28 NEWSWEEK.COM MARCH 05, 2021
POLITICSparty,” says Kim, explaining her vote. “Representa-
tive Greene’s comments and actions, from spreading
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to questioning 9/11
and school shootings, are wrong in any context. I
cannot in good conscience support this rhetoric.”
Comparing the 30 GOP women now in the House
to the 25 Republican women serving in the 109th
Congress of 2005-07, the previous record, shows
how much more conservative the group has be-
come. Most of the GOP female representatives of the
109th were, predictably, anti-abortion, opposed to
LGBTQ rights and affirmative action and took little
interest in protecting the environment. But about
half of them received praise from the Federation
for American Immigration Reform for votes op-
posing restrictions on immigration and most voted
at least some of the time in ways that the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People
approved of. Six of them supported some forms of
abortion rights and gun control, for which they re-
ceived grades lower than an “A” from the National
Rifle Association. One, then-Representative Nancy
Johnson of Connecticut, received a 100 percent rat-
ing from the pro-choice advocacy group NARAL, a 53
percent rating from the pro-LGBTQ Human Rights
Campaign and a 70 percent rating from the League
of Conservation Voters. (Johnson’s fate was a harbin-
ger of what moderate GOP women would face; she
lost her seat to a Democrat in 2006.)
By contrast, not one of the Republican women
currently serving in the House supports abortion
rights and every one of them boasts an “A” rating
from the NRA. On immigration, 25 of them sup-
ported the hard-line anti-immigration policies of
the Trump administration, including reductions
on asylum and the building of a border wall. (Three
of the women from the 109th Congress are still in
the House, and two of them—Marsha Blackburn of
Tennessee and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virgin-
ia—are now senators.)
The more conservative bent of many of the Re-
publican newcomers partly reflects Stefanik’s polit-
ical sensibilities, given her hands-on efforts in re-
cruiting them. The New Yorker provided a template
for gaining traction and attention. She was elected in
2014 at 30 as the youngest-ever Republican woman;
she had a moderate reputation, espousing a desire
to work in a bipartisan fashion and opposing Trump
on his coziness with Russia, his border wall efforts
and the ban on travel from several Muslim-majority
nations. Then, in 2019, her national profile soared
as one of the most vocal defenders of Trump as the
House moved to impeach him for his efforts to
strong arm Ukraine’s president into digging up dirt
on the family of Joe Biden, his likely opponent in
the 2020 election. The president rewarded Stefanik
for her advocacy by hopping on Fox News to lavish
praise: “This young woman from upstate New York,
she has become a star.”
All of this was instructive to ambitious 2020
candidates, says Liz Mair, a longtime Republican
strategist who worked with Stefanik on Minneso-
ta Governor Tim Pawlenty’s short-lived bid for the
2012 GOP presidential nomination. “She really, really,
really, really wants to be Speaker, and the reality of
the Republican Party now is you’ve got her and Liz
Cheney playing two very different hands. Cheney
clearly takes a view that you don’t get to be speaker
unless you do a good job and stick to your principles
and don’t waver and are consistent and tough. Ste-
fanik has decided she can’t be speaker without being
super Trumpy so she’s just going to be super Trumpy.”
Yet Cheney too, despite her impeachment vote,
is more typically a rock-ribbed, lock-step conser-
vative. She has voted with House Minority Leader
Kevin McCarthy 92 percent of the time—and, in
fact, in agreement with Trump’s positions about 93
percent of the time, according to a FiveThirtyEight
tracker. (Stefanik, according to this measure, voted
in accordance with Trump’s position about 78 per-
cent of the time. Yet she has the ex-president’s favor
for her willingness to support his baseless election
fraud claims and champion him personally.) Cheney,
daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is so“One of the things women
bring to Congress is that we
are PROBLEM SOLVERS.
It’s, ‘let’s figure out how
to make THINGS WORK.’”