It’s Tuesday afternoon at the Ohio Clock, an ornate, 11-foot
case clock that resides in the hallway near the entrance to the Senate
floor.
Because it’s Tuesday and the senators have just completed their
separate Democratic and Republican lunches, the clock is the meeting point
for modern Senate procedure: the bitter dueling press conferences at which
lawmakers stand in front of a phalanx of microphones and tell the press
why they’re right and the other side is wrong and at which they
acknowledge, week after week, that a major piece of legislation is all but
doomed.
The Senate is talking about the highway bill today, “and that’s
certainly important to the future of the country,” Senate Republican
leader Mitch McConnell says. But McConnell and his GOP colleagues don’t
want to talk about roads. They want to talk about exploring for domestic
oil and about why they think President Obama is one big liberal failure.
Even worse, Senator John Cornyn tells the reporters, Obama is making
Americans suffer on purpose.
“Looking at all the evidence on energy prices,” Cornyn says,
“it would be hard to reach any other conclusion than that high gas prices
are exactly part of the President’s plan.”
Minutes after the Republican senators leave, their Democratic
colleagues appear. Harry Reid looks exasperated—as he usually does on
Tuesdays at this time. The highway bill is being held up, Reid complains,
because Republicans are trying to add an amendment that would allow
employers to deny contraceptive coverage in health-care plans.
“It’s hard to understand why our Republican colleagues think
this deserves to be debated,” Reid says, his soft tones failing to mask
his annoyance. He goes on to define the question as “extreme and
divisive,” accusing the Republican leader of “reviving the culture
wars.”
Their separate press conferences concluded, the senators go
back to their separate offices.
The second floor of the Capitol has become a weapon-free war
zone, an area where senators and House members spin reporters before
filing in and out of the chamber to vote and to speak—not with but at one
another.
In the Senate, lawmakers decamp to the LBJ Room or the
Mansfield Room for party caucuses at which they plot against the other
side. On the House side, members walk in and out of the chamber through
doors at opposite ends of the Speaker’s Lobby, rarely mingling. Even the
terrace off the lobby, a place where members go to smoke and get away from
reporters, is a site of de facto segregation, with Republicans puffing
away on the right side of the balcony, Democrats on the left.
And getting a bipartisan drink together after votes? Yeah,
right.
The Hill is a painfully sober environment nowadays—and that
doesn’t refer just to the grim faces of representatives and senators.
Democrats and Republicans don’t work together anymore, and a big part of
the reason, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta noted at this year’s
Gridiron Dinner, is that they don’t drink together anymore.
All kinds of socializing are on the wane, but alcohol has taken
a special hit, with concerns about both health and public image making
Congress members less likely to imbibe in public—or at all. If a member
takes a break from the floor, it’s more likely to go to the gym than to a
fellow lawmaker’s office for a beer. Only one new-member reception in the
House served beer and other alcohol after the 2010 elections, author
Robert Draper reports in his book Do Not Ask What Good We Do.
Even the cochair of the Congressional Wine Caucus, Dan Lungren, doesn’t
drink.
Far be it from us to advocate unhealthy or reckless behavior,
but in this divisive era, lawmakers need to spend more time together to
hear and understand one another. Couldn’t a little more bipartisan alcohol
lubricate the process?
Booze once flowed far more freely in the Capitol.
In the mid-20th century, the Senate featured a so-called Key
Club on the second floor of the Capitol, where senators with a key would
pop in and partake of the liquor and mixers kept in a small
refrigerator.
The club was just for Democrats, but plenty of bipartisan
imbibing took place elsewhere. The Secretary of the Senate had a bar in
his office, where even staff could grab a glass of bourbon. The Ohio
Clock—where modern enmity unfolds—was reportedly a receptacle for bottles
of booze during the 1950s (not put there for senators, as is commonly
thought, but more likely by reporters, the Senate historian notes). And
until the temperance movement put the pressure on, the Senate floor
featured decanters of whiskey—one on the Democratic side, one on the
Republican—and lawmakers could pour themselves a belt while conducting
business.
Prohibition didn’t stop the drinking. The famed Man in the
Green Hat brought contraband hooch to the Hill, making some 25 deliveries
a day and concealing the bottles in a sturdy leather briefcase. Capitol
police knew the man, George Cassiday, and allowed him unfettered access to
the Capitol, day and night, until an unsympathetic Capitol Police officer
blew the whistle.
On the House side, members could grab a drink in the “Board of
Education,” the hideway office in which Speaker Sam Rayburn hosted
colleagues. Not only were relationships fostered in the room, but history
unfolded there. One day in 1945, Vice President Harry S. Truman arrived to
talk politics, only to be greeted by Rayburn with an urgent message. The
White House press secretary had called, and Truman was to return to the
White House as quickly and quietly as possible. Truman complied and was
told Franklin Roosevelt was dead, making Truman
commander-in-chief.
Slightly off campus, lawmakers, lobbyists, and zipped-lipped
journalists hung out at the Monocle restaurant or at the Carroll Arms
hotel. The Carroll Arms was where some members lived while looking for
more permanent digs, but more commonly it was a place where people drank.
A lot.
The now-demolished D Street building was the central relaxation
place after a tough day on the Hill. One of its most popular waitresses,
Flo Black, would look skeptically at anyone who made the mistake of
ordering a Coke. “This is no drugstore,” Black would scold in her Southern
drawl. “We only serve drinks here.” On the second floor was the more
exclusive Quorum Club, where lawmakers and lobbyists drank, played poker,
and negotiated.
“You saw not only senators there but your staff colleagues,
though you might have been fighting with them all day. And that’s one of
the differences I see in the Senate then and the Senate today—there was a
camaraderie; though you could disagree, there was a great deal of
integrity in your disagreement.”
Those words came from Roy L. Elson, who’d served as an
administrative assistant to Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona from 1955 to
1969. Elson, in an interview with the Senate historian, was bemoaning how
the social relationships among lawmakers had deteriorated.
“There wasn’t a lot of dishonesty or lying to you, or
misleading you,” Elson said. “You fought fair-and-square for the most
part. After you might have lost a legislative battle, you’d meet over at
the Carroll Arms and have a drink and laugh about it.”
That interview was conducted in 1990. And in the 20-plus years
since, the situation has only gotten worse.
Why the shift? Health and modern mores, for one—the
three-martini lunch died decades ago, replaced by chomping salad in a
carryout container while answering e-mail. Television has had a particular
impact. Before 1979 in the House and 1986 in the Senate, floor proceedings
weren’t televised. C-SPAN brought Congress into America’s living rooms,
and lawmakers, conscious of looking young and healthy, responded by
getting themselves to the gym instead of the bar.
Lawmakers’ modern schedules—in which they head back home from
Thursday or early Friday until Tuesday—discourage them from spending time
together, laments Congressman Bill Pascrell, a New Jersey Democrat. “There
are people in this House who don’t say hello to people on the other side
of the House,” Pascrell says, because they don’t know them as anything
besides a member of the opposition.
And public perceptions have made lawmakers and others skittish
about being seen with a drink in hand.
Stan Collender, a former staffer for both the House and Senate
budget committees and now a partner at Qorvis Communications, found
himself on the shortlist to be director of the Office of Management and
Budget during the Obama administration. Collender’s early move, after
learning he was under consideration for such a high-profile job? Telling
his wife that if they went out to dinner, he couldn’t even enjoy a glass
of wine. “Someone’s going to take a shot of me with a drink in my hand and
my head back, and it’ll be over,” he told her.
True, some lawmakers have been embarrassed by reports of
merrymaking after hours. Former New York congressman John E. Sweeney got
in trouble in 2006 after he was photographed at a frat party in a
neighboring congressional district. He lost his race and later was jailed
for driving while intoxicated (the second infraction in less than 18
months). Another member retired in early 2005 after she fell drunk into an
escalator on Capitol Hill, missing an important tax vote.
But Congress members now say they’re worried that any imbibing
at all will be caught by a cell-phone camera or blogger and used to
characterize lawmakers as a bunch of do-nothing drunks.
And what about heading to a holiday party or reception? Go at
your peril: House speaker John Boehner—who arguably deserved to unwind
with an adult beverage after wrangling with the Tea Party faction of his
caucus all year—arrived at the US Chamber of Commerce Christmas party last
December only to be greeted by jeering Occupy demonstrators, who huddled
under a red “99 percent” carpet and invited guests to walk all over
them.
Stringent ethics rules have a party- dampening effect as well.
Eager to counter impressions—correct or not—of lawmakers fiddling around
at fancy dinners while voters burn with resentment, Congress has approved
increasingly restrictive rules about what lawmakers and staff can
accept—and from whom. Officials and their staff are barred from receiving
any gifts at all, even pizza, from a lobbyist or someone who employs a
lobbyist or lobbying firm.
Members and staffers can go to a “widely attended reception”
but only if the fare consists of hors d’oeuvres and not a full dinner. The
event must be related to the member’s or staffer’s official duties and be
attended by at least 25 nonofficial guests. (Don’t even think of counting
congressional or staff spouses as civilians.) And just in case someone had
hopes of enjoying such an event, the House Ethics Committee’s guidebook
sternly notes: “An event may not be merely for the personal pleasure or
entertainment of the Member or staff person.”
In other words, you can consume small amounts of food and
drink, but you may not have fun.
The caterers do their best to serve food that can be eaten with
one’s fingers while standing. It’s common to see clam chowder in a
miniature cup (no spoons means it’s not really a “meal”), and skewers are
a popular way of eliminating the need for a fork. Still, many lawmakers
are nervous about being photographed sipping a plastic cup of wine while
on the job—and members of Congress are always “on the job” when they’re on
the Hill.
It used to be that at receptions “you could rub elbows or a
little work would get done,” says Representative Michael Capuano, a
Massachusetts Democrat. “Now there’s no opportunity to really get to know
each other.”
When he was mayor of Somerville, Capuano recalls, he would
sometimes have lunch with his wife. On one occasion, he sipped a beer
while having a burger at a bar: “Next thing I know, I hear rumors that I
was drunk in the afternoon and was with ‘some chick.’ It was my
wife.”
In Washington, Capuano says, “it’s a lot worse.”
“When I was a kid, the Democrats and Republicans used to
socialize together,” says Ali Wentworth, whose parents were a
Washington Post reporter and Nancy Reagan’s social secretary. “My
parents always had dinner parties, and sources exchanged ideas. Bob
Woodward would be at the table. Tip O’Neill would get into these screaming
fits, and then they would go play tennis.”
Now, says Wentworth—who is married to ABC journalist and former
Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos—“Republicans are all in their mansions
in McLean and Democrats are in the Palisades or Georgetown.”
Some of the newer members of Congress are trying to turn back
the clock. Representatives David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat, and
Nan Hayworth, a New York Republican, are seeking support for the Common
Ground Caucus, a purely social group. To join, a lawmaker has to bring a
colleague from the other party.
“We are living in an environment now where there are very few
opportunities to develop those relationships,” says Cicilline. “If we
don’t intentionally try to develop remedies to make it happen, it won’t
happen.”
A group of George Washington University students is on the
case, starting Slam Dunks, Fireworks, and Eagles Super PAC, which is
committed to raising cash to fund beer-fueled sessions where lawmakers
could conduct bipartisan negotiations. It’s the thought that counts:
Recent Federal Election Commission filings show that the group has yet to
raise or spend any money.
Cicilline and Hayworth’s caucus, meanwhile, started out with a
cocktail party. Only 11 members came. So now they’re thinking about
setting up a breakfast after Congress is back in session. Presumably,
there will be no alcohol with the eggs.
But lawmakers getting together and just trying to get to know
one another as people? We can all drink to that.
Susan Milligan (milliganglobe@yahoo.com) is a political and
foreign-affairs writer.
This article appears in the November 2012 issue of The Washingtonian.
