Congress is a workplace. The New York metropolitan delegation, thirty-three members strong, is also a cast of characters, and this year its members have spent nearly as much time in the society pages, the gossip columns and the viral clips as on the House and Senate floors. A look at the year in the delegation’s public lives, all of it on the record.
Malliotakis sends Taylor Swift the bill
When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce married at Madison Square Garden on the Fourth of July, closing streets around the Midtown arena on a national holiday, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who represents Staten Island and southern Brooklyn, asked the question that tends to get lost in the glitter of a celebrity wedding: who pays for the police? “Taylor Swift & Travis Kelce should reimburse NYPD for the 130 officers needed per day to keep their multi-million dollar, thousand person wedding at MSG safe,” she wrote on X. “Our officers are already working overtime for 4th of July festivities & NYC taxpayers should NOT be on the hook.”
It turned out the couple had already paid. Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters on July 10 that Swift had covered “the cost of the permit that was lodged, which was over $160,000 for that event and for the response to that event,” Rolling Stone reported. Days before the wedding, the couple had also donated $26 million across 20 charities, the magazine noted.
The couple’s payment was, in fairness, precisely the outcome Malliotakis had asked for. Minding the police overtime bill is familiar ground for her: the city’s police, detectives’, sergeants’ and fire officers’ unions all appear on her list of 2026 endorsements.
It would be easy, in a column like this one, to leave her as a one-post story. The record is more substantial. The daughter of a father from Greece and a mother who fled Castro’s Cuba, as her campaign biography notes, Malliotakis spent a decade in the State Assembly, carried the Republican line against Bill de Blasio in the 2017 mayoral race, and in 2020 unseated a Democratic incumbent, Max Rose, to win this seat. She is now the only Republican representing New York City in Congress, and her margins have grown since that first win, to 64 percent in 2024, according to the certified return.
In 2023 she became the first New York City Republican in 30 years to sit on Ways and Means, the House’s tax-writing committee, her office announced at the time. In February, after years of advocacy by Staten Island veterans and officials, she announced that the White House had approved the Medal of Honor for Staff Sgt. Michael Ollis, the New Dorp soldier killed in Afghanistan in 2013 while shielding a Polish officer from a suicide bomber, SILive reported; President Trump presented it to his parents in March, according to the AP. And in April she was one of six Republicans who joined Democrats to force a House vote extending protected status for Haitian immigrants, a break with the White House, NBC News reported.
Agree with her or not, and plenty across the aisle do not, she is a politician whose voters keep telling her, by wider margins each time, that she is doing what they sent her to do.
Booker, newlywed
Sen. Cory Booker, the delegation’s most famous bachelor for most of two decades, married Alexis Lewis last November, with ceremonies in Newark and in Washington. He has been unusually open about it since.
“I didn’t expect marriage to have this big of an impact on me this immediately,” Booker told New Jersey Monthly in March. “I’m getting to experience a deeper joy than I’ve ever experienced.”
The details are pure Jersey. Lewis, who grew up in Washington and lived in Los Angeles for nine years, got Booker out of his basement crash pad in D.C., got her own New Jersey driver’s license, and has, he said, already met Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. The couple are regulars at Tops Diner in East Newark, and he took her to Hobby’s Deli in Newark, where she loved the pastrami. His diner order, for the record: black coffee and fries, no cheese, since he became vegan.
The marriage has a political dimension, too. Booker is on the ballot for a third full term on November 3, and asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in September about a 2028 presidential run, Booker said that “after the election, my wife and I are going to make our decisions,” the New Jersey Globe reported. In the meantime, his book “Stand” came out in March, launched at NJPAC in conversation with Jon Bon Jovi.
Goldman and the coffee shop
On the eve of his primary, Rep. Dan Goldman bought a coffee at Poetica Coffee in Williamsburg. The shop then posted on Instagram a security image of the congressman at the register, with a message that read, in part: “See, here at Poetica, we don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers, or anyone in between,” NBC News reported. The post said the shop had refunded his money, which it said was “probably coming from AIPAC anyways,” and signed off: “Enjoy your loss on Tuesday. Don’t ever come to Poetica.”
Goldman, who is Jewish and was endorsed by AIPAC and J Street, said he was shocked “because the interaction in the shop could not have been nicer,” and called the post “outright discrimination and prejudice.” The Justice Department’s civil rights chief, Harmeet Dhillon, announced an investigation. Goldman, to his credit, said he did not think the department should open one. “I’m a public figure, and I can accept the criticism,” he told CNN.
The post’s prediction proved correct. Goldman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, lost to Brad Lander that Tuesday by more than 30 points, and President Trump took the occasion to call him “weak and pathetic.”
The Kennedy, the Conway and the Twelfth
The race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler on Manhattan’s East and West Sides was the year’s great society contest. Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s grandson, entered with the most famous name in American politics and a large social media following. George Conway, the conservative lawyer, Lincoln Project co-founder and ex-husband of Kellyanne Conway, entered as a Democrat with a national following among Trump critics.
Neither came close. Assemblymember Micah Lasher, a former Nadler aide with Nadler’s backing, won, and Schlossberg finished third with 11,719 votes. Conway, who raised more than $7 million according to FEC data, won about 6 percent, the BBC reported. On the Upper West Side, it turns out, a résumé in Albany still beats a following on Instagram.
Lawler, unfiltered
Rep. Mike Lawler, the Hudson Valley Republican in one of the country’s most closely watched House races, has never been accused of mincing words. At an October 6 campaign stop in Westchester with Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman, Lawler, talking about the state’s sanctuary policies, said of Gov. Kathy Hochul, “We’re going to be back here because Kathy Hochul is too (expletive) stupid to figure this out,” ABC7 reported.
Hochul replied in kind, without the expletive: “Let’s talk about what’s true. Let’s talk about something that’s honest.”
Lawler’s Democratic challenger, Cait Conley, an Army veteran with six tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, has accused him of having “bent the knee” to Trump. Lawler counters that he has broken with his party on collective bargaining, Affordable Care Act tax credits and protections for Haitians, the last of them a bill he wrote with Democratic Rep. Laura Gillen, which a discharge petition forced to the floor and the House passed in April.
The season ahead
Election Day is November 3. After that come the lame-duck session, the farewell parties for the retiring and defeated, and, if Democrats win the House, a Brooklyn speaker. Whatever happens, The Delegation will be watching the receptions as closely as the roll calls.
Featured image: Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, official portrait, 117th Congress. Photo by House Creative Committee via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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