-If you hadn’t a clue, you would have assumed Rep. Julia Carson was giving new meaning to the notion of a no-show job.
The Indiana Democrat was elected in November to replace Andy Jacobs, a former boss of hers who was one of Congress’ most idiosyncratic souls. But she did not actually show up to work until last Wednesday, attending her very first hearing the next day.
I might have assumed that she somehow was following in the footsteps of the frugal Jacobs, who declined congressional pay hikes and once declined to get on a flight to the capital because the only seat left was in first class.
To save $20, he decided to instead drive through a snowstorm. Meanwhile, the plane crashed, killing everybody.
So maybe Carson, 58, was hitching from Indianapolis but having a hard time finding a ride?
“Well, I’m now a member of the Zipper Club,” she said Friday.
She has joined the ranks of members of Congress who have had coronary artery bypass surgery, in her case double bypass surgery, which is the real reason she arrived two months late to work.
Near the end of her campaign for office, she was having what she assumed were repercussions from the flu. Even when she felt discomfort in her chest after winning, she assumed it was some virus. She went to Washington a few times, though never could summon much energy.
More Top Picks Best Electric Bidet Seats With Night Lights
On Jan. 3, she was packing to come here and handling several appointments. At one point she called a doctor’s secretary, who is a friend, and wondered if she were having a heart attack.
“She went ballistic,” said Carson, who grew up in poverty as the daughter of a teen mom and did some farm labor. The secretary ended up sending cops to Carson’s house. The cops proceeded to bust through a door to get inside.
Alas, Carson was elsewhere, meeting a union official. But, when done, she headed over to a hospital and soon found herself in surgery.
As if that wasn’t enough, she returned on Valentine’s Day for a checkup, only to learn she needed more surgery, this time on an artery in her neck. She thus was out of commission until Thursday, when she showed up at a sparsely attended Banking Committee hearing.
“I did recognize Joe Kennedy, though,” she said of the Massachusetts Democrat, one of her few colleagues who surfaced.
Carson, who served in the Indiana legislature, watched a lot of C-SPAN while in the hospital and at home the past two months and concedes being awfully down as she watched the first day of the new Congress. “I was so depressed, I asked the nurse to turn off the TV.”
But, finally, she made it last week and, “being human, I had to blink off tears” as she walked into her office.
“I’m basically a country girl at heart and was grateful to have finally arrived on the scene.”
Gored oxes and double standards
Robert Bennett, a prominent defense attorney whose clients include President Clinton in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, passed along a copy of a speech he gave Friday at a San Francisco law school. In it, he derided “The Politicalization of the Legal and Ethical Processes.”
While conceding that an obsession for scandal has been a boon for his practice, he noted the rampant hypocrisy in both parties when it comes to bashing independent counsels, like Kenneth Starr, who is investigating Clinton in the Whitewater matters.
“The Republicans were highly critical of the independent counsel statute when my client, (former Defense Secretary Caspar) Weinberger, was in the cross-hairs of the independent counsel, but don’t think it such a bad idea now that President Clinton is on the receiving end. Of course, the Democrats, who now complain about Mr. Starr, had no problem with (Iran-Contra counsel) Lawrence Walsh when he was pursuing Mr. Weinberger.”
Playing nice in the House
The Friday morning scene at the capital’s Union Station gave new meaning to the notion of kiss and ride.
Julia Carson still wasn’t feeling quite up to it but one did find nearly half the U.S. House of Representatives, and assorted family members and staffers. They were getting on a train to head to Harrisburg, Pa., for a bus trip to Hershey, Pa., where they’d spend 48 hours learning how to be nice to one another.
As one who finds life too civil here, and too many folks (including in the press) too smoochy with one another, I was sort of convinced when co-ringleader Rep. Ray LaHood of Peoria tried to explain his idea for a gathering scheduled to include the following:
The historian David McCullough speaking Friday afternoon; a professional facilitator (i.e. touchy-feely expert); a trek to the Hershey chocolate factory and entertainment by, among others, Rep. Sonny Bono of Palm Springs.
Six or eight months back, co-ringleader Rep. Dave Skaggs (D-Colo.) came to LaHood and said life was deteriorating in the House.
“It wasn’t any single incident,” LaHood said.
For sure, there had been weird happenings: one guy trying to pull another’s necktie, Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Speaker Newt Gingrich not speaking to each other for a year, a member telling another to shut up in the well of the House, one guy calling another a “fag,” and former Rep. Bob Dornan (R-Calif.) merely being himself.
Then there was the holy war waged against Gingrich by onetime seminarian David Bonior of Michigan. Bonior seemed convinced Gingrich was part-John Wayne Gacy, part-Willie Sutton, and chagrined when he was reprimanded, not booted, for violating House rules. This all falls somewhat short of gang war in South-Central Los Angeles. But it struck some as an unsettling, Rodmanization of congressional life.
LaHood, a moderate Republican who was part of the zealot Class of 1994, which helped the GOP take control of the House for the first time in 40 years, blamed many of his classmates.
“They trashed the very institution they were seeking office in. Some came with no legislative experience and wanted to turn the place upside down, sell office buildings and reduce the institution to something that people had never seen before. They were the cause.”
Meanwhile, Democrats sulked, unaccustomed to being in the minority and losing.
LaHood explained the schedule; how on Saturday morning everybody would split into groups of about 25 or 3O and discuss the roots of the new incivility. Congressmen will be encouraged to mingle with those they do not know.
“I hope this is a start of friendships and relationships between members, spouses and families,” said LaHood. Admittedly, the search for civility has its limits, and he made sure Bonior and Gingrich were in different groups.
More Top Picks Turntables
Will life change when everybody returns from a venture largely subsidized by the private Pew Charitable Trusts?
One should hope only if there might be some effect on the legislative inertia. Be informed that your paid representatives have done virtually nothing of consequence since the start of business in January.
Last week’s House schedule included such weighty matters as resolutions applauding Nicaragua for having had democratic elections, Warren Christopher for having been secretary of state, and some Alabama judge for ignoring a court order to remove a copy of the 10 Commandments from his courtroom.
There was nothing about the 45 million Americans who are uninsured. Or fixing huge holes in the new welfare law. Or the campaign finance laws. Or anything about forcing corporations to exhibit a tad more responsibility.
Maybe the politics are so fierce, and uncivil, because the stakes have become so small.