For those who’ve been paying close attention to Anna Paulina Luna’s political profession, this week’s events in Washington, D.C., come as no surprise.
Since before she first ran for Congress in 2020, the U.S. representative-elect from St. Petersburg has been a rising conservative star.
Her entire profession, Luna, 33, has been known for her brash, take-no-prisoners style. It earned her endorsements from high-profile conservatives like U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz and then-President Donald Trump. Her style netted her jobs with influential conservative groups like Turning Point USA and PragerU.
She’s also landed in hot water every now and then. In 2018, she compared Hillary Clinton to herpes on Fox News — a comment she later said was a mistake.
Luna hasn’t even been officially sworn into Congress yet, but national observers are already starting to be aware of how she operates. She’s a part of a small group of Republican lawmakers refusing to vote for his or her party’s leader, Kevin McCarthy, to be speaker of the House.
Luna’s position, which is contributing to a stalemate that has left one in all America’s two predominant legislative bodies essentially paralyzed, has brought renewed attention to the conservative rising star and former model from St. Petersburg. Listed below are three things to learn about her.
From the Air Force to politics
Luna was born in California, the daughter of a girl of Mexican descent and a person of Mexican and German heritage. In a 2020 Tampa Bay Times profile, Luna recounted a tumultuous childhood during which she regularly modified schools. Her parents never married.
At 19, Luna joined the U.S. Air Force, working as an airfield manager in Missouri and Florida. She left the service early to enroll in college, and he or she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the University of West Florida.
Within the 2010s, Luna did some modeling work, appearing in Maxim, SI.com and Liberty Belles, an internet site that showcases women in camouflage bikinis posing with guns.
Although she at one time supported Barack Obama and thought of herself a Democrat, Luna underwent a political transformation once she began looking more seriously into what each political party stands for, she said.
She became an outspoken critic of human trafficking, which gave her a modest online following and put her on the radar of Charlie Kirk, the founding father of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit dedicated to educating young conservatives. In 2018, Kirk brought Luna aboard to be the group’s national Hispanic engagement director.
Luna rose quickly in conservative politics
By 2019, Luna was a political commentator for Turning Point USA with nearly 75,000 Twitter followers. She legally modified her last name to Luna from her married last name of Gamberzky, saying partially that she didn’t want her husband dragged into her political activity.
In 2020, she won a hotly contested five-way primary for a Pinellas County-based congressional seat for the possibility to face then-U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist in the final election.
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Luna lost by 6 points. But a Trump endorsement combined with a comparatively strong showing in a blue-leaning district put her in good position for a future run. She also falsely denied Joe Biden’s victory within the 2020 election, saying: “President Trump won that election.”
She took one other crack on the thirteenth Congressional District seat in 2022. This time, it had been redrawn by the Florida Legislature to incorporate more Republican voters. After aligning herself with far-right, 2020 election-denying U.S. representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, Luna won one other primary. The first was a high-drama affair, with Luna alleging that one early primary opponent who later dropped out planned to murder her, citing a secretly recorded call where the challenger bragged about access to a “hit squad.”
Running on a platform of border security and opposition to COVID-19 vaccine mandates, amongst other policies, she coasted to victory in the final election by 8 points.
Luna is not any friend of Kevin McCarthy
As of Thursday morning, Luna is one in all about 20 legislators who’ve voted for other candidates for speaker as an alternative of GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.
There look like policy and private reasons behind the anti-McCarthy insurrection. Some conservatives mistrust him because they think he’s not sufficiently dedicated to investigating Joe Biden’s family or cracking down on illegal immigration. Among the many procedural changes conservatives need to see in exchange for a pro-McCarthy vote is an assurance that any member will have the opportunity to call a vote to oust McCarthy from his speaker role at any time. (The Recent York Times reported Thursday morning that McCarthy had given into that demand.)
Others simply don’t appear to love the best way he operates. Gaetz, a detailed ally of Luna’s and a pacesetter of the anti-McCarthy insurrection, said of McCarthy: “Possibly the precise person for the job of speaker of the House isn’t someone who has sold shares of themself for greater than a decade to get it.”
In an interview with The Recent York Times, Luna said McCarthy turned off several of her conservative colleagues together with his closing argument in a closed-door GOP meeting earlier within the week. McCarthy reportedly told a few of his fellow Republicans that their demands — just like the stipulation that any of them should have the opportunity to call a vote to oust the speaker — were unreasonable.
“There have been some members that felt very disrespected,” Luna told The Recent York Times. “And it pushed them right into a category that — I don’t think they’ll ever vote for him.”
Luna didn’t reply to requests for comment for this story, but on Wednesday morning, her office put out an announcement assuring her constituents she was fighting for them.
“I’ll stand strong until we get a speaker who will fight for the American people and fix the chaos and corruption in our nation’s Capitol,” Luna said. “I’ll proceed to face firm against all types of pressure. Immediately, democracy is at work — something that hasn’t happened for a long time. The method could also be messy, but that’s the way it is presupposed to be.”
