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.
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.