10 Things to Know About the U.S. Senate

[Caveat: I’ve been out of the Senate for 27 years; these are my memories!]

At its core, the Senate is a human institution, filled with human beings in all of their inspiring, humorous, admirable, and revolting aspects. Here are a few personal recollections of some of the little things that made working there a special human experience.


1. Locker Room. Off the Senate floor are two break rooms, one for each party, where senators can sit, talk, make calls, negotiate, and bond. They’re called “cloak rooms,” from a time when legislators still wore cloaks and left them there before entering the Senate chamber. One of my first times in the Democratic cloak room was late at night; the Senate was still in session, debating some pending issue long after hours. When I walked in, I saw one senator reading, two telling jokes, another pacing around, another sitting alone. I thought, this isn’t a lot different than the Knicks locker room. I felt at home.


2. Hideaways. Most senior senators were given small hideaway offices in the Capitol, where they were supposed to work or have meetings while the Senate was in session, to save time and stay close to the floor for votes. Most of these hideaways were windowless holes in the wall. They looked like closets. Nothing happened there. One year, I didn’t set foot in mine at all.


3. Lunch. In the Capitol, there was a “Senators-Only” dining room that served roast beef, bean soup, pecan pie, chocolate cake, and other equally low-calorie menu items. My first two years in the Senate, I’d go there three days a week to eat lunch, ask questions, and learn the ropes from senior senators who’d hold court. I gained 25 pounds. After that, I ate a tiny salad and two crackers at my desk nearly every day for 16 years.


4. Gym. The Senate gym barely qualified as a gym. Unlike the house gym, it had no basketball court – just a small workout room, a tiny pool, and some cots for naps, like an infirmary. Which is where most senators would end up if they ever did build a basketball court.


5. Human Beings. When Cory Booker was elected to my former seat representing New Jersey, he asked if I had any advice. I said, “Make five Republican friends, real friends. At some point, if you need them, they’ll find a way to help.” So he tried to sit down with every Republican senator, to talk about life apart from politics. The hardest to pin down was Jim Inhofe, an ultra-conservative from Oklahoma; but they connected at a Bible study in Inhofe’s office, where Cory learned Inhofe had an adopted granddaughter.

Months later, Cory had an important proposal to boost school support for homeless and foster children. When he wanted to bring it to a vote on the floor, Inhofe was the one who agreed to cosponsor it and who convinced a decisive number of other Republicans to sign on. Today, it’s the law of the land.


6. Listening. Most speeches given on the Senate floor are really just for the benefit of the written record or the TV audience, not for people actually in the room. In fact many times, no one else is even there, and you’re speaking to an empty chamber. But sometimes, when the stakes were high and big votes were on the line, senators used to come in and hang around. At those moments, eloquence could make a difference. I loved listening to Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, Pat Moynihan of New York, Phil Gramm of Texas, and Russell Long of Louisiana. They knew how to persuade with style and they often succeeded, partly because most of us kept open minds and respected each other.


7. Michael. When the Senate was out of session, I sometimes got special permission to take visitors into the Senate chamber. One day, Phil Jackson brought his then-NBA-champion Chicago Bulls for a tour. I took them onto the floor, to give them a feel for what it was like to be at “center court” of the Senate. The players looked up at the gallery seats and moved around the floor as if they were casing a new arena. All the desks looked the same; there was no way to know which one belonged to the majority leader, the Senate’s playmaker. But Michael Jordan somehow sensed it. When I looked over, without a word exchanged, there he was – standing behind the majority leader’s desk, the seat of real power on that court.


8. Bright Ideas. Constituents often offered helpful policy suggestions. But sometimes they could say the damndest things. During the energy crisis in the late 1970s, one man told the head of my New Jersey office that we could help people to save gas by building a long ramp between the Empire State Building and Atlantic City, N.J., so cars could “roll” all the way to the gambling mecca without using any fuel. We asked how the cars would then get back to New York. “Oh,” the man said. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”


9. Timelessness. In Washington, senators spent most time in their offices or on committee work, rather than listening to procedural minutiae on the Senate floor. It was an era before cell phones, so when it came time to vote on a measure, we were summoned with buzzers that sounded across the Capitol and Senate office buildings. The first was one long buzz, signaling you had 15 minutes to get to the floor to vote. Five short buzzes meant you had only five minutes left, or you’d miss your window. People would rush to the floor on an underground open-air train that ran from our office buildings to the Capitol in a brightly-lit tunnel. People were still late, though – and on more than a few occasions, when the majority leader needed their votes to win, he’d drag things out with an unspoken nod to his presiding officer. If a senator whom the leader needed got stuck in traffic coming from a speech at some D.C. hotel, the vote could sometimes last 30 extra minutes. You can’t drag things out like that in basketball or elections.


10. America. What was true then is still true now – despite all the noise, most people in the Senate really do care about making this country a better place. The key is remembering that you’re a human being first, an American second, and a politician third.