My day on Capitol Hill

It’s now Sunday morning, 5am ET, here in Washington DC. Here’s a recounting of my Thursday:

Had a busy day. Flew out of CID at 6:50 this morning to Detroit. Interesting thing was that the director of my department at the university (e.g. my boss) was on the same flight. She was headed elsewhere, but sharing the flight the whole way to DC was a professor of political science who I know. I also shared the flight from Detroit with A. from Ames who is on the state executive board with me. (I’m in town for the winter leadership conference that the non-profit I volunteer with is putting on. The non-profit is based in DC and has organizations in all 50 states and 1,100 local chapters. I’m on the state board and also the board of my local organization.)

At any rate, we got to DC exactly at noon eastern time. A. and I took a cab to the Hyatt Arlington where we’re staying. We grabbed a quick bite to eat and then headed via the subway to Capitol Hill. There’s a subway stop right across the street from the hotel. The opening down into the subway was intense. A. said she felt dizzy.

The subway was pretty easy though, and we got off at Capitol South not knowing where to go (Travel = Adventure). We hadn’t talked to any of our folk at this point, but we knew there were meetings going on. At any rate, we found the House office building we needed to be at. There was snow coming down then—huge white flakes. We were glad to get inside. We found Rep. Leach’s office (he’s my local Representative) and joined a meeting in progress. We had several meetings through the course of the afternoon and early evening. It was A. from Ames, S. from Cedar Rapids, myself and Andrew, the full-time lobbyist for our non-profit in the Washington DC headquarters. Anyway, we talked to Leach’s staff for a while about issues. From Leach’s office we went down through some tunnel system and up into a Senate office building. We met with Senator Grassley’s staff. Grassley is from Iowa. He’s very powerful in the Senate because he’s the chair of the senate finance committee. At any rate, we talked with some of his policy wonks. Andrew said the meeting went well—that the staff were receptive. They were polite, but it was a little hard to tell from my perspective how it went. It was cool walking around with Andrew because he knew so many people, and it was interesting to eavesdrop. We then hung out at Senate Chef for a bit before our Harkin meeting. We actually got to meet Senator Harkin (also from Iowa). We introduced ourselves and shook his hand. He was cordial and said he’s always willing to meet constituents. He had to go though because he was rushing down to the Senate floor to vote on the Gonzales nomination for Attorney General. I checked the news later that evening, and it sounds like Gonzales was approved by the Senate (Harkin said he was voting against the nomination). Gonzales is the guy who legally validated Bush’s use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, etc. It was a real honor to meet the Senator.

We met with Harkin’s staff, and they were by far the best. The other people we met during the day were very knowledgeable, smart people, but the Harkin folk really knew their stuff when it came to our issues. It was a really good session.

We then headed over to a reception in the same building they were having for all of the folk from our non-profit who were on Capitol Hill. A couple Senators showed up too. I talked to M. from Des Moines who is the president of the national board and is also the executive director of the Iowa organization (and who funded my trip). And met lots of other people.

Got back to the hotel around 7:15 and had a session from 7:30 until 9pm. A. and I were both exhausted. A few of us walked across the street and had supper about 9:30pm. It was a long, but very good day. I had been up since 4am central time and needed some rest, which I finally got.