“It’s easier to find bacon in Tel Aviv than it is to find a working Congressman in Washington. Okay, I’ll try.” He stood up and went over to my liquor cabinet. “We’re going to need a drink or two for this.”
I smiled and nodded, and he brought back a couple of glasses and bottles of gin and tonic water. I buzzed Cheryl and asked her to rustle up some ice. After she brought in the fixings for the booze we made our drinks.
Brewster sat down and drank some of his drink, and sighed blissfully. “Now, where were we? Oh, yes, discussing science fiction. Well, the first thing you have to understand is that all of the actual work is done by your staff. Forget about the sound bites and speeches from the elected representatives of this our great democracy. They don’t actually know shit about what is going on. It’s their staff that runs the place.”
“How big is my staff, anyway?” I asked.
“Right now? Zero!”
“None of the existing staff stay on?”
“Nope. They’re all Democrats anyway. No, you need to start lining up a staff now. You can have a maximum of twelve or fourteen — not quite sure on that — and they do everything.”
“Fourteen? Everybody gets that many? I mean, if there’s 535 Congressmen and Senators…” I started doing the math in my head, and then switched to a calculator. “That’s almost 7,500 staffers!”
“Wrong. Congressmen get that many. Senators get three dozen! That’s almost ten thousand staff people. Plus interns, don’t forget them.”
“Good Lord!”
“It gets worse,” he added. “That’s just the staffers for the individual Representatives and Senators. Congress itself has a staff. Each Congressional committee — you know, like Ways and Means or Armed Services — has its own staff. There are dozens of committees. Then the leadership, like the Speaker and the Whip, has a staff just for that. These are just the people who work on the laws. I’m not including any of the police or maintenance types. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total staff of the Congress was in the fifteen to twenty thousand range. I don’t think anybody actually knows!”
“Holy crap! That’s like an entire city!”
“Bingo! Now you know why they built the Hart Senate Office Building back in the Seventies. You simply can’t cram that many people into the Capitol. You won’t have an office in the Capitol itself. Only the leaders have those, the guys way up in seniority. You’ll be in either Cannon, Longworth, or Rayburn, down on Independence Avenue. That’s one of the things you’ll do in Orientation, get your office.”
“Huh,” I muttered to myself. “So, what in the world do all those people do?”
“Well, it’s like I said earlier, get you reelected. If you can actually accomplish anything while you’re at it, more power to you.” I gave him my driest look, and he shrugged and went on. “Okay, since you plan to be so tiresome as to actually want to do your job, here’s more for you to think about.”
We both drank some of our G&Ts and then he continued. “One thing you have to remember is that no single human can possibly read all the crap that comes through your office. It’s written by lawyers, for lawyers, and it would take up way beyond twenty-four hours a day to actually go through the mountain of shit that is a single bill. Nobody expects you to read this stuff. That’s what some of your staff does. They sort through it, figure out if it’s what you want, and tell you what you think about it. Even more of this goes on at the committee level.”
I raised an eyebrow at that. “So, if I was being cynical and unscrupulous, and I wanted to screw around with a bill, why bother with the Congressman, just go after the staff.”
“I knew you’d catch on eventually,” he replied, smiling.
“What else do they do?”
We spent the rest of the afternoon discussing staff members. There was the Chief of Staff who ran it all. Maybe an Assistant Chief of Staff, but that might be more for the Senators. A Press Secretary to tell the world what a great job I was doing. Probably a Legislative Director and several staffers to work on bills. An Executive Assistant to tell me what I was doing. You always had caseworkers who would field complaints from the home office and constituents, to help them get their Social Security check or whatever. Plus assistants and interns and general flunkies to round it all out. The most important person also turned out to be one of the lowest ranking people (isn’t that always the case?) — The person who logs in all the phone calls and letters and makes sure that each and every one is responded to. It’s is worse to ignore somebody than it is to tell them NO.
The Congressman was probably the least important person involved!
“So where do I find people to do this stuff? Call StaffRUs?” I asked.
“Pretty much. Don’t worry too much. There’s a huge subculture of staffers and wannabe staffers all around Washington. You’ll meet some of them at the Orientation next week. Find one, and they’ll start coming out of the woodwork.”
I was curious. “What will Stewart’s staffers be doing?”
He shrugged. “Same sort of thing. Looking for jobs on other Democratic staffs or going to work for a lobbyist. That’s one of the ways the lobbyists buy a Congressman. They don’t actually go after him, but they go after his staff, and promise them jobs in the future.”
“Good Lord! Does anything actually get accomplished?”
“Only when all else fails,” he replied. “Listen, very important, don’t piss off anybody else’s staff. Some of the long term senior staffers for the more powerful members will have a shitload more pull than you will. Keep that in mind. If you have a chance to be nice to them, take it.”
“Not following you. Be nice, how?” I asked.
“There is a whole subculture in D.C. of caterers, decorators, real estate people, restaurants, travel agencies, and the like that are owned or operated or staffed by people related to Congressmen or Senators or their staff. Pay attention to that. All other things being equal, it would be better to hire a ‘Republican’ decorator than a ‘Democrat’. Follow me?”
“Christ! What a fucking snake pit!”
The rest of the week we spent preparing for the transition. I avoided signing anything important until after Orientation, just in case I did something that was a violation of Federal law. In my experience, investigators from the Department of Justice had notoriously small senses of humor. For instance, was I allowed to enter into a long term lease for the campaign headquarters? Could I use the same space for my local office and the future campaign headquarters? Could the headquarters have a door that opened into the local office or did they have to be inviolably separate? Andrea thought up all of these questions.
Who comes up with this shit? Didn’t the fine folks at the Federal Election Commission have better things to do than come up with rules on this stuff? Apparently not. It turns out that I couldn’t use my campaign offices as my local office; they had to be separate, not even so much as a door between them. I got Andrea working on splitting the space into two sections and developing two lease agreements, one for me to pay for the campaign space and one for Congress to pay for my local offices.
Andrea didn’t handle real estate in the D.C. area, but she knew someone who did. She had gotten enough business off of the Buckman Group and referrals over the years that she knew better than to steer me wrong. (The town house and property for me, the office and two expansions for the Buckman Group, John’s new home, the Tusk’s building and home, a house for Jake Junior, etc. - get the idea?) I checked with Brewster and found out that the person Andrea recommended was the wife of an assistant to the Chief of Staff for Vice President Quayle, an acceptable choice. I talked to this new person, a Jacqueline Staymann-Huestis, and made an appointment to meet with her during Orientation Week. I got the impression that she was busy, but would be happy to sell me a house. Maybe when Andrea told her I was ludicrously rich she changed her mind.