When the 119th U.S. Congress was sworn in, some newly elected women members made history.
Emily Randall, from Washington’s 6th Congressional District, is the first out LGBTQ+ Latina. Lisa Blunt Rochester and Angela Alsobrooks are the first Black senators to represent Delaware and Maryland, respectively — and the first two Black women to ever serve concurrently in the upper chamber. Sarah McBride, from Delaware’s at-large House district, is the first transgender member of Congress. All are Democrats.
But for the first time since 2011, the number of women serving in the Senate and House of Representatives declined.
While Democrats sent a record 110 women lawmakers to Congress, Republicans elected just 40 women across both chambers. (On Election Day, 151 women were serving.) In addition, at least one Republican, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, who was also the only woman serving in GOP House leadership, is expected to resign if she is confirmed as ambassador to the United Nations in the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, said that while the drop in the number of women in Congress is small, “any decline when we’re talking about women’s representation is effectively slowed or stalled progress because women are already so underrepresented in Congress.”
It’s also a reminder, Dittmar said, “that we cannot assume that women are just going to continually increase their representation past parity, that we have to keep a focus not only on women’s success but women’s candidacies, recruitment, and candidate emergence.”
150 women were sworn into the 119th Congress, representing 28 percent of the total number of lawmakers across both chambers. Twenty-five of these women — 16 Democrats and nine Republicans — serve in the Senate, holding one in four seats of the 100-seat upper chamber. The House of Representatives has 125 women — 94 Democrats and 31 Republicans — who make up about 29 percent of the 435-seat lower chamber, according to a CAWP analysis.
Among the non-incumbent women in Congress, only two are Republicans; Dittmar called it a “clear tell” about the status of women in the legislative body.
“It’s always going to be harder to get there [to parity] if Republican women’s representation remains so low. We saw the issue at the start of this campaign … in terms of the drop in candidacies for Republican women that persisted,” Dittmar said. “And then we’re going to see it really starkly as it pertains to their power, both in the percentage of the caucus, as well as the percentage of committee chairs, which is going to be zero in the House for Republican women.”
Republicans control both the Senate and House and, therefore, hold all committee gavels. Some Democratic women in the House serve as ranking members, the top spot for the minority party on each panel.
GOP Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan replaced Stefanik as the House Republican Conference Chair and is expected to be the only woman serving in a party leadership role. In the Senate, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia leads the Republican Policy Committee, the only woman in the top role since Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa lost her race for Republican conference chair.
Jessica Mackler, the president of EMILYs List, a group that works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights, said the organization backed all 19 of the new Democratic women joining Congress. These include women who are a “first” of some sort, like Arizona’s Yassamin Ansari, the first Iranian-American Democrat in Congress; Janelle Bynum, the first Black member of Congress to represent Oregon; and Nellie Pou, the first Latina to represent New Jersey.
“The perspectives that women bring, whether that’s their professional perspectives, their personal perspectives, their background, they bring that into the halls of power, and that allows them to put a face and a voice to the way in which these policies are going to impact people across the country. Our government can’t work at its best if it doesn’t reflect the American people as a whole,” Mackler said.
Mackler also anticipates that Democratic women will play prominent roles opposing Trump administration policies, many of which could have gendered impacts on women and LGBTQ+ people.
“The perspectives that they are bringing are going to be critically important to the fights that we have ahead of us,” Mackler added.
The 119th Congress: Some history makers, but fewer women overall was first published by The 19th, and republished with permission.
Amanda Becker is The 19th's Washington Correspondent.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.