Minority Rules

Summary and Excerpt

Excerpt:

The House only paid once a month, which made budgeting quite a challenge. Fortunately once you landed a policy position, sponsor tabs were ubiquitous- if you knew where to go and when. You couldn’t work on the Hill and have any kind of social life without them. The Republicans were making a lot of noise about a gift ban, but behind the scenes it was becoming clear to them how disrupting the symbiotic relationship between lawmakers and stakeholders would destabilize the entire ecosystem.

New Members arrived every cycle, fresh-faced and achingly earnest, truly believing they could honor their campaign promises — that they would be the ones to “shake things up,” change the system to make it work “for the people” — but it always ended up the same way. Albeit writ large, Newt’s Class of ‘94 would be no different. Washington always wins.

Before long, they would join the ranks of those their campaign had referred to as the cynical and the jaded — only now they thought of themselves as practical — and savor the sweet smugness with which Washington collectively views each subsequent crop of Members-elect.

Outsiders assume the allure of Capitol Hill insiderdom is proximity to power, but the reality is, it’s conceit. The lowest ranking staff assistants, vested a mere six months, roll their eyes at the incoming Congressmen — a bunch of rubes who just do not get it. But soon the Speaker would gavel open the new session, and as they learned to navigate the ebb and flow of their new environment, they would be assimilated too.