Rep. Brandon Gill, the youngest Republican in the House, has a role model he’s trying to emulate — and it’s not Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln.

It’s former champion wrestler, proto-MAGA stalwart and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan who the 31-year-old Texan is seeking to follow. Gill is consciously replicating the formula that made Jordan a household name among conservatives — landing seats on the combative Ohio Republican’s committees, Judiciary and Oversight, and quickly earning a similar reputation for bare-knuckle partisan brawling.

“I’d like to be as close to Jim Jordan as possible,” Gill said in a recent interview. “I’d love to sit in there and just watch him do his committee hearings and learn from him, and get his advice on things.”

Gill, in fact, might have learned from Jordan all too well: His latest crusade — pushing for impeachment of a federal judge who sought to block President Donald Trump’s deportation plans — has put him at odds with Jordan, who is allied with House GOP leaders in counseling a less aggressive approach to confronting the federal judiciary.

In essence, Gill is playing the role Jordan used to occupy earlier in his career — the rabble-rouser pushing party leaders to do more, political headaches be damned. And his explanations ring pretty familiar for anyone familiar with Jordan’s “follow-the-voters” rhetoric.

“Not everybody is where I am” on judicial impeachments, Gill said. “I’d like to push us in that direction because I think that’s what the American people want. Very, very clearly, that’s what Republican voters want.”

Gill, who has gathered the backing of more than 20 colleagues in his effort to impeach U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, said he’s dead-set on promoting a more “muscular conservatism,” much in the same way Jordan has urged Republicans to fight harder over his nearly two-decade congressional career.

Jordan, meanwhile, is now helping fellow Republican leaders keep GOP hard-liners at bay, floating judicial overhaul legislation as a less risky proposition than impeaching judges.

The impeachment campaign has failed to pick up steam among old-guard conservatives who see it as an ill-fated distraction — despite Trump publicly voicing support for using Congress to wipe the bench of judges he perceives as hostile.

“The likelihood that you’re going to impeach people for maladministration, as it’s called, is just low,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a former Oversight chair whose bill addressing national injunctions is poised to come for a vote on the House floor Wednesday. “And even if you did, should we be second-guessing the decisions of the [judiciary]? The answer is no.”

There’s no small irony in Jordan now occupying the role of elder statesman urging his younger colleagues to exercise prudence. The 61-year-old came to prominence on Capitol Hill as a thorn in the side of former Speaker John Boehner, who stepped down in the wake of pressure from hard-liners like Jordan, whom he called a “legislative terrorist.” Years later, Jordan sought the speaker’s gavel himself, losing after more moderate colleagues held out and denied him the nod in an internal GOP vote.

Gill said he doesn’t fault Jordan for pursuing a more restrained approach now in regard to judges, and he has so far refrained from trying to force a vote on his impeachment resolution on the House floor. “We’re all on the same team here,” he said.

Jordan, in an interview, praised Gill as “a sharp young man” with a strong work ethic and said Gill didn’t need his advice.

To be sure, Jordan remains a darling of the MAGA right. A co-founder and former chair of the House Freedom Caucus, he’s a frequent guest on conservative media, has Trump’s ear and controls a panel with jurisdiction over marquee issues like law enforcement, immigration and gun rights.

Now Gill is looking to fashion himself as someone who embodies Jordan’s rabble-rousing past with his current establishment clout. In addition to assignments on Judiciary and Oversight, Gill is also a member of the new Oversight subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency — a complementary effort to the Department of Government Efficiency initiative headed up by Elon Musk, with whom Jordan has a longstanding relationship.

Gill has even deeper ties to hard-right conservatism. A former Wall Street investment banker, he married the daughter of conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza in 2017. He has since ridden a far-right wave among young men into a conservative media career and then into Congress, where he says he continues to be motivated by growing up in a world where young conservatives like himself “were belittled and insulted for being a white male constantly.”

Much like his father-in-law — the activist behind a film promoting discredited conspiracies about election fraud that’s widely popular with the far right — Gill has sought online viral fame by embracing the offensive and outrageous. In one recent case, he suggested Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, should be deported to Somalia for advising people on how to engage with immigration enforcement.

“Brandon Gill’s claim to fame is peddling race-baiting conspiracy theories and pushing the big lie with the 2020 election to gain clout within the Republican Party,” Omar said in a statement. “He is nothing more than a xenophobic fame-chaser, nepo-baby that never had to work for anything in his life.”

Gill is used to making enemies. He described being radicalized toward conservatism while attending Dartmouth College, where his wife was allegedly excommunicated from her sorority house after the 2016 election for what she claims was her support for Trump.

“I’ve always been conservative, but the more you’re around rabid leftists, that’s what red-pills you,” Gill said.

Gill recalled that one of his first memories of meeting Jordan was on the set of his father-in-law’s movie “Police State,” a 2023 film alleging that the federal government weaponized its law enforcement. Jordan later campaigned for Gill in what at one point was an 11-person Congressional primary, arguing that the Texas Republican was needed in Washington to “protect conservative values from Washington elites.” Trump endorsed Gill in that primary, too.

Gill spoke effusively about Jordan in a recent interview, calling him “the best of the best” among House Republicans in terms of his performances at hearings and in the media. After the Oversight hearing last week with leaders of PBS and NPR, where Republicans threatened to withhold the media networks’ future government funding, Gill said he texted Jordan to pick his brain on how he prepared for the proceedings.

Gill and the other Republicans on the DOGE subcommittee later wrote to Johnson to demand that lawmakers defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the public entity that in turn funds NPR and PBS.

On public media, Gill is hardly out of step with top GOP leaders, who have also voiced support for zeroing out congressional support for the networks. But when it comes to picking fights with an anti-Trump judge — and in the eyes of his critics, potentially provoking a constitutional crisis — he said he’s more than willing to push boundaries.

“All of this boils down to a basic question of, are we going to allow the Republic to survive or not?” said Gill of his political motivations. “And if it’s going to survive, we’ve got to start being a lot more aggressive with how we play politics. The left plays to win. They play for keeps.”

Michael Bennet seemed destined for a lifetime appointment to the Senate.

He was tapped for a vacancy in 2009, the same moment Colorado was turning perpetually blue. The Democratic son of the former staff director of the Senate Budget Committee and grandson of another political hand, Bennet brought lineage, his own impressive resume and, most significant of all, a thoughtful, affable and moderate sensibility to a chamber that once rewarded all three qualities.

Yet after accumulating 16 years, and well-positioned for another decade-plus of service having just turned 60, Bennet is poised to walk away from seniority, the Senate and Washington, the city where he was raised.

He’s frustrated with Congress, yes, but also Joe Biden’s selfishness, what Donald Trump has done to both parties and the corrosive impact of social media on politics, the media and even the once-presumed idea of shared facts.

Bennet is almost certain to run for governor in his adopted state next year, according to multiple Democrats in Washington and Denver.

In an hour-long interview this week, Bennet made little attempt to hide his intentions, telling me he’ll reveal his plans in early April.

“The central fight is whether or not we can create an economy where people feel like when they work hard they get ahead,” he said. “And I think the answer to that over the next decade is as likely to come from the states as it is from Washington.”

Reminded about his father’s staff tenure — stints with a pair of Cold War senators in addition to his committee post — the senator noted that Douglas Bennet Jr. also eventually left the Senate to run USAID and eventually NPR and Wesleyan University.

“I wish he were still alive, because I wish I could ask him his advice,” Bennet said. “And I think what he would tell me is, notwithstanding the fact that he worked here and he loved this place, he also moved on to do other things. And he might say, take what you’ve learned and find a place to be as effective as you can be.”

That Michael Farrand Bennet is no longer sure the Senate is a place to be effective is as harsh an indictment I can recall of what was once unironically called the world’s greatest deliberative body.

He’s not the only lawmaker headed for the exits. Already this year, before the first quarter even ended, Democratic Sens. Gary Peters, Tina Smith and Jeanne Shaheen announced they wouldn’t run again.

Some of this owes to simply hitting retirement age or dreading a prolonged life in the minority. But when taken together with all the lawmakers in both parties who’ve walked away since Donald Trump’s first election, it’s undeniable that what was once a political pinnacle has become a place for some that’s just not worth the hassle.

After all, the Senate was usually what governors graduated to, even if they preferred their old jobs, not an office one left for the statehouse. Look no further than the trajectory of Bennet’s colleague and former boss: Senator, and former governor, John Hickenlooper. War and peace, treaties and the Supreme Court, affairs of state, were determined in the nation’s capital. Prisons, roads and schools were left to the states.

What makes Bennet’s frustrations so meaningful, and illuminating, however, is that they go far beyond the usual bill of particulars. Sure, he’s exasperated with — and has even compiled research about! — the trend toward the consolidation of power and the diminution of the committee barons he met when he arrived in the Senate in the last years of the World War II generation.

“The duties of the senators have been sucked up basically into the leadership of the Senate,” he said, adding that “the decision-making among the four corners in the Congress has in some sense dispossessed the other actors.”

Bennet dodged questions about whether Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer should continue to lead the caucus, but was candid about the leadership void.

“I think we need a strategy, and I think we need a plan, and we need a message,” he said, adding: “And if current leadership can’t figure out how to do that, then the caucus will figure out how to do that.”

Is the current message entirely: Trump is bad?

“I think the current message is basically, yeah, Trump’s bad.”

Bennet’s obvious misery of serving in Trump-era Washington is in some ways more notable than his unhappiness with Schumer. And this gets at something that isn’t sufficiently appreciated. The departures, some voluntary and others less so, of anti-Trump Republicans have been well-documented.

But Trump has also made Congress a lot less appealing for serious-minded Democrats who want to legislate and suddenly find most of their GOP counterparts are barely coping, living a lie or in thrall to a personality cult.

“That has been a big change, that’s a big difference,” said Bennet, citing the departures of John McCain, Jeff Flake, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker. “There are people here, but it’s also true across the country, for whom Trump’s approach to politics has become normalized.”

More to the point, he said: “I’d be lying, if I said — It’s tough when you got everybody on the other side voting for Pete Hegseth to be the secretary of defense.”

Put another way, there’s simply not going to be a robust debate over, say, the refundability of the Child Tax Credit, a Bennet priority, when every day revolves around what Trump or his administration just said or did.

He calls it “shirts and skins,” tribal politics, and he deplores the culture. But this is where I should note, clearly, what Bennet emphasized: that he’s eager to remain in the fray.

He wants to confront Trumpism, he said. And, for a 60-year-old, he is unusually conscious of his own mortality, a trait he may have because of his father’s passing at 79, his mother’s youthful escape from the Holocaust and his own treatment for prostate cancer.

I had suggested to Bennet that his own potential early exit from the Senate along with his brother James’s unhappy departure from the New York Times both had a tragic quality. Here were enormously talented siblings who would’ve flourished in an earlier, more consensus-oriented era.

“I don’t feel like I was born too late,” the senator said, after citing all the policy goals he’s still eager to enact on the economy, healthcare, education and sustaining the American dream. “I think that my expectations about where we would be and the progress that we have made turn out not to have been fulfilled. And I am becoming incredibly impatient with the notion that I could die before seeing this to-do list addressed.”

That impatience has intensified since Trump’s second election, an event that I told Bennet seemed to jar him. “It definitely did,” he acknowledged, “it definitely did.”

Which triggers his deep discontent with his own party.

Bennet has long been frustrated with Washington — he wrote a 2019 book lacerating “the pathological culture of the capital” — but Trump’s return seemed to mark a personal pivot point.

“I can’t say that I was surprised, but I find it shocking that the Democratic Party lost to Donald Trump twice, once after he took away a woman’s right to choose, you know, and with all of the convictions and everything else,” he said. “And you know what? I hate to say this, there are many things that I blame Donald Trump for but getting elected is not one of them.”

For that he blames Biden. Bennet himself barely left a mark when he ran for president in 2020 and he acknowledged Biden may have been the only Democrat who could have defeated Trump that year.

However, the Coloradoan was one of the first Senate Democrats to say publicly what was obvious to all of them: that Biden couldn’t win the election after his disastrous debate. And Bennet was one of the loudest critics of Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter, on the way out of office.

His irritation doesn’t seem to have receded.

“What I would say to the American people who are frustrated that the Democratic Party has not fought hard enough to provide a compelling alternative to Donald Trump, a big piece of that was the decision that Joe Biden made to run for re-election,” said Bennet.

“The Democratic Party,” he continued, “didn’t show up as a fighting force during the Biden administration.”

But Bennet conceded that, no, he never privately urged Biden or the former president’s top aides to not run again in the first place. “I wish I had,” he said. “I wish we all had.”

Recalling a caucus meeting after the now-infamous debate, Bennet recounted telling his colleagues that “if we elect Donald Trump president, we will be the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, for the people coming after us.”

That’s what plainly eats at Bennet. It’s not just Biden’s vanity, and the failure of the rest of the party to intervene well before last summer, but the deeper failures of Democrats and the potential implications of those failures.

Though much closer to the center than his party’s progressives, Bennet reflects the widened policy aperture of this moment and pans Democrats’ timidity from both the left and the right.

“When I think about this last election, was it important for us to make sure that we were extending the Obamacare tax credits for health care?” he asks. “Of course it was. But shouldn’t we be standing for universal health care in this country? Shouldn’t we be standing for universal mental health care, especially for our kids who have been so incredibly affected by Covid and by social media?”

Yet on education, an area of personal expertise dating to his time running Denver’s public schools, Bennet said his party needs to be bolder.

“We have to recognize that our system of public education has to be dragged from the 19th century to the 21st century, what are our ideas for that?” he said, all but rolling his eyes as he recalled that much of what Democrats say about the topic begins and ends with “forgiving student loan debt.”

And it wasn’t just 2024.

“The Democratic Party failed to make a compelling case in really a generation worth of elections,” Bennet argued.

He recognizes, however, that the great challenges of the present are less tactical than structural.

He’s no nostalgist — “I don’t mourn the analog world,” Bennet said — but he said “our tribal instincts have been concretized by the medium of the internet.” And it’s digital technology that must resolve that problem so that Americans can “have a shared understanding of the facts.”

Perhaps because of his brother — who was hounded out of his job as the Times’ editorial page editor by liberals angered over an op-ed written by conservative Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton — or perhaps just because he’s a reader, Bennet returned repeatedly to what social media and its attendant algorithms had done to sow division and make folly of the Moynihan maxim that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.

“We have had many reactionary periods in American history,” he said. “Those have always been followed by a progressive period. Always, always. The only difference right now, between our lives and those lives, is we destroyed our journalism in America.”

The ”old political order has collapsed,” said Bennet and “the journalistic order has collapsed with it.”

But what remains, he emphasized, is his appetite for building what comes next.

“Whatever I do is not going to signify a retreat from anything,” Bennet said. “What I’m trying to figure out is where the fight can best be joined.”

Denver’s golden dome awaits.

President Donald Trump’s decision to keep Rep. Elise Stefanik in Congress is the clearest sign yet that the political environment has become so challenging for Republicans that they don’t want to risk a special election even in safe, red seats.

A pair of April elections in deep-red swaths of Florida next week was supposed to improve the GOP’s cushion in the House and clear the path for Stefanik’s departure, until Trump said he didn’t “want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat.”

The decision to pull Stefanik’s nomination came as Republicans grew increasingly anxious about the race to fill the seat of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz on April 1. Polling in the district, which Trump carried by 30 points, had tightened, and the president himself is hosting a tele-town hall there to try and bail out Republican Randy Fine.

An internal GOP poll from late March showed Democrat Josh Weil up 3 points over Fine, 44 to 41 percent, with 10 percent undecided, according to a person familiar with the poll and granted anonymity to discuss it. Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster, conducted the survey. That result spooked Republicans and spurred them to redouble efforts to ensure a comfortable win in the district, according to two people familiar with internal conversations.

Some Republican strategists said it’s not worth taking the risk of losing Stefanik’s sprawling northern New York seat, which Trump won by 20 points in 2024.

“Can they defend her seat? Absolutely. But why do you do that right now?” asked Charlie Harper, who was a top aide to former Rep. Karen Handel on her successful 2017 bid in a special election in Georgia.

Harper is not the only Republican making that calculation.

“If we’re far underperforming in seats Trump won by 30 then there’s obvious concern about having to chance special elections in seats Trump won by a lot less,” said one top GOP operative granted anonymity to speak candidly. “The juice is not worth the squeeze sweating them out.”

Republicans insist they would prevail in any race for Stefanik’s seat. National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Maureen O’Toole said the party would “win this seat in a special election and we’ll win it in a general election.”

In an appearance on Fox News on Thursday evening, Stefanik said the withdrawal of her nomination was “about stepping up as a team, and I am doing that as a leader.”

“I look forward to continue serving in different ways,” she added.

In Florida, Weil, the Democratic candidate, has raised $10 million, which has led to Elon Musk’s America PAC putting forward some last-minute cash for Fine, as well as Florida CFO Jimmy Patronis.

But that hasn’t stopped Democrats from saying Republicans are panicking, not just playing it safe.

Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster who was working for Blake Gendebien in the now-canceled special election in Stefanik’s seat, said “this is a Jamaal Bowman-style five alarm fire bell.”

“Again, you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it, just see how Republicans are acting,” McCrary said. “They were very blasé about opening up the seat and now on a full retreat.”

Democrats have been on a streak of success down ballot, narrowly winning a special election on Tuesday for state Senate in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in a district that Trump had won by 15 points in 2024. It included the more conservative parts of a county that only one Democratic presidential candidate, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, had won since the Civil War.

But any chance for Democrats to flip Stefanik’s seat would be an uphill battle. A poll in the district conducted last week, obtained by POLITICO, showed a Republican candidate up 16 points. Stefanik carried the district by 24 points in 2024 — a higher margin than Trump’s 20 point victory — and Republicans have 80,000 more registered voters than Democrats.

One veteran Republican consultant, granted anonymity to speak candidly, pointed to Republicans’ changing coalition of voters — many of whom Trump attracted — as a reason for recent struggles in special elections.

“Republicans have traditionally done well in off-year elections and special elections because our voter coalition is more traditionally engaged voters,” the consultant said. “And now we depend more on less engaged voters and we need our folks to turn out, and it is a good wake up call that we need to engage more.”

Brakkton Booker and Seb Starcevic contributed to this report.