"I don't know yet, but let's tell the others." I stuck out my hand and we shook on it. Then I led her down the hall and we told the new Chairman and President. They both gave us a thumbs up. Then I sent her off to find a note pad and a pen, and we started making some plans.
Talk to Brew McRiley.
Talk to Andrea Greene about leasing the campaign offices.
Talk to Andrea about buying a home in D.C.
Arrange for accommodations in Washington for the Orientation week. Talk to Taylor Hannity about a hotel room for the week, maybe longer.
Get the final details for the Orientation week,
and finally
Talk to Brew McRiley!
I really needed to talk to Brewster. He needed to give me some last minute instruction on how Congress worked before I got there. Sure, we had Orientation coming up, but I didn't even know what I needed to know before I got that far! Behind the scenes in Congress are thousands of people who never make the evening news, but if you don't do it right, you will be history.
Back when I was in the Army, they had long experience with new people coming into new commands, and they had developed schools and introductory courses so a new officer, no matter how bad he was, didn't seem like an idiot when he got somewhere. The reverse had been the case with the Buckman Group, but we had the benefit of not actually knowing what we were doing anyway. We made it up as we went along. I had a feeling that Congress might be closer to a shark tank, and I would need to at least know how to dog paddle before I got there.
I had debated asking Brewster if he might be interested in a position as my Chief of Staff, but I shot that idea down almost as quickly as I came up with it. McRiley wasn't interested in politics as a means to get anything accomplished. He saw it as a game, and liked to play the game. He was a mercenary and simply moved from campaign to campaign, playing the game, and winning or losing. For him, winning simply meant an opportunity to move to a bigger campaign. No, while I would get a lot of information from him, he wouldn't be part of my team, at least not until I was running again.
I cornered McRiley and got him into my office after lunch on Wednesday. "So, Brew, tell me how to be a Congressman!", I asked.
Brew laughed loudly at that. "Oh, Carl, you're such a babe in the woods! Nobody cares about being a Congressman! They only care about being reelected!"
I rolled my eyes, but smiled. This was pretty much in line with what he had told me all through the campaign. "Humor me, Brewster. Imagine that I actually gave a shit about being a Congressman. I know it's a stretch, but try to imagine it."
"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."