2011 began with me high on Vicodin, healing from a wisdom tooth removal, glued to the couch in my parent’s basement, watching nonstop coverage in the wake of the assassination attempt on Gabby Giffords’ life.
Y’all why has nothing changed?
The Congresswoman from Arizona and I were at the time on opposite sides of the political aisle but my heart was broken for her, her hopes and ambitions, her Navy pilot husband, and our country. It was senseless. It was infuriating.
Even at twenty-four, I had aspirations to run for office. I also assumed my future husband, like Kelly would have a distinguished career in the Navy. Her optics were my optics, and instead of representing her people, she was in the hospital fighting for her life because someone decided to attend a voter outreach event and kill her.
When my internship in the office of Senator John Ensign (R-NV) began days later, I realized the hate and rising political vitriol were not isolated to far away Arizona. I have a vivid memory of rounding the outside corner of the Dirksen Senate Building to find a bevy of Gadsden flags and a person shouting at a crowd from a small, makeshift stage. I’m a sucker for a good political speech, so I circled the perimeter. I never got a clear indication of who or what they were protesting but I did figure out that they didn’t like taxes.
Soon after, I was sitting in the intern office (read the printer, copier, autopen room) when the massive wooden door came swinging open before banging loudly into an ill placed photocopier. Startled I turned to find my senator, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), his wife, and a trailing staffer. They realized very quickly they had entered one door too early.
The Senator did a little aw shucks schtick then took time to shake all of our hands and ask us where we were from. He seemed pleased to hear I was “from” Texas. At first I was confused as to why he was in our humble space but it quickly became evident he was scouting out the office.
A few days later I was summoned into the Senator’s office (Ensign was going through a sex scandal and was hardly ever around the office and most definitely not around the one female intern). There I found the office manager and loads of paint, wallpaper, and fabric swatches laid out all over the conference table. My eyes grew big at the blues, reds, and golds. Quickly some navy and white striped wallpaper grabbed my attention. How would I decorate my office when I got here? Blue. Lots of blue. And gold. And stripes.
While circling the conference table, I learned that the deaths of two long-term senators, Ted Kennedy in 2009 and Robert Byrd in 2010, had created prime real estate among the marbled halls. The senior and junior senators were vying moves to bigger, more historic spaces, with seniority determining who gets which office.
What struck me most, standing over those fabric swatches in a scandal-plagued senator’s office, was not the grandeur of the Senate. It was how casually expensive it all felt. The office shuffle wasn’t treated as an extraordinary event or a rare indulgence. It was routine. Expected. Institutionalized.
At the same time, the median American worker makes $64,000 a year or just over $5,000 a month. The same amount Senators get to redecorate their offices every time they move.
Families budgeting for groceries, childcare, mortgages, and medical bills are underwriting a political class debating wallpaper patterns in marble buildings connected by private underground rail cars so they do not have to walk two-tenths of a mile outdoors.
And maybe that is the real lesson I carried out of Washington. Not that politicians are uniquely evil. Not that one party is more guilty than the other. But that the longer people remain inside those buildings, the easier it becomes to mistake extraordinary privilege for ordinary life.
Washington doesn’t just spend taxpayer money.
It absorbs people into a culture where spending taxpayer money begins to feel normal.
Sources:
https://rollcall.com/2003/11/11/senate-doubles-furnishing-funds/
https://peer.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/5_11_21_Cap_Office_Renovations.pdf
https://www.aoc.gov/what-we-do/projects/congressional-office-moves/senate
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/illinois-congressman-reimburses-government-office-renovations