The reason Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) is cooling her heels in the House instead of heading to the United Nations to give them hell at Turtle Bay is that Republicans have gotten a case of the nerves.
Depending on what happens in a few elections being held Tuesday, their condition is about to get a lot worse or a lot better.
Stefanik is a kind of House of Representatives version of Vice President Vance. She started out as an old-fashioned Republican national security hawk, working in former President George W. Bush’s White House after Harvard, then the Romney-Ryan campaign in 2012. When a loss blocked that path forward, she went home to Albany and looked for another way.
The House district just north of where she grew up had been redrawn after the 2010 census to include everything from above Albany all the way to the Canadian border, basically the right side of the “Y” shape of the Empire State. Former Rep. Bill Owens, a moderate Democrat, had flipped the old district in a special election in 2009, but quit after the new district took shape for the 2014 midterms.
That opened the way for Stefanik, then just 30 years old, to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. She was the dark horse in the primary, but tapped the deep pockets of the Bush political universe to win. Then, as her party changed, she changed right along with it. In the span of less than eight years, she went from Bush-Cheney wunderkind to the woman who knocked off Dick Cheney’s daughter, Liz, to become the No. 4 member of the Republican House leadership.
Her unflinching defenses of President Trump won her lots of cred in a MAGA world skeptical of her hawkish, Bushie past. But it was her evisceration of the then-president of Columbia University and other administrators of elite schools in the spring of last year over the anti-Israel protests on their campuses that won her a spot on the shortlist to be Trump’s running mate.
Vance, who had emerged and reinvented himself even more swiftly and thoroughly than Stefanik, got that gig. Her consolation prize, though, was a good one. Ambassador to the United Nations is a job with Cabinet-level visibility but located a comfortable 232 miles away from destructive White House drama.
When Trump tapped Stefanik, however, he was plucking other Republicans from the House, including Mike Waltz of Florida—now famous as the father of the indiscreet airstrike chat—to be his national security adviser. When Trump also chose Matt Gaetz, a man with all of Stefanik’s ambition and none of her self-control, for an abortive bid to be attorney general, it made three sitting members of Congress to be yanked out of what was already the narrowest House majority in history.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) was in charge of setting the replacement elections for Waltz and Gaetz, which made the timing no problem. And Gaetz’s district on the Flora-Bama Coast is so Republican that the GOP could put up a conch shell with an American flag pin and still win by 10.
Waltz’s district on the other side of the state is almost equally red. And if they had gone with a patriotic conch shell over there, Republicans would have probably been OK. Instead of OK, they got Fine.
