — “essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.”
Nonetheless, when asked if she believed Ms. Noem without a shadow of a doubt, Ms. Britt did not hesitate. […]
Sitting in the same chair where she reads her Bible every morning, Ms. Britt explained how important it was to have these kinds of direct conversations with top administration leaders. To demand answers for the people of Alabama.
“I said I was going to run for the Senate to be a voice for the voiceless,” she said. “And I mean it.”
Ms. Britt had tears in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just keep thinking about that child.”
So all this influence and access and soft power that Britt has been developing over the past few years got her a phone call with Kristi Noem, who baldly lied to her. The call neither changed the policy nor led to better treatment of Ramos and his family. If she got angry with Noem or is considering voting against ICE funding as a result, there’s no evidence of that in the article.
Instead, we see a largely powerless senator who is publicly Trump’s loyal soldier and privately… is sad about it sometimes. That’s potentially good positioning for staying in office now until the Trump Era ends, but it’s hard to see how this makes her look good — in an article designed to do exactly that.
I read that story, too. Obviously, her tears did not spur her to action, like Joaquin Castro, the Texas Representative who went to check out the conditions of Arias and his son, along with other Democrats, at the concentration camp to which they had been consigned. Britt's compassion did not spur her to personally confront the situation at the camp. It's easy to shed tears for others from the safety of your home.
What a hypocrite! Being separated from his father was very traumatic for a five year old child so to say he was cared for by ICE agents (whatever that means) is absurd. And she calls herself a Christian, unbelievable!