Pandemonium ensued. There were angry glares, heated accusations. Red-faced name-calling echoed off the walls and vaulted ceilings in a room just off the main corridor of the U.S. Capitol. It was Tuesday, February 11, 2014. Another lunch of the Senate Republicans.
I’d been a regular part of these gatherings ever since I was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012. Most, if not all, of the then forty-five members of the Republican conference usually attended; these were, literally, free lunches after all, in some of the most beautiful rooms in the U.S. Capitol. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we met in the Lyndon B. Johnson Room, an expansive chamber adorned with ceiling frescoes by the Italian artist Constantino Brumidi, a large gilded mirror, an opulent chandelier, and marble-paneled walls. On Wednesdays we met in the Mike Mansfield Room, a wood-paneled rectangular conference room named for the late Senate majority leader from Montana.
Typically the party lunches were civil discussions—somewhat plodding, and occasionally instructive. On this day, however, civility was not on the menu.
At this lunch, the duly elected members of the U.S. Senate—many who’d served in the august body for decades—were yelling. Not simply raising their voices or speaking loudly, but angrily yelling at their colleagues in the room who had committed what I had quickly come to learn was the cardinal sin of Washington, D.C.: telling the truth.
