Monica Popp

Monica Popp just wants to win.

After more than a decade climbing the rungs of American politics, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn’s chief of staff said muscling legislation across the Senate floor is what gets her blood flowing.

Senate Republicans have a razor-thin majority. Popp — and Cornyn (R-Texas) — are charged with building internal coalitions to push legislation through the chamber. She started as Cornyn’s chief of staff almost three years ago, and her job is to understand what makes her conference’s members tick and what they want in a bill for them to vote for it.

The Trump administration has been a mixed bag for Senate Republicans. While passing tax reform was “really thrilling,” she said, whiffing on health care was “probably one of my greatest personal disappointments.”

Popp is the daughter of Portuguese immigrants and grew up in both New York and Shreveport, La. Early in her studies at Texas A&M, she wanted to be a doctor. She worked as a public-school math teacher for a year before moving to Washington, where she ended up working for then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s Washington office for a couple of years before “turning the lights off” at Health and Human Services at the end of President George W. Bush’s second term.

Popp has always liked being in the middle of the action. As a staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, she enjoyed negotiating with Democrats, drafting bills and getting them passed. In her current role, she spends three-quarters of her time talking to other Senate Republican offices to accomplish that goal and the rest studying policy so she can understand what she’s selling.

“The most important thing in this job is to preserve the relationships, and the No. 1 thing I care about here is having a trust with people and maintaining the confidentiality so on a person’s worst day, we’re not going to talk about it, and on a person’s best day, we’re not going to talk about it,” she said.

Popp frequently talks with White House legislative affairs director Marc Short, which sometimes requires “brutal honesty” to tell him what is possible to do on the Hill.

Regardless of any challenges, Short said he loves working with Popp. “I find her to be both humorous and quite knowledgeable on all matters. There is simply no staff member on Capitol Hill who I have a higher regard for than Monica.”

“Monica usually has great advice for us on how to achieve our objectives to say, ‘Here’s where you can tweak your policy,’ or ‘Here’s how you can message it in ways that would be helpful over here,’” he added. “When I’m up there, I often swing by her office just because she often has good intel for me.” — Daniel Lippman

Photos by John Shinkle/POLITICO.