In her remarks, Britt largely focused on Biden’s immigration policies, seeking to blame him for a rise in border crossings, as well as on the administration’s economic policies and the nation’s crime rates.
Britt, 42, opened her prime-time address by reminding viewers of Biden’s age, 81. Republicans have sought to depict Biden as too old to run for reelection, despite being only four years older than their party’s presumptive nominee, Donald Trump.
“What we saw was the performance of a permanent politician who has actually been in office for longer than I’ve been alive,” Britt said in remarks from her kitchen in Alabama.
Britt is widely considered to be an usher for the next generation of congressional Republicans. While she was sworn in last year as the first Alabama woman elected to the Senate, she is not a Washington newcomer — she was a longtime staffer of her predecessor, Sen. Richard C. Shelby, who named her his chief of staff in 2016.
The daughter of a hardware store owner and a dance teacher, Britt grew up in Enterprise, Ala., and graduated from the University of Alabama School of Law in 2013. She is a mother of two and is married to former NFL player Wesley Britt.
And while she had experience working for campaigns and in Shelby’s office by the time she mounted her own political campaign, Britt was considered a newcomer to the political scene and an underdog in the 2022 Republican primary in the race to replace Shelby, a six-term senator. While Britt aligned herself closely with Donald Trump, the former president endorsed congressman Mo Brooks, a House member who belonged to the far-right Freedom Caucus and who objected to the certification of Arizona’s electoral votes in the 2020 election before giving up his seat ahead of his Senate bid.
But Brooks lost Trump’s endorsement in March 2022 after telling a crowd of Trump supporters that they should move past the results of the 2020 election and focus instead on the future of the GOP.
By the time the 2022 GOP primary for the Senate seat in Alabama advanced to a runoff between Brooks and Britt, the younger Republican had risen in the polls. She defeated Brooks with 63 percent of the vote.
During her Senate campaign, Britt never fully embraced Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. She did, however, entertain some of his allegations. She said she believed “that there was fraud” and that a “forensic audit” should be conducted, but she stopped short of calling the election “stolen,” Al.com reported at the time. On the campaign trail, Britt adapted Trump’s “America First” slogan to “Alabama First.”
Britt sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee and is the top Republican on the Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee.
During her time in the Senate, Britt has been highly critical of the Biden administration’s immigration policies. And though she helped negotiate a bipartisan border security deal, she ultimately voted against it after Trump signaled to congressional Republicans that no immigration policy should pass during the election year.
On other issues, Britt has largely stuck to the party line. She was one of 31 Republicans who voted against the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 amid a showdown over raising the national debt limit. Most recently, as a Senate Appropriations Committee member, she voted against a stopgap funding bill in January that kept the government open while Congress worked to pass the full-year funding bills.
Britt also has worked across the aisle during her first year in the Senate. She has, for example, introduced a bipartisan bill aimed at protecting children online alongside Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a bipartisan measure seeking to protect survivors of sexual assault in the Coast Guard alongside Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and legislation to improve mental health among young people co-sponsored with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). In the Capitol, Britt is also known for having close relationships with some Democrats who joined the Senate alongside her — she visited Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) in the hospital after he checked himself in for clinical depression last year. And she and Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), another freshman in the Senate, enjoyed a dinner together with Welch and his wife at their Washington home.
