An Iowa law rolling back trans civil rights protections in the state has taken effect. Here's what to know
The new rollback of protections is the latest attack on trans people in the US and part of a broader movement across conservative-led states working to restrict LGBTQ rights.
GOP Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the Republican-backed measure earlier this year, saying it 'safeguards the rights of women and girls.' But advocates worry about what they call the dangerous, far-reaching consequences for the trans community in the absence of state legal protections.
'It's really a dark moment in our history,' said Democratic Rep. Aime Wichtendahl, Iowa's first openly transgender lawmaker. 'Our government in the state of Iowa has been reducing rights across the board this past decade.'
The new law marks the end to an 18-year legacy of civil rights protection for trans people in Iowa – a stark departure from the state's history of inclusive gender policies.
'The fundamental fact is, we were freer 10 years ago than we are today,' Wichtendahl said.
While there are still federal and other anti-discrimination protections in place, President Donald Trump and conservative allies continue to take steps to chip away at trans rights since he returned to office.
A state's civil rights code safeguards people from discrimination, often based on characteristics like religion, race and, in many cases, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity.
Gender identity is no longer on the list of protected classes in Iowa.
Iowa's new law also attempts to redefine gender as a synonym for biological sex, a shift that disregards contemporary medical and psychological understandings of gender identity.
Under the law, transgender people are barred from correcting their gender marker on birth certificates, so their identifying documentation will show the sex they were assigned at birth.
Transgender and nonbinary people in Iowa now face increased legal uncertainty, experts say.
'This isn't some nebulous law that won't really impact people,' said Max Mowitz, the executive director of LGBTQ advocacy group One Iowa.
Without state civil rights protections, individuals who are fired, denied housing or refused medical treatment based on their gender identity have a narrower path to legal recourse.
'Folks would be able to discriminate against us if (we) were trying to get a hotel room, or go to a coffee shop, or even open a line of credit,' he said.
Having identifying documents with gender markers that don't appear to match how a person is presenting themself could foster an uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous, situation for people who are forced to out themselves as trans to strangers.
As a trans Iowan, Mowitz said he's been patted down by TSA because 'something was on my driver's license that didn't look the way that they thought it should.'
Naomi Goldberg, executive director of the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank providing resources to the LGBTQ community, said trans and nonbinary people will have a hard time going about daily life because of the new law.
It will also increase the already high risk of harassment and violence for trans Americans, Goldberg added.
More than a dozen states, mostly conservative, have never added gender identity as a protected class to their civil rights laws, according to data from the Movement Advancement Project.
Meanwhile, 31 states prohibit some form of discrimination against people based on their gender identity. And bills in those states have not moved to strike gender identity from their civil rights statutes, Goldberg said.
But protections for LGBTQ people vary greatly by state.
In Texas, the American Civil Liberties Union is currently tracking 88 bills it says are anti-LGBTQ that have been introduced during the 2025 legislative session — more than any other state. By contrast, the ACLU is tracking zero in Vermont.
At the federal level, new legislation and lawsuits targeting trans people have increased across the US.
The Supreme Court could agree this week to hear arguments in the backlog of cases dealing with trans issues — putting transgender rights front and center for a second year in a row.
The high court handed conservative states a win this Pride Month when it upheld Tennessee's ban on some medical treatments for transgender minors.
Trump, who campaigned on ending 'transgender lunacy,' has taken steps to dismantle the Biden administration's efforts to be more inclusive of Americans' gender identification.
He has signed a flurry of executive orders targeting trans people — including declaring there are only two genders, banning transgender women from participating in most women's sports, and barring transgender service members from serving in the military.
Trump earlier this year pushed Iowa to follow his lead from the orders and pass the bill to 'remove Radical Gender Ideology from their Laws.'
But trans people just want politicians to allow them to live freely, said Wichtendahl, the Iowa lawmaker.
'The ability to live our lives and be treated equally under the law and rights and dignity, to not have the government be this pernicious voice dictating who we are every step of the way,' Wichtendahl said, 'that's all we've ever asked for.'
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San Francisco Chronicle
27 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
No, California is not guaranteed to remain an abortion haven
The sudden closure of five Planned Parenthood clinics in Northern California last week reveals a sad, stark truth: California is not the national 'haven' for abortion rights that it has aspired to be since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. No state could be under Republican rule in Washington, or while federal law trumps state law, the Supreme Court majority opposes abortion rights and clinics are reliant on federal money to survive. There are few options to fix this problem, even in California, the world's fourth-largest economy. The state barely covered its budget deficit this year, and it has holes to fill as federal funds for public universities, education, transportation and other sectors were slashed in the recently passed budget. Plus, the state needs federal dollars to help rebuild Los Angeles after the devastating wildfires there earlier this year. Ten million Americans are expected to lose their health insurance because of nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans will receive a disproportionate share of the tax cuts funded by those reductions, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. 'It's an illustration of the limits on what any state can do (on abortion access) if the federal government is hostile,' said Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at UC Davis and leading scholar on abortion rights. 'It's more of a reminder that there isn't really a real sanctuary. California has limited power over a lot of this.' It is the latest example of how California is in the political crosshairs of what President Donald Trump's former top adviser Steve Bannon famously described as his 'muzzle velocity' philosophy of launching a lot of disruptive policies and spurious attacks simultaneously. California is withering under the incoming fire. The people hurt most by the closure of those clinics will be the poorest Californians, as 80% of the people who used services at those clinics were Medicaid recipients, according to Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, the umbrella organization for the shuttered clinics. Planned Parenthood doesn't just provide abortion services. The majority of people go to Planned Parenthood clinics for contraceptive services, sexually transmitted infection testing, pregnancy testing and gynecological services. One in 10 (11%) female Medicaid beneficiaries ages 15 to 49 who received family planning services went to a Planned Parenthood clinic in 2021, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. California has the highest percentage (29%) of Medicaid recipients in the country who go there for health care. This wasn't the way it was supposed to go. California was supposed to be a haven for abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Shortly after the decision, Gov. Gavin Newsom joined the governors of Washington and Oregon to create what he called 'the West Coast offensive. A road map for other states to stand up for women.' A diverse coalition of abortion rights advocates formed the California Future of Abortion Council. It proposed more than 50 recommendations for policymakers to improve abortion access in the state. In the year after the decision, Newsom and the Democratic-controlled Legislature created more than a dozen new laws and invested more than $200 million to increase access across the state. In November 2022, 67% of California voters supported a ballot measure enshrining abortion rights in the state Constitution. Newsom spent $100,000 from his campaign coffers to plant billboards in seven states with some of the nation's most restrictive laws: 'Need an abortion?' reads one billboard. 'California is here to help.' 'What you do in California sets the standard for everyone else,' Mini Timmaraju, national president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said at a 2022 fundraiser for Proposition 1 in San Francisco that Hillary Clinton attended. 'I want to take that package of legislation and this proposition and see it copied nationwide.' Ultimately, all those California laws and all that state funding weren't enough to keep the Mar Monte clinics open. They never could be as long as there isn't the national right to an abortion that Roe provided and as long as women's health clinics are reliant on federal funds to remain open. Planned Parenthood estimates that 200 clinics nationwide could close. To meet this reality, California needs a new 'West Coast offensive.' It needs to draw up a new 'road map for other states to stand up for women.' It would be best if clinics were funded privately, insulating them from partisan federal cuts. But that is harder now. California is the state with the most millionaires and billionaires. Now is the time for wealthy individuals and foundations to stand up and backfill these losses so clinics can continue to provide access to women's health care. But will those individuals step forward? Or will they be cowed like the wealthy law firms and Ivy League universities that have bowed to Trump's intimidation? Even if they do step up, is there enough private money in California to keep federally funded women's health clinics open until Democrats regain control of at least one lever of power in Washington and can curb his fascistic policies? That possibility looks bleak. For starters, it would probably require hundreds of millions of dollars, said Shannon Olivieri Hovis, former NARAL Pro-Choice California director who is now vice president of public affairs at Essential Access Health. 'I think the honest answer is, we don't know yet. We're talking about a huge hole.' Theresa Cheng, a professor of emergency medicine at UCSF and a member of the school's Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, said it will be difficult for the private sector to patch up all the new holes punctured in the social safety net by the Trump administration. 'That's going to be really difficult because the Trump administration has cut so broadly in so many social systems,' said Cheng, who is in touch with private donors through her work with several nonprofit organizations. 'Food insecurity. Homelessness. Immigration. There are a lot of needs out there now.' Relying on private donations isn't going to help clinics across California's chasm of wealth inequality, Ziegler said. 'If you're depending partly on individual donors, that's going to look very different in Beverly Hills or Marin County than it is in Gilroy or other areas where there are few people to give private donations,' Ziegler said. Until political change happens in Washington, Cheng urged Californians to 'stay stalwart in protecting reproductive health. So much of this will have to be settled out in the courts. That will at least buy us some more time.'
The Hill
27 minutes ago
- The Hill
Paul signals Jill Biden, Anthony Fauci could be looked at in autopen probe
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Sunday that former first lady Jill Biden and Anthony Fauci could be examined during Congress's autopen probe. President Trump has railed against his predecessor, former President Biden, for using the autopen to pardon individuals during his last few months in office. The president ordered a probe into the signatures on various pardons in June while GOP lawmakers requested interviews with several former White House staffers to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Some have pleaded the Fifth at some point during their testimonies. 'Even though Anthony Fauci has been pardoned, there is some question whether it's a legitimate pardon. His pardon wasn't signed by President Biden,' Paul said during an appearance on John Catsimatidis's radio show 'Cats Roundtable' on WABC 770 AM. 'It's unclear whether President Biden is mentally cognizant enough of the situation to know who he pardoned. Hundreds and hundreds of people were pardoned in a day by a mechanical signature from a machine. We do know there's been testimony from the people running the machine that they never talked to the president, that they talked to an assistant that works for the president's wife,' he added. Biden has previously argued that past administrations have used the autopen to sign government paperwork, proving its legality. However, Republicans have refused to let go of criticism regarding his signature on multiple pardons. 'Who knew that we weren't being run by Joe Biden, but we were being run by some kind of chief of staff that worked for his wife. That's something to a lot of Americans to know that that person was granting power of pardons and could have taken the country to war and was never elected,' Paul said. 'So I think the way the best way to sort this out is you have to go to court. And I think the easiest way to get this into court is they should indict Anthony Fauci for lying to Congress, and he will make a defense that he's been pardoned,' he added. Paul also pointed out that the autopen was not used to sign the pardon for Hunter Biden. 'I think there is a question whether these pardons are valid. Interestingly, when he had to do the pardon for his son, he didn't take any chances by running it for the auto pen,' Paul. 'The pardon for Hunter Biden for any crimes committed over the last 10 years, any crimes, was done by personal hand signature by Biden, not the auto pen.'
Atlantic
28 minutes ago
- Atlantic
The Politics of Going Low
All the comforts of a Waldorf Astoria city-view suite did not, at that moment, seem to cheer Jasmine Crockett. The 44-year-old Texas Democrat known for her viral comebacks was frowning as she walked into her hotel room in Atlanta last month. She glanced around before pulling an aide into the bathroom, where I could hear them whispering. Minutes later, she reemerged, ready to unload. She was losing her race to serve as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, she told me, a job she felt well suited for. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were planning to vote for the senior-most person in the race, even though that person wasn't actually a Black Caucus member, Crockett complained. California members were siding with the California candidate. One member was supporting someone else in the race, she said, even though 'that person did the worst' in their pitch to the caucus. Crockett was starting to feel a little used. Some of her colleagues were 'reaching out and asking for donations,' she said, but those same colleagues 'won't even send me a text back' about the Oversight job. To Crockett, the race had become a small-scale version of the Democratic Party's bigger predicament. Her colleagues still haven't learned what, to her, is obvious: Democrats need sharper, fiercer communicators. 'It's like, there's one clear person in the race that has the largest social-media following,' Crockett told me. In poll after poll since Donald Trump's reelection, Democratic voters have said they want a fighter, and Crockett, a former attorney who represents the Dallas area, has spent two and a half years in Congress trying to be one. Through her hearing-room quips and social-media insults, she's become known, at least in MSNBC-watching households, as a leading general in the battle against Trump. The president is aware of this. He has repeatedly called Crockett a 'low-IQ' individual; she has dubbed him a 'buffoon' and 'Putin's hoe.' Perhaps the best-known Crockett clapback came last year during a hearing, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made fun of Crockett's fake eyelashes. Crockett, seeming to relish the moment, leaned into the mic and blasted Greene's 'bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body.' Crockett trademarked the phrase—which she now refers to as 'B6'—and started selling T-shirts. At the time, I wrote that the episode was embarrassing for everyone involved. But clearly it resonated. Crockett has become a national figure. Last year, she gave a keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention and was a national co-chair of Kamala Harris's campaign. This year, she has been a fixture on cable news and talk shows as well as a top party fundraiser; she was in Atlanta, in part, for a meet and greet with local donors. At an anti-Trump protest on the National Mall in April, I saw several demonstrators wearing B6 shirts. Others carried signs with Crockett's face on them. Crockett is testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there. That approach, her supporters say, appeals to people who drifted away from the Democrats in 2024, including many young and Black voters. 'What establishment Democrats see as undignified,' Max Burns, a progressive political strategist, told me, 'disillusioned Democrats see that as a small victory.' Republicans understand this, Crockett said: 'Marjorie is not liked by her caucus, but they get her value, and so they gave her a committee chairmanship.' Perhaps inadvertently, Crockett seemed to be acknowledging something I heard from others in my reporting: that the forthrightness her supporters love might undermine her relationships within the party. Some of Crockett's fellow Democrats worry that her rhetoric could alienate the more moderate voters the party needs to win back. In the same week that Democratic leadership had instructed members to focus on Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for billionaires, Crockett referred to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as 'Governor Hot Wheels.' (Crockett claimed that she was referring to Abbott's busing of migrants.) In an interview with Vanity Fair after the 2024 election, Crockett said that Hispanic Trump supporters had 'almost like a slave mentality.' She later told a CNN host that she was tired of 'white tears' and the 'mediocre white boys' who are upset by DEI. Unsurprisingly, Trump himself seems eager to elevate Crockett. 'They say she's the face of the party,' the president told my Atlantic colleagues recently. 'If she's what they have to offer, they don't have a chance.' Some of the Republican targeting of Crockett is clearly rooted in racism; online, Trump's supporters constantly refer to her as 'ghetto' and make fun of her hair. From the June 2025 issue: 'I run the country and the world' None of this appears to be giving Crockett any pause. The first time I met her, a month before our conversation in Atlanta, she was accepting a Webby Award, in part for a viral exchange in which she'd referred to Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina as 'child' and Mace suggested they 'take it outside.' Backstage, in a downtown-Manhattan ballroom, I asked Crockett whether she ever had regrets about her public comments. She raised her eyebrows and replied, 'I don't second-guess shit.' This spring, I watched Crockett test her theory of politics in a series of public appearances. At the Webbys, most of her fellow award winners were celebrities and influencers, but only Crockett received a standing ovation. A week later, Crockett flamed Republicans and the Trump administration during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing about Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A 15-minute clip of her upbraiding ICE agents—'These people are out of control!'—has racked up more than 797,000 views on YouTube; I know this because she told me. On TikTok and Instagram, Crockett has one of the highest follower counts of any House member, and she monitors social-media engagement like a day trader checks her portfolio. She is highly conscious, too, of her self-presentation. During many of our conversations, Crockett wore acrylic nails painted with the word RESIST, and a set of heavy lashes over her brown eyes. The lock screen on her phone is a headshot of herself. Behind the scenes, the congresswoman speaks casually. At the Waldorf, I watched her deliver a quick Oversight-campaign pitch via Zoom. It was a virtual meeting of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, she'd explained to me beforehand. But then, after the call, she wasn't sure. 'CAPAC is the Asian caucus, right?' she asked. 'Yes,' the aide confirmed. 'That would've been bad,' Crockett said with a laugh. She can also be brusque. During our interview at the Waldorf, she dialed up a staffer in D.C. in front of me and scolded him for an unclear note on her schedule. Another time, in the car, after an aide brought Crockett a paper bag full of food from a fundraiser, she peered inside, scrunched her nose, and said, 'This looks like crap.' Still, Crockett is often more thoughtful in person than she might appear in clips. Once, after a hearing, I watched as she responded to a request for comment with a tight 90-second answer about faith and service. Another time, a reporter who was filming her tried to provoke her by asking what she would say to people who think she is 'mentally ill.' 'They can think whatever they want to, because as of now, we live in a democracy,' Crockett answered calmly, before taking another question. 'I don't want people to lose sight of the fact that this is someone with a very fine, legally trained mind,' Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, a mentor of Crockett's, told me. Crockett's Republican critics like to say that she's a private-school girl playing a plainspoken Texas brawler for social-media clout. They're not wrong about her background. Crockett grew up an only child in St. Louis, not Dallas, and attended private high school before enrolling at Rhodes College, a small liberal-arts school in Tennessee. When Crockett was young, her father was a life-insurance salesman and a teacher, she told me, and she has talked often about his work as a preacher; her mother, she said, still works for the IRS. Crockett's stage presence precedes her political career. At Rhodes, from which she graduated in 2003, she was recruited to the mock-trial program after a team leader watched her enthusiastic performance as the narrator Ronnette in Little Shop of Horrors, her former coach, Marcus Pohlmann, told me. She won a national award during her first and only year in the program. As Crockett tells it, she became interested in the law after she and a few other Black students at Rhodes received anonymous letters containing racist threats. The school hired a Black female attorney from the Cochran Firm, a national personal-injury-law group, to handle the case, Crockett told me. The attorney became Crockett's 'shero,' she said, and inspired her to attend law school herself. When I asked for the name of her shero so that I could interview her, Crockett told me that she did not remember. I reached out to a former Cochran Firm attorney in Tennessee who fit Crockett's description; she remembered the incident in broad terms but was not sure if she had worked on the case or with Crockett. Although Rhodes College had no specific records of the incident, two people who worked at the college at the time told me that they recalled it. Crockett worked for a few years as a public defender in deep-red Bowie County, Texas, before starting her own law firm, where she drew attention for defending Black Lives Matter demonstrators. She was sworn in to the Texas state House in 2021 and became the body's third-most progressive member, according to the Texas Tribune, authoring dozens of bills, with an emphasis on criminal-justice reform. (None of the legislation for which she was the main author ever passed the Republican-dominated legislature.) 'Most freshmen come, they are just trying to learn where the restrooms are,' but Crockett 'came with a fight in her,' Texas Representative Toni Rose, a former Democratic colleague of Crockett's, told me. Having defeated an incumbent Democrat to win her seat, Crockett was already viewed as an agitator by some of her new colleagues. Then, in 2021, she became the unofficial spokesperson for a group of more than 50 Texas Democrats who fled to D.C. in a high-profile effort to stall Republican legislation. Her dealings with the press built up 'real resentment' with Democratic leaders, one Texas-based party strategist, who was familiar with caucus actions at the time, told me. (This person, like some others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly.) 'When they broke quorum and it was important that everything be secret, she was on the phone to the press talking about what they were getting ready to do,' the strategist said. Both Crockett and her chief of staff at the time, Karrol Rimal, denied this version of events and told me that she had not given an interview before arriving in D.C. Rimal said that Crockett had agreed to do press only if the story would not be published until the Texas lawmakers crossed state lines. He added that state Democrats were sometimes jealous because Crockett 'outshined them.' The state-House drama was short-lived: After one term, Crockett became the handpicked replacement for 15-term U.S. Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson. Crockett sailed to victory, and less than a year later, her breakthrough moment arrived: While questioning a witness in a committee hearing, Crockett held up a photograph of several boxes in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. The classified documents, she said, looked like they were 'in the shitter to me!' Trump critics praised her as an 'absolute star' and their ' new favorite Congresswoman.' Not everyone agreed. Johnson felt that the freshman congresswoman was dismissive of her experience and advice, according to two sources familiar with the relationship. 'I don't think it was a secret' that by the time Johnson died, in December 2023, 'she had had second thoughts about Jasmine,' the Texas-based Democratic strategist said. Crockett strongly denied this characterization and said that she had never heard it from those close to Johnson. I reached out to Johnson's son for his view, but he didn't respond. The race to replace the Oversight Committee's top Democrat, the late Representative Gerry Connolly, presented a multipurpose opportunity. Democrats could preview their resistance strategy for a second Trump administration. And Crockett, who'd run an unsuccessful, last-minute bid for a leadership position the previous year, could test her own viability as a party leader. In late May, Crockett brought me along to a private meeting in the green-walled office of a freshman member—Maxine Dexter of Oregon—where she made her pitch: The Democrats have a communication problem, Crockett said. 'The biggest issue' with Joe Biden's presidency wasn't 'that he wasn't a great president,' she explained. 'It was that no one knew what the fuck he did.' (Crockett acknowledged to Dexter that the former president is 'old as shit,' but said, 'He's an old man that gets shit done.') Crockett highlighted her own emphasis on social media, and the hundreds of thousands of views she had received on a recent YouTube video. 'The base is thirsty. The base right now is not very happy with us,' Crockett continued, and if any lawmaker could make them feel heard, 'it's me.' Crockett told Dexter that she had big plans for Oversight. She wanted to take hearings on the road, and to show voters that 'these motherfuckers'—Republicans—are all 'complicit' in Trump's wrongdoing. She wasn't worried about her own reelection. 'I guess it's my fearlessness,' she told Dexter. Dexter asked Crockett about her relationship with leadership. Another young firebrand, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had bumped up against then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she arrived in Congress, Dexter noted. Crockett dismissed that concern, explaining that she had never wanted to 'burn it down' and prefers to be seen as working on behalf of the party. The national 'Fighting Oligarchy' tour featuring Senator Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez is a good idea, Crockett said, but it 'kind of makes people be like, Oh, it's about them, right? Instead of the team.' (Through a spokesperson, Ocasio-Cortez declined to comment. Crockett told me that the two have a positive relationship.) Read: Can you really fight populism with populism? By the end of the meeting, Dexter was ready to vote for Crockett. But she would never get the chance. Five days after Crockett's fundraiser in Atlanta, Punchbowl News reported that she had 'leaned into the idea of impeaching President Donald Trump,' which spooked swing-district members. Representative Robert Garcia of California was quickly becoming the caucus favorite. Like Crockett, he was relatively young and outspoken. But he had spent his campaign making a 'subtle' case for generational change, Punchbowl said, and he'd told members that the Oversight panel shouldn't 'function solely as an anti-Trump entity.' The same day the Punchbowl report was published, 62 Democratic leaders met to decide which of the four Oversight candidates they'd recommend to the caucus. The vote was decisive: Garcia, with 33 votes, was the winner. Crockett placed last, with only six. Around midnight, she went live on Instagram to announce that she was withdrawing her name from the race; Garcia would be elected the next morning. In the end, 'recent questions about something that just wasn't true' had tanked her support, Crockett told her Instagram viewers. She hadn't campaigned on impeaching Trump, she told me later; she'd simply told a reporter that, if Democrats held a majority in the House, she would support an impeachment inquiry. And why not? She was just being transparent, Crockett told me, 'and frankly, I may not get a lot of places because I am very transparent.' Some of Crockett's fellow Democrats find that candor refreshing. 'People don't necessarily agree with her aggressive communication style,' Representative Julie Johnson of Texas told me. 'I'm thrilled she's doing it, because we need it all.' Garcia, in a statement from his office, told me that Crockett is 'one of the strongest fighters we have,' and that, 'as a party, we should be taking notes on the kinds of skills she exemplifies.' But several other Democrats I reached out to about the race seemed uninterested in weighing in. Thirteen of her colleagues on the Oversight and Judiciary committees, along with 20 other Democratic members I contacted for this story, either declined to talk with me on the record or didn't respond to my interview requests. Senior staffers for three Democratic members told me that some of Crockett's colleagues see her as undisciplined but are reluctant to criticize her publicly. 'She likes to talk,' one of the staffers said. 'Is she a loose cannon? Sometimes. Does that cause headaches for other members? 100 percent.' Crockett said that people are free to disagree with her communication style, but that she 'was elected to speak up for the people that I represent.' As for her colleagues, four days before this story was published, Crockett called me to express frustration that I had reached out to so many House members without telling her first. She was, she told me, 'shutting down the profile and revoking all permissions.' Crockett does not have supporters so much as she has admirers. Everywhere she goes, young people ask for selfies, and groups of her red-clad Delta Sigma Theta sorority sisters pop up to cheer her on. A few days before she dropped out of the Oversight race, a congregation outside of Atlanta full of middle-aged Black Georgians was giddy to host her: Here was Jasmine Crockett, recounting her feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene. 'She thought she could play with me,' Crockett told Pastor Jamal Bryant, the leader of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and a progressive activist. There were a few 'oh no's in the crowd. 'The average, maybe, person in my party potentially would have just let it go,' Crockett went on. 'I wasn't the one.' There were claps and whoops. 'I was steaming, and I was ready,' she said. 'I was like, 'Well, two wrongs gonna make a right today, baby, cause I ain't gonna let it go!'' The righteous anger in Crockett's voice was audible; people applauded for it, probably because it sounded a lot like their own. Crockett's fans are rooting for her to go bigger. And when I asked if she was considering running for Senate in the future—John Cornyn is up for reelection next year—Crockett didn't wave me off. 'My philosophy is: Stay ready so you don't have to get ready,' she said. Crockett imagines a world in which Democrats are associated with lofty ideals and monosyllabic slogans, like Barack Obama once was. When I asked her what the party should stand for beyond being against Trump, and what she stands for, she explained, 'For me, I always just say 'the people,'' adding that her campaigns have always been associated with 'fire.' Plenty of other Democrats believe that Crockett's approach comes dangerously close to arson. Her critics argue that it's easy to be outspoken in a safe Democratic seat; they might also point out that Crockett received 7,000 fewer votes in 2024 than Johnson, her predecessor, had in 2020. You can see James Carville coming from a mile away. 'I don't think we need a Marjorie Taylor Greene,' the longtime Democratic consultant told me. Crockett is 'passionate. She has an instinct for making headlines. But does that help us at the end of the day?' he said. 'You're trying to win the election. That's the overall goal.' Crockett is not Marjorie Taylor Greene; for one, she is not peddling space-laser, weather-control conspiracy theories. Yet Crockett's combative style could be a misreading of the moment, Lakshya Jain, an analyst at the political-forecasting site Split Ticket, told me. 'People think the brand issue that Democrats have is they don't fight enough and that they're not mean enough,' Jain said, but 'those are all just proxies for saying that they can't get stuff done for people.' In Congress, Crockett has championed progressive causes and introduced plenty of legislation, but none of the bills she's been the lead sponsor of has become law. Clearly, though, lots of real-life voters want Jasmine Crockett. At the church outside Atlanta, Pastor Bryant triggered a standing ovation when he declared, 'Jasmine Crockett for president' and '2028 is coming, y'all!' Outside, in the parking lot, someone shouted at Crockett, 'First Black-woman president!' June was a disheartening month for Crockett. She was soundly rejected by her own colleagues and shut out of a chance at institutional power. But when we talked in her hotel room in Atlanta, she'd framed the situation differently: If Americans on the outside could vote, she'd insisted, 'I absolutely feel like I know where it would go.'
