Alex Ortiz thought he was done with Capitol Hill. After a decade as a staffer for “the representative for all Alaska,” Ortiz carried out the sad duty this spring of packing up Don Young’s office after the Republican’s sudden death — even at 88 years old, it still felt sudden.
Clearing out all the taxidermy and tchotchkes Young accumulated over his 49 years in Congress, Ortiz locked up 2314 Rayburn one final time on Aug. 16, and then immediately left town for his first real vacation in over a decade — one without any check-ins with the team, emails that just couldn’t wait, or constituents that needed a quick call. It was along the cobblestone rues of Montreal that he got a message that would upend both his plans to begin lobbying and some long-standing assumptions about partisanship in Washington.
“Out of the blue, I got a text from her, and I was like, ‘Maybe I should shave and get down to D.C. and put a suit on,’” Ortiz said, referring to Mary Peltola, the Democrat who won a special election in August to serve out the less than four months remaining in Young’s term.
