I promised that there would be poop jokes in this post, and I’m sorry to say that I don’t have any at the moment. But I do have a lot more travel photos.
Impressive, isn’t it? Seeing this in person should be required for all Americans that can afford the trip. And we should all kick in to pay for the people that can’t afford it. Both the structure--and what it represents--is an amazing sight.
The actual Capital building is just used for meetings of the House, Senate, and certain committees. Most of the action actually happens in the five or six office buildings that surround it. These house the offices of the Senators and Representatives, and are where they spend most of their time.
Some are traditional, and some are modern, but they all have an amazing feel to them. Forty year old lobbyists walking past twenty year old staffers, while the sixty year old Congress people hide away in their back offices. People are moving and things are happening!
This is the main lobby of one of the older office buildings. It's where both parties hold a lot of their impromptu press conferences, and you can see a TV camera set up in the top left corner.
This is one of the many hallways coming out from the lobby above. The two doorways with flags in front of them lead to Senators' offices.
This is one of the newer, but equally impressive office buildings. This one houses the offices of Harry Reid, Jon Kyl, and Al Franken, amongst many others.
We met with the offices of Representative Flake (R-Phoenix), Senator McCain, and Senator Kyl. We didn’t get face time with any of them, since votes were happening during our appointment times, but we did meet with the health staffers for all three. And to be honest, that’s what we were hoping for. Things like payment formulas and residency funding are kind of wonky, and our elected representatives don’t have time to learn about all of them. So they have specialized staff members (health, finance, military, etc.) that are experts in these subjects. They meet with the various interest groups, and compile a summary for their bosses.
Not surprisingly, the health staffer for Rep. Flake could care less about what we were talking about (he’d rather talk about abolishing Medicare than about allocating a specific pool of money within it). But the health staffers for both Senators McCain and Kyl were remarkably receptive. They were well informed, and knew about the issues that we were trying to address. While we didn’t see eye to eye on all issues, we all agreed that the residency funds need to be more diversified. It was a very pleasant surprise to have their support on that issue.
After our three meetings, the rest of the Arizona delegation (a doctor and a resident) all struck off on our own to take advantage of our time in D.C. I spent the afternoon visiting a friend who served with Aimee in the Peace Corps. He has a very impressive job coordinating public relations for Senate Dems, and he reports to none other than Harry Reid. When he told me nonchalantly to just meet him in Harry Reid’s personal office, my eyes almost popped out of my head. I was actually kind of nervous walking over to meet him. “What if Senator Reid is there? Should I say hi? Should I talk about Medicare payment reform, or should I just say how nice the weather is?” But for better or worse, Senator Reid was in meetings all afternoon, so I didn’t have the chance to make an ass out of myself in front of the majority leader of the United States Senate.
But I had a great time meeting with my friend. He has an all access pass to the Capital building, and gave me a pretty incredible behind-the-scenes tour of the operation. I even got to see Al Franken reading the newspaper on the Senate podium. Apparently, whenever the Senate is in session, there needs to be a Senator presiding over it, even if nothing is going on. It’s clearly a pretty boring gig to sit on the podium (while all of your colleagues are off in meetings) so the junior Senators rotate through the job in two-hour shifts. And I had the luck of being there during Senator Franken’s turn. And for everyone who solely remembers him and Stuart Smalley and the guy that wore nothing more than a diaper on live television, he’s actually a remarkably astute policymaker. After all, you don’t have to be smart to be a Senator, but you do have to be smart to be funny. Seinfeld/O’Brien 2016. We could do worse.
