Election night 2024 was a triumph for Angela Alsobrooks.
Despite a bitter Democratic primary and no small amount of second-guessing within her party about the often-cautious campaign she had run, the then-Prince George’s County executive was elected Maryland’s first Black senator. She handily beat a former Republican governor who had once enjoyed an approval rating of close to 80 percent.
But for Democrats across the country, the overall returns were grim. Practically the entire nation moved to the right. Their party lost its narrow Senate majority. And then there were the results of the presidential race.
“I’ll never forget how special it felt to me and to my daughter and family. And at the same time, there’s the reelection of Donald Trump, which, quite honestly, I literally never thought was possible,” Alsobrooks recalled in an interview in her Senate office. “So the mission for me was really crystal clear on that night.”
But her first year in the Senate has also been an adjustment — and a learning process. “I know that it takes time. This is for me a long game,” Alsobrooks said. “You know, I’m going to be here when the people in the White House leave. They have four years, and I have six.”
An early glimpse what was ahead came when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited her windowless temporary office in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to lobby for his nomination to be Trump’s health secretary.
“I knew before even speaking with him, he had no background to support his nomination,” Alsobrooks said. What Kennedy was most known for were discredited theories regarding vaccine safety.
So she asked him whether he intended to substitute his own judgment for that of scientists at the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier biomedical research agency, which is in Maryland and would be under his purview.
His answer, as she recalled it: “I will replace bad scientists with good scientists.”
“I knew we were in for a really rough ride,” she said. So, she steeled herself for his confirmation hearing, digging for instance into his past comments, including one in 2021 that Black people should have a different vaccine schedule than Whites because “their immune system is better than ours.”
“Let me just ask you then. So what different vaccine schedule would you say I should have received?” she said.
Alsobrooks’ grilling, which displayed her chops as a former chief prosecutor in Prince George’s County, went viral.
She has continued to be one of RFK Jr.’s chief antagonists in Congress, as she says her fears about him have been realized. NIH canceled billions in research grants; thousands of government scientists were fired.
In May, she became the first senator to formally call for Kennedy to resign or be fired. In September, she and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, have also compiled a 54-page report chronicling day-by-day his actions as health secretary to build a case that he should be removed.
Still, Alsobrooks has kept a generally low profile thus far. Where other senators seem to practically live in television studio green rooms, she is not a fixture on cable news. Instead, Alsobrooks explained, she has focused on learning the Senate from the inside out.
Of the half-dozen first-term Democrats sworn into the U.S. Senate at the beginning of the 119th Congress in January, Alsobrooks was the only one who hadn’t come from the House. Her experience was in executive office, where leaders are measured by how they assert their authority, set an agenda, make crisp decisions and implement them.
The Senate, on the other hand, is an institution bound up in partisanship and slow-moving processes that are not geared toward yielding results. Ex-governors have often had so much trouble coming to terms with being only one of 100 that they joke about needing a support group. Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who served two terms as chief executive of his state, has suggested they call themselves the “Extremely Frustrated Caucus.”
Maryland’s junior senator, currently 96th in seniority, denied that she has felt that kind of exasperation. “What is it like to go from an executive to a legislator?” she said. “I wasn’t sure how it would feel. I’ve loved it. I have. I think I found my space.”
Alsobrooks has been surprised, she said, at how collegial senators are privately, even amid the partisan battles they conduct in public. She has joined a bible study with seven colleagues of both parties that meets with the Senate chaplain on Thursdays. “You get nothing done if you cannot make friendships and relationships, so I have made that my mission,” she said.
On legislation, Alsobrooks has sought out Republican co-sponsors — to the point, she laughed, that she has been known to track them down in the senators-only ladies room.
Among the GOP senators who have signed on to bills with her: Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming) on one steering more federal money to early detection and treatment of uterine fibroids; Tim Scott (South Carolina), on one allowing beauty industry businesses, including hair stylists, barbers, and nail technicians, to qualify for more generous federal tax credits; Katie Boyd Britt (Alabama), on one to make homeless youth eligible for more services.
At a time when “affordability” is on the lips of every Democrat, Alsobrooks argued that her party must also look beyond easing the immediate economic crunch that Americans are feeling. Most people aspire to do more than just pay the bills, she noted.
“We often talk a lot about poor people, working class people and middle class people, but my opinion is that sometimes we obviously don’t know very many of them, because if we did, I swear we would be focused very differently in terms of how we legislated,” she said.
Having come from a working-class family and still living in the county where she grew up, Alsobrooks added, “it isn’t theoretical for me.”
Alsobrooks was recruited by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) to sponsor and then help negotiate the final version of a landmark law — titled the GENIUS Act — establishing the first regulatory framework around cryptocurrency known as stablecoins.
“When Gillibrand came to me with this legislation, I jumped right away,” she said. “What happens is these emerging markets come about, and the people who are able to benefit are people who are already wealthy. I wanted to be there to make it safe for the average person to be able to participate in an emerging market that I feel has the opportunity to create and to generate wealth.”
One thing that distinguishes senators from Maryland and Virginia is that they live among their constituents all the time, and run into many on the job at the U.S. Capitol.
“I see my constituents at the Wegmans every week, so I knew when grapes reached $9,” Alsobrooks said. She is also a member of the “sandwich generation,” the mother of a 20-year-old in college who is also helping her parents grapple with serious health issues. The family recently spent hours on the phone when the price of a drug her father was taking to prevent strokes suddenly spiked to $800 a month.
For Alsobrooks, joining what is often referred to as the most exclusive club in the country carries additional significance, because she is the first person of her race to represent the blackest blue state in the country.
She gets reminded how much her presence matters in big ways and small. Last summer, Alsobrooks decided to put her hair in braids, mostly because it seemed easier in the muggy hot weather. As she was headed toward the chamber one day, a longtime Capitol police officer stopped her and asked if they could take a photo together, which they did.
“My mother is going to be so thrilled,” he told her. “You are the first person to have ever walked on the floor of the Senate with braids in your hair.”
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