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New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand has had a banner few months. She racked up the best record on Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, opposed Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination, railed against Trump’s immigration executive order, and grilled his appointees in widely shared videos. She was even singled out by the Trump team — along with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and, of all people, New Jersey senator Cory Booker — as one of the “radical liberals” blocking his anti-Muslim travel ban. Now her name is being floated as a progressive presidential candidate in 2020. Gillibrand — who has consciously positioned herself as an elite face of “the Resistance” in the wake of Trump’s election — has some good spots on her record. She led efforts to curb sexual assault in the military, pushed to get the 9/11 first responders bill passed, campaigned to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act, and has been advancing a paid family leave bill for years. But if we’re going to remember Gillibrand’s voting record on Trump appointees in 2020, we should also remember some of the less laudable aspects of her political career.

1. She has questionable political connections. They say you are the company you keep. Kirsten Gillibrand keeps some curious company. Gillibrand cut her teeth interning for former Republican senator and state GOP boss Alfonse D’Amato, an associate of her father. D’Amato is probably best known for hounding the Clintons in the 1990s with his Whitewater investigations into their alleged real estate shenanigans in Arkansas. He was also a law-and-order Republican who inserted proposals into an anti-crime bill that would have allowed gun murders to be punishable by death and placed a mandatory thirty-year sentence on any crime carried out with a firearm that involved federal authorities. He now makes his living as a powerful lobbyist. D’Amato and Gillibrand have remained close over the years despite their respective party affiliations. He enjoyed a prominent place at her first senatorial press conference — which the late journalist Wayne Barrett called a “not-so-subtle advertisement of his influence” meant to benefit his lobbying firm — and authored a gushing piece on Gillibrand for Time’s 2014 “100 Most Influential People” issue. After jumping from the House to the Senate in 2009, Gillibrand settled in under the tutelage of former law-and-order Democrat and forever Wall Street–friendly senator Chuck Schumer. Now the Senate’s minority leader, Schumer is often cited as Gillibrand’s “mentor,” pushing behind the scenes for then–New York governor David Paterson to select her to fill Hillary Clinton’s vacated seat and subsequently shaping her early political “evolution.” Speaking of Clinton, the former senator and presidential candidate is another one of Gillibrand’s mentors. Gillibrand has cited Clinton as the reason she got into politics, and the two quickly developed a close relationship. She acted as one of Clinton’s surrogates during the last presidential campaign, and according to emails released by WikiLeaks, the campaign deployed her to stop congressional candidate Zephyr Teachout from being “too vocal” in her support for Sanders in the Democratic primary and to harangue Elizabeth Warren when she was “not being effusive enough or critical” of Clinton. Finally, there’s former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Though the two aren’t close, it’s not for lack of trying on Gillibrand’s part. Bloomberg, the centrist billionaire who oversaw stop-and-frisk and the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims, among other things, reportedly disliked Gillibrand so much his advisors were in talks with potential challengers. Gillibrand said she didn’t “get it,” but was undeterred and seemed “determined to win over Mr. Bloomberg,” according to a New York Times report. They later appeared together at an event for No Labels, a “post-partisan” centrist group.

2. She’s “evolved” in record time. Most politicians shift their positions when it’s convenient. But the speed of Gillibrand’s flip flops on a number of fundamental issues raises questions about how far she’s willing to take her much-publicized opposition to Trump. Before her appointment to the Senate, Gillibrand was a Blue Dog Democrat through and through. Representing a House district in Upstate New York, she backed the Bush tax cuts and voted to expand government surveillance every chance she got (this continued to 2015, with CISA, a bill that allowed companies to pass their customers’ data to the government). She opposed gay marriage and bragged that her voting record was “one of the most conservative in the state.” As late as 2009, she was referred to as an “ostensibly non-liberal Democratic congresswoman” and a “conservative Democrat.” Gillibrand’s record on immigration deserves special mention. Before taking up her Senate post, Gillibrand came out against giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship and opposed then–New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s plan to allow undocumented immigrants access to drivers licenses. In 2007, she cosponsored the SAVE Act, which significantly beefed up border patrols, required all employers to check the immigration status of their employees through a flawed computer database, established monetary rewards for anyone who helped catch an undocumented immigrant trying to obtain falsified documents, and turned local police into an arm of federal immigration enforcement. She supported financially penalizing sanctuary cities, the same thing now on Trump’s wish list. And she wanted to make English the United States’ “official language.” These positions would haunt Gillibrand for some time. In December 2010, the Spanish-language New York newspaper El Diario ran a cover story on Gillibrand titled “ANTI IMMIGRANTE,” and quoted Gillibrand’s own website boasting about her anti-immigration stances. One Hispanic assemblyman criticized Gillibrand for having a “hard-line stand” that “borders on xenophobia.” Yet there was never any doubt in the minds of Gillibrand’s backers that she would renounce her beliefs as soon as she entered the Senate chambers. “Her views will evolve,” Schumer assured the crowd at her appointment announcement. Gillibrand agreed, saying, “I think on some issues my positions will change. Others will become simply broader.” And sure enough, Gillibrand carried out a comically quick evolution. She immediately came out in favor of gay marriage. After meeting with the New York Immigration Coalition, she announced her support for a moratorium on government raids, for clearing the backlog of entry applications for immigrant families and reducing the waiting time, and for a path to citizenship in the temporary worker program. Many, including Gillibrand, credit her “listening tour” of New York — which she embarked on before coming to the Senate — for her change of heart. “I did expand my views on immigration, mostly because I did not have a large immigrant community in my district,” Gillibrand said in 2010. The more likely explanation for her shift is that she faced a challenge from activists and other politicians. She was immediately made aware of several potential primary challenges for her seat. She was explicitly told by representatives of the governor that she would only be given the Senate seat if she improved her standing with gay rights groups, at which point she phoned the executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda and expressed her support for gay marriage. And, of course, knowing she would be answering to a more left-leaning set of voters must have helped. On the one hand, this shows that Gillibrand isn’t implacably opposed to taking more progressive stands. But more importantly, it indicates that she’s less a torchbearer for anti-Trump resistance than a garden variety ladder-climber. How, after all, can a politician whose past positions on immigration rival — and in some cases mirror — Donald Trump’s lead a far-reaching fight against political reaction?