Crested Butte Public Policy Program: Will today’s Congress stand up to the Trump administration?

Paul Kane – Washington Post Sr. Congressional Correspondent

Paul Kane has covered Congress since 2000, when he started at Roll Call with a beat focused on the Senate. He joined The Washington Post in 2007, covering the 2008 financial crisis and the Obama-Republican fiscal wars. He began writing a regular column, @PKCapitol, on Congress and its interactions with the White House in 2017. His columns have covered Washington’s response to the global pandemic, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, two impeachments and the Biden administration’s legislative agenda on Capitol Hill.

In addition, Kane worked with reporting teams in 2021 that won the Pulitzer Prize’s gold medal for Public Service in reconstructing the Jan. 6 attack, and in 2023 worked with the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for “American Icon,” a series about the rise of the AR-15 rifle and its prominence in mass shootings.

Kane grew up in Maple Glen, Pennsylvania, a hamlet in the Philadelphia suburbs in a large Irish Catholic family that worshipped the Catholic Church, the Philadelphia Phillies and Eagles. Maybe not necessarily in that order for every member of the family.

He went to the University of Delaware as a political science major, fully intending to go to law school until he took an undergraduate pre-law class. Disillusioned, he stumbled into a journalism class because it checked a box for a writing requirement for his degree, only to discover his calling. He ended up managing editor of the prize-wining school paper, The Review, and took several jobs at daily newspapers around Philadelphia, including the perfectly named Daily Local News of West Chester, PA.

In the mid-1990s he moved to Washington and worked for a now defunct small wire service called States News, working as a regional reporter for smaller newspapers that did not have their own correspondent in Washington, such as the Bangor Daily News of Maine. In 2000, he began a nearly 7-year stint at Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, where his focus was on the Senate and ethics investigations.

In 2007, he started at The Washington Post as the news organization’s first blogger on Congress, the beginning of the news industry’s transformation to a digital-first focus.

Kane holds the Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress, 2005; Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, 2022; Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, 2024.