Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  One year, though, Jeff Flake, an iconoclastic Republican from Arizona, kind of hurt my feelings by giving me a crappy present: a hat bearing the logo of “PING,” which is apparently a golf equipment company based in his home state.

  I complained about it to Tim Kaine. “Flake gave me this stupid hat. This is the worst Secret Santa gift ever. What was he thinking?”

  “Staff error,” said Tim. He’s really smart. And would make a great vice president. Goddammit. Now I’m depressed. Let’s move on.

  Not surprisingly, the quickest way to my heart is through my funny bone (which isn’t the elbow, but rather the rib that lies directly over the heart).* And my favorite Republican colleagues aren’t the ones whose politics are the least objectionable, but rather the ones with the best senses of humor no matter how objectionable their politics may be.

  Pat Roberts has got to be near the top of the list. As I mentioned earlier, he loves Bob and Ray, but he loves Jack Benny even more, and he has a little bit of that famous Jack Benny comic timing. When I see him at an elevator or in the Senate subway, I usually greet him with a “May I help you?!” in the shrill voice of annoying character actor Frank Nelson, a regular on the Jack Benny program. Pat replies with a great Benny-esque “You again?!” And then we laugh.

  No one within earshot has a clue what we’re laughing about, and odds are neither do you, but we don’t care. And though our politics couldn’t be more different, we always jump at the chance to work on something together. For example: The regulations on drug compounding (which is when pharmacists mix prescriptions themselves from individual ingredients) were extremely confusing, and in 2012, eight hundred Americans contracted fungal meningitis, and sixty-four died, due to unsafe drugs that shouldn’t have been allowed to be distributed. Pat and I discovered that we both wanted to work on this issue, so we teamed up and closed the loopholes.

  Then there was the time I needed Republican votes for an amendment to get $11 million for energy projects in Indian country, so I asked Pat. He stood with me in the well of the Senate, doing his best to urge his Republican colleagues to help me. And by “his best,” I mean that Pat told them, “Leadership describes this as ‘completely innocuous.’” I got the votes.

  Pat’s funny, but the funniest Republican in the Senate is Lindsey Graham. Most of his jokes are of the “we’re in a cynical business” persuasion. For example, before our Christmas break one year, Lindsey asked me if the Frankens were going anywhere for some sun. I told him we were going to Puerto Rico.

  Without missing a beat, Lindsey gave me some advice. “Do two fund-raisers: one with the folks for statehood, one with the folks against statehood. They never talk to each other.”

  In 2016, Lindsey ran for president, and found himself somewhere around fifteenth in a field of seventeen. Running into him in the senators’ bathroom, I told him, “Lindsey, if I were voting in the Republican primaries, I’d vote for you.”

  Again without hesitation, he replied, “That’s my problem.”

  Believe it or not, however, not every senator has a great sense of humor.

  Tom Coburn and I did not hit it off right away. A terrifyingly conservative Republican from Oklahoma, he was known as “Dr. No,” for two reasons. First, Tom’s an obstetrician-gynecologist. Second, he is an adamant federalist, who believes the federal government has appropriated too much power from the states, which means he’s pretty much opposed to Congress doing anything.

  But that’s not why we didn’t hit it off. Our first four or five interactions were just misses. Nothing terrible. Mainly, he just didn’t seem to get where I was coming from. So I approached him at a Judiciary Committee hearing to take another shot at breaking the ice. “Tom, can I buy you lunch?”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Buy me breakfast.”

  We sat down together a couple of days later in the Senate dining room around 8 a.m. I had given some thought to how I wanted to start. “Tom,” I said cheerily, “let’s have fun. We can talk about anything. Politics. Our families. Our careers. But let’s make sure to have fun.”

  “Sure.” He nodded. “Fun.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Careers. Let me ask you something. To be a doctor in Oklahoma, do you have to have any formal education?”

  “Yes!!!” he exploded angrily. “You have to go to medical school!!!”

  Ah. I had identified our problem. “Okay,” I explained, “that was a joke.”

  Tom understood immediately and calmed right down.

  “You see, that’s what I used to do for a living. I told jokes. I was in comedy.”

  We did have fun for the next forty-five minutes, and he wrote me a lovely note thanking me for breakfast and for the fun, which seemed like it had been a novel experience for him. Tom retired from the Senate after 2014 with a near-perfect record of voting against everything I like.

  But when I called Tom a few months ago to make sure it was okay with him if I told this story, he agreed right away. “You’re a gentleman to ask, but there’s a First Amendment! You can write anything you want!” Very Tom Coburn. Then we had some fun talking about grandchildren.

  I should note, I like my Democratic colleagues, too. But I spend a lot more time with them. And we agree on stuff. So it’s easy to like them. It’s harder to make friends across the aisle.

  And it’s also more important. It’s a lot easier to negotiate with people you trust and whom you don’t personally dislike. That’s why you fight as hard as you can for your principles, but you try not to be a jerk about it. It’s why it’s important that your word is good. It’s why it’s important to try to build these relationships with colleagues across the aisle, whether it’s through family bonding or inside jokes or writing a country song together (which I did with Orrin Hatch).*

  Unfortunately, building those bonds is harder now than it used to be. For one thing, members of Congress used to bring their families to Washington to live. Members would see each other on weekends and just hang out. Their kids used to go to school together—in D.C. or suburban Maryland or Virginia. It’s hard to hate the parent of a kid who’s on your kid’s baseball team.

  To a great degree, the 1994 election changed that. Newt Gingrich told Republicans to run against Washington. They did, and they won. He told them to keep their families in their home districts. And they did, and for some of them, it put some pressure on their family life. Newt, for example.

  But mostly it meant that members would fly into D.C. on Monday afternoon and fly out on Thursday afternoon, a practice that has continued to this day.

  Meanwhile, our schedules have gotten more packed than ever. Every minute we don’t spend fulfilling the requirements of our jobs, we’re expected to spend raising money. And we’re also expected to spend as much time as possible in our states. Which doesn’t leave a lot of time for getting to know, and therefore trust, your colleagues.

  At the end of the day, the Senate is like any other workplace. You don’t always enjoy all of your coworkers, but you’re far better off finding a way to get along with them than you are harping on the things you don’t like.

  And being a successful senator is as much about being a good coworker as it is about being smart or well versed in the issues or a talented orator. If you can be a pleasure to work with, you’ll get more accomplished than if you’re a pill whom nobody can stand.

  Which brings me to Ted Cruz.

  Chapter 37

  Sophistry

  As I mentioned in the last chapter, there are unwritten rules of the Senate that everyone follows in order to maintain civility and foster productive working relationships. One of those unwritten rules is that you aren’t supposed to repeat in public a conversation you’ve had with a colleague in private if that conversation makes your colleague look bad in any way.

  I’ve decided to observe that practice in this book, with one exception: Ted Cruz.

  For what it’s worth, I feel fully justified in doing so, because Ted violated basic Senate protocol himself wh
en he went to the floor and called Mitch McConnell a liar. It was the sort of thing that just isn’t done, a breach of decorum so shocking that even I haven’t committed it. And I love calling people liars!

  Anyway, here’s the thing you have to understand about Ted Cruz. I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.

  The reason I like Ted more than most of my other colleagues do is that he actually has a decent sense of humor. Ted has tried out jokes on me. They’re usually pretty pedestrian—generally, I can see the punch line coming, and many are not-very-good versions of constructions I’ve heard before. But as politician jokes go, they’re not bad at all. And Ted is a fan of comedy. I think. You’re never entirely sure with this guy.

  One Monday, after a week’s recess, Ted came up to me on the floor to tell me that he and some friends had watched a rerun of my Stuart Smalley sketch with Michael Jordan and raved about how funny it was. I think he was being sincere, which meant it was a genuinely nice gesture.

  The only problem was that at that moment I was talking to Jeff Sessions about our respective recesses. And now I had to try to explain to Jeff what Ted was talking about. Which meant I had to explain what recovery is, what affirmations are, what public-access TV is, what a parody of public-access TV is—and I had to do it all in about thirty seconds before Jeff lost interest. Which I of course failed to do, and Jeff just kind of faded away to talk with someone else. Great.

  Anyway, Ted has a sense of humor, even if it’s a lame one. And he did pay me a modest compliment, even if it was some Machiavellian ploy in service of his ambition to take over the world.

  The problem with Ted isn’t that he’s humorless. It isn’t even his truly reprehensible far-right politics. No, the problem with Ted—and the reason so many senators have a problem with Ted—is simply that he is an absolutely toxic coworker. He’s the guy in your office who snitches to corporate about your March Madness pool and microwaves fish in the office kitchen. He is the Dwight Schrute of the Senate.

  In a way, he’s a perfect example of what I said in the last chapter about how it’s not your knowledge of policy or your political talents, but rather your people skills, that determine whether you succeed as a senator.

  For sure, Ted is extremely smart. Only the most brilliant young lawyers get to clerk for Supreme Court justices, and Ted got to clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist. And he’s a truly gifted speaker who can frame an argument brilliantly. From what I’ve heard, when Cruz later returned to the Court to argue cases in his capacity as the solicitor general of Texas, clerks would all make a point to be present in the chamber so they could watch him do his thing.

  I don’t begrudge Ted that. There are plenty of senators who are smarter than I am, or have more natural political aptitude than I do. For example, my own senior senator, Amy Klobuchar. Or my friend Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Or Lindsey Graham. But I like them all. Because none of them are sociopaths.

  Let me explain by telling you what I consider to be the quintessential Ted Cruz story.

  After the unspeakable mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Dianne Feinstein introduced a bill to reinstate the federal assault weapons ban, which was enacted in 1994 and expired in 2004.

  Now, there are plenty of things we could be doing to address gun violence that are overwhelmingly popular and aren’t getting done only because Republicans have decided to refuse to do anything on guns, such as closing the loophole that allows people to buy guns at gun shows or on some websites without a background check. But there is a little more room for disagreement when it comes to the assault weapons ban.

  I, for one, wanted to cosponsor Dianne’s bill right away. But we have a very strong gun culture in Minnesota. And my advisers in the state urged caution. Why be in such a rush to back the bill?

  “How am I going to feel when this happens again?” I asked. But I understood why many of my constituents felt differently. I love football. There is no reason to love football as much as I love football, but people live for their pastimes. And one popular pastime, especially in Minnesota, is target shooting with AR-15s. Who am I to say that’s any more or less valid of a hobby than watching football players give each other concussions?

  Anyway, I wanted to treat the debate with the seriousness it deserved, so even though I’d decided to support the assault weapons ban, I made sure to listen to both sides. I even visited a gun manufacturer in St. Cloud where they made AR-15s.

  It’s actually a great company. They have a terrific record of hiring veterans. But they are very much central-casting pro-gun guys. The company doesn’t make ammunition clips, just the AR-15s themselves, so I decided to start with something I thought we could maybe agree on. I asked why anyone would need a thirty-round magazine to go hunting, and the manager shook his head and said, “If anyone needs ten bullets to take down a deer…”

  It seemed like we were finding some common ground. So why, I asked, would anyone need an assault rifle to go hunting at all? And one of the guys brought up feral pigs. Apparently they run in packs, and they’re vicious. We don’t have a lot of feral pigs in Minnesota, but they’re evidently a real problem in parts of the South.

  “Has anyone ever been killed by a feral pig?” I asked.

  There was an awkward pause. Then someone said, “I heard of a guy who got bit in the leg.”

  That didn’t really seem to me like a reason to tote around an AR-15 with a thirty-round magazine, but I didn’t want to push my luck, so I asked, “Well, are they good eating? The feral pigs?”

  And one of the guys said, “If they’re young.”

  Okay, that wasn’t a story about Ted Cruz, but it was a story about how fraught the debate was over the assault weapons ban, and how I tried hard to take that debate seriously, and also you learned something I bet you didn’t know, which is that if you’re going to eat a feral pig, you should eat a young one.

  Here’s where Ted comes into the story. Back in Washington, Ted was taking absolutely no pains to listen to the other side. Instead, he was vehemently and theatrically opposing the bill with a series of fiery sermons on the Senate floor. And then one day he came up to me during a vote and said the following: “Anyone who is for the assault weapons ban is engaged in sophistry.”

  “Sophistry” is an SAT word, one I had neither seen nor heard nor spoken since I was sixteen years old. Our English teacher, Mr. Glenn, had assigned us a vocabulary book, and we were to learn three words a day, and one day “sophistry” was one of the words. Sophistry is a form of argument that is intended to be deceitful.

  I don’t think Ted knew that I was a cosponsor of Dianne’s bill. I also don’t think he knew that I knew what “sophistry” meant. Which I think is why he used the word.

  But I played along. “Why am I engaged in sophistry?”

  “Because,” Ted said, “Clinton’s own Department of Justice did a study of the assault weapons ban and concluded that it doesn’t work.”

  “No it didn’t,” I replied. “Actually, what the report said was there wasn’t enough data to reach a conclusion, because the study was conducted only two years after the ban was implemented.”

  “Just read the report,” Ted sneered in his pugnacious way (I think “pugnacious” was also one of Mr. Glenn’s vocabulary words).

  “I’ll do that,” I said with an edge of, um, truculence?

  After the vote, I took the Senate subway to my office and found Josh Riley, my Judiciary counsel. “Ted Cruz just told me that anyone who’s for the assault weapons ban is engaged in sophistry.”

  Josh, I should mention, is, like Ted, a super-whip-smart graduate of Harvard Law School. “What’s sophistry?” he asked.

  I told Josh what sophistry is, and he nodded. “What was his basis for that?”

  “He said that it was because Clinton’s Justice Department did a study that concluded that it hadn’t worked.”

  Josh frowned. “That’s not true.”
Then he proceeded to explain to me what I had already explained to Ted—that there wasn’t enough data available at the time for Clinton’s Justice Department to reach a firm conclusion. Still, I asked Josh to go find the Justice Department report and put a memo together so I could be prepared the next time I saw Ted.

  Josh went and found the Clinton Justice Department’s Impact Evaluation, which was published in 1997, fulfilling the law’s requirement that an analysis of the assault weapons ban be completed within thirty months of its enactment.

  And guess what? Josh and I were entirely right, and Ted was entirely wrong. The Clinton Justice Department wrote:

  Our best estimate is that the ban contributed to a 6.7 percent decrease in total gun murders between 1994 and 1995, beyond what would have been expected in view of ongoing crime, demographic, and economic trends. However, with only one year of post-ban data, we cannot rule out the possibility that this decrease [in gun murders] reflects chance year-to-year variation rather than a true effect of the ban.

  In other words, the early results suggested that the ban might be working, but that there wasn’t enough data to draw a definitive conclusion. Exactly what I had told Ted.

  The next time I spotted Ted on the Senate floor, I approached him and said, “Well, I guess you owe me an apology.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” I said, getting ready to hit him with some facts, “the last time we spoke, you said that anybody who is for the assault weapons ban is engaged in sophistry.”

  To which Ted replied, “No I didn’t.”

  As in a flat denial.

  Not “No? I didn’t!” Or “Really? I said that?” Or “That doesn’t sound like something I’d say.”