Promising news, from the NYTimes:
Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator who captured the national spotlight with an 11-hour filibuster against restricting abortion rights, turned up in Washington on Monday with the news that she was considering a run for governor.
“I can say with absolute certainty that I will run for one of two offices: either my State Senate seat or the governor,” Ms. Davis said after a luncheon and speech at the National Press Club.
It was Ms. Davis’s second trip to Washington in as many weeks — a period when she has met with staff members at the Democratic Governors Association, raised money at sold-out fund-raisers, turned up at parties around town and huddled with Emily’s List…
Mr. Frost estimated Monday that Democrats would need to raise about $35 million to $40 million. During the last two weeks of June, Ms. Davis raised more than $930,000, much of it in small contributions after her filibuster, The Texas Tribune reported last month.
As her star rises, Ms. Davis has also been a boon to Texas Democrats, drawing national attention to a party desperate for the momentum to break out in a solidly red state. On Monday, she offered nods to her fellow Democrats, calling Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio and Representative Joaquin Castro “extraordinary” and acknowledging the “masterful” help of her fellow Texas Democrats during her filibuster….
Organizers expected 150 people to attend a fund-raiser in Washington for Ms. Davis on July 25, one month after her headline-catching filibuster, with $25 student tickets and $50 individual tickets selling out days in advance. But 400 people showed up, said Matt Angle, a longtime adviser to Ms. Davis and director of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic policy group.
Too, also, cheers for The Intimidator:
Seven months into Senator Barbara A. Mikulski’s new assignment as chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, there is already a saying among members: “We loved Byrd, we respected Inouye, we fear Barbara.”
It is not hard to see why. Ms. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, intimidates people in a way that the two most recent committee chairmen, the late Senators Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, did not. During a March floor debate, Ms. Mikulski ordered Senator John McCain of Arizona to go back to his office and read a bill so he could properly vote on it — and Mr. McCain, chastened but cheerful, agreed…
Ms. Mikulski, who legislates with two parts accommodation and one part coercion, now finds herself at the center of a spending brawl on Capitol Hill. At 77, she is the longest serving woman in Congress, the first female leader of its most august committee and the fulcrum in a fiscal fight that will dominate Washington this fall.
With Ms. Mikulski at the helm, the Senate Appropriations Committee — for decades a quiet outpost of bipartisan check-writing financing every corner of the government — is charged with heading off what could be the first shutdown of Washington after three years of near misses. She has already begun by reviving the committee from an earlier somnolence, when staff members directed much of the action and partisan peace was kept by awarding senators money for the pet spending projects universally denounced as earmarks.
“You take your persona from the generation you come in with,” Ms. Mikulski said in an interview. “And mine is a very activist generation.” …
This (via Ed Kilgore), on the other hand…
… Nancy Mace, the first woman to graduate from The Citadel, announced Saturday in Goose Creek that she will challenge [Lindsey] Graham in the 2014 Republican primary, declaring, “I believe our state desperately needs new leadership, someone who truly understands the challenges before us and what’s at stake and is willing to fight for the principles that make America great.”
Mace, who runs a public relations firm, has criticized Graham as not conservative enough. She also dropped the name of the nation’s 40th president…