The Senator and the Priest

by Andrew M. Greeley

  The vast mound which was Richard “Poor Richard” Yardley from Oklahoma rose unsteadily at his desk. Dressed in western boots, a snow white “Western” suit that Cowboys might wear to court pretty ladies from the East, a string tie, but not wearing his cowboy hat, Poor Richard started to drink at noon every day, was incoherent at the Thursday Republican caucus lunch, and slept most of the time when he was in the Senate chamber. He was a figure of fun even among his fellow Republicans, but he still had one percent of the vote in the United States Senate.

  “The Senator has already finished his allotted time, Senator.”

  “I demand a Senator’s right to respond.”

  “Two minutes, Senator.”

  I remained standing.

  “These illegal criminals belong in jail, that’s where they belong. Why are we giving them illiterate vermin the right to come into our country, take our people’s jobs, send American money home to their vermin families in Mexico, and ruin our country? We should horsewhip them all and send them back to where they belong, that’s what we should do. We should shoot them on sight at the border, that’s what we should do. If we don’t protect our borders, this won’t be America any more.”

  He babbled on for five more minutes—the C-SPAN camera grinding away and the members growing restless. I wondered if anyone from Oklahoma was watching. Would they be ashamed of him or proud? Bobby Bill Roads who had doubtless poured millions into his campaigns would surely be very proud.

  The President Pro Tem touched the handle of his gavel to his desk, a gentle hint. Poor Richard became more incoherent on the subject of vermin, but did not take the hint.

  Finally, after half way through eternity, the President Pro Tem spoke up.

  “The Senator from Oklahoma has exceeded his time. Will he yield?”

  “Poor Richard” simply collapsed into his chair and fell asleep.

  “Does the Senator from Illinois wish to respond?”

  He didn’t.

  “There being no other speakers, we will proceed by unanimous consent to voting on this amendment.”

  No one requested a quorum call. The amendment passed by nine votes, what we had expected. Was it all a charade? Was the whole long afternoon and evening a waste of time because everyone knew the bill would pass by five or six votes, many of them reluctant?

  We voted and went on to the next amendment which would mandate health examinations prior to the awarding of green cards.

  “These people are sick,” the supporting senator argued. “We can’t give them permanent residence unless we are sure they won’t bring contagious diseases into our country and infect our people.”

  The research showed that, on average, the immigrants were more healthy than average Americans. However, everyone knew that wasn’t true. Nonethless the amendment was doomed because it didn’t have the votes. It lost by five votes—the size of the majority that the two leaders had created against the will of their respective caucuses.

  A page, Asian, pretty, with braces, brought me a note from the Minority Leader. He wanted to see me in the cloakroom.

  “You did good, Tommy.”

  “Thank you, Senator.”

  “Sorry you had to put up with ‘Poor Richard.’”

  “He’s a member of the United States Senate. He has the right to be heard, poor dear man, as my wife would say.”

  “As does the Senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.”

  He laughed.

  “I figured you and he wouldn’t get along when I put you on the committee. It’s so easy for those guys to sell out to anyone with stripes and ribbons. They’ll be more careful about who they send up to the committee now that they know they have you to contend with … How do you see the Conference Committee on this bill?”

  “There’ll be two of us from the two houses on the committee and three of them. We’re down six to four. And we hold all the cards thanks to the White House.”

  “Right, they want immigration legislation and they know—or at least they’ve been told by my friend across the aisle—that they’re going to get the legislation only if they can hold the Democrats in both houses. So if our guys hang tough the Conference will report out mostly our bill.”

  “An opportunity to be seized.”

  “Would you mind seizing it?”

  “Not at all if you want me to.”

  “You’ll have to spar all through the summer up to recess with the nativists.”

  “I’m prepared to do that.”

  “Everyone will see the handwriting on the wall when you hang tough. So they’ll probably only schedule a meeting every week. Not all of them will come either.”

  “It should be interesting. Poor Richard will be there?”

  He grinned. “No way, but guys that are sober most of the time with the same ideas.”

  “Will the White House stick with us?”

  “They’re notorious for cutting the ground out from under us. This time my friend across the aisle will probably hold their feet to the fire.”

  The Immigration Reform Bill passed at 11:55. Many of the Senators had left for the airport. We still had our six-vote majority. I went home exhausted and depressed. So much fighting, so much fooling around for a law that would not help very much, but was better than nothing. That is the burden of democracy, I told myself.

  My wife, with a gender-discrimination case before the court, one in which she had little confidence because of mistakes at lower levels, was sound asleep. I didn’t bother her.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE FIRST meeting of our Conference Committee was a rhetorical slugfest. The chair of the House Delegation, a Congresswoman from Texas, was Ms. Anita Bell Landry, a true, artificially blond southern Belle. She was a mean, snippy woman with a giggly, passive manner which hid both her tenacity and her acute dislike of “our little brown brothers” as she called them—in the presence of Representative José Maria Espinoza from California. My chairman from the Senate was my old friend Hat McCoy who treated her with the deference a southern gentleman owes to a Texas Belle—without conceding anything in the argument.

  “The Senate will have to concede many points to the House if this bill is ever to get out of conference.”

  “Not to be offensive, ma’am,” Hat responded, “we’re not fixing to give up much.”

  “That amendment Senator Moran introduced must be deleted and replaced with our text. We simply won’t report out a bill that does not fine those who have come to our country illegally.”

  “No way,” I said simply.

  Most of the time I simply sat and listened while the immigrant haters and the immigrant supporters, including Representative Espinoza, traded insults. My friend Hat maintained a brave front though I didn’t think that many of his actual voters were Latino. He was there because the Majority Leader wanted a bill he could get to the President.

  Vile woman that she was, Ms. Landry knew the same thing. We would spend spring and summer sparring for the benefit of our respective constituencies both in Congress and around the country and then end up with legislation that had to please Senate Democrats for a change. Everyone around the table knew that, more or less, but the losers wanted to go back and tell everyone that they had fought the good fight.

  I began to draft the early chapters of my book Political Show Trials, under the guise of taking copious notes at the discussion.

  “At least you found something useful to do,” Dermot protested as our entourage returned to the Dirksen building. The entourage routinely included Dermot, Pat Coogan, a recent product of the Golden Dome, and Roberta Becker, our new assistant press secretary, a disturbingly gorgeous young woman—model beauty—three years out of Columbia. I noted the look of sympathy in her eyes when I had to tangle with the Texas Belle. Sympathy is always welcome, especially from a beautiful woman, but, I told myself, this is someone of whom you should be a little wary. She might develop a crush on you.

  Ordinarily I ignored the sallies of La Belle, partly beca
use I’m a gentleman (usually) and partly because if I were rude the word would leak out and there’d be trouble with the media, not that as summer wore on I cared much about the media. However, one day a riposte slipped out, one which had surged up like a geyser from my Irish sub-basement.

  “I wouldn’t be so hard on your little brown brothers, Congresswoman. The way they assimilate to American society in three generations they’ll be voting Republican and joining country clubs.”

  “Not my country club,” she snapped back, as Hat and José and my staff guffawed.

  That story would get around. It wouldn’t hurt our side, but it would hurt theirs.

  So we finally adjourned, having agreed on nothing.

  A couple of TV cameras and some bored reporters were waiting outside.

  “Any progress, Senator?” someone asked.

  Robbie tried to protect me by hustling me down the corridor. Mother Hen, I thought.

  “Not one bit.”

  “Do you expect any during this session of Congress?”

  “If the White House is serious, we’ll start seeing progress a couple of days before the August recess. The Senate has given them pretty much the bill they wanted. The question now is how badly they want it.”

  On a dull news day, that might be a useful clip for our side.

  A critic of the media and the political game, I had nonetheless succumbed to its techniques. I was a trial lawyer, however, and I love to score points for our side.

  “Saw you on C-SPAN,” Chris said when I dragged myself back from my lunch with Hat in the Senate dining room. We had discussed a bill we proposed to bring to the floor in January, a can’t-miss bill for both of us. We were going to follow the advice of the Supreme Court and forbid municipalities to condemn private property so that they might zone them for shopping malls and other income-producing enterprises. Only the lethargy of both houses had delayed it this long. It would certainly help Hat in his reelection bid. I hoped for a Democratic majority, but I feared we’d have to wait several more years for that turn of the tide. The high tide, King Alfred cried, the high tide and the turn! But we also needed Republicans like Hat who were not “extreme” Christians.

  “Debil made me say it,” I muttered.

  “You’re getting a reputation for quotable one-liners,” she said.

  “That’s bad?”

  “So far that’s good. I am kind of afraid what you might say when you lose your temper.”

  “I have a long record for self-control, too much maybe.”

  “I also heard about your remark about little brown brothers voting Republican.”

  “That was bad?”

  “That was naughty, but it was good … When was the last time you really blew up?”

  “Probably back in high school. Maybe junior high.”

  She probably wondered what kind of a freak her Senator was.

  “What do you think of Robbie?”

  “Competent … Perhaps a little too protective … Maternal.”

  “I was afraid of that. I’ll deal with it.”

  “Carefully, I hope. She seems a little fragile.”

  “A lot fragile.”

  That night Marymarg, as worn down by Beltway heat as I was, and the kids and I discussed our plans for the August recess. To our surprise the kids were not interested in going back to Hermosillo. They were tired of the heat in Washington. They wanted to spend the month with their cousins in Grand Beach.

  “Swim!”

  “Water ski!”

  “Sail!”

  This was good news for us. Security questions had been raised about a United States Senator and his family living as a private citizen in a Mexican city. They would be easy targets for kidnappers. A luxurious beach resort with lots of guards might be acceptable.

  Grand Beach sounded fine to me too.

  “What about your Spanish?”

  “There are kids in our classes who speak Spanish,” Mary Rose informed us. “They laugh at our accents, but we get tons of practice with them.”

  “What did you make of that?” Mary Margaret asked me as we were getting ready for bed.

  “They took counsel among themselves and decided that their parents needed time at the lake.”

  She chuckled.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised at all. Soon they will outnumber us.”

  “Already they do.”

  As June turned into July, the only other exercise was the first important meeting of the Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on the appointment of Judge Marsha Barnard of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to the Court of Appeals of the Fifth Circuit. The senior Democrat on Judiciary gave me a stack of her opinions.

  “She is to the right of Catherine the Great,” he confided. “If we cause enough trouble, she won’t even get out of committee. I don’t think she has anything near sixty votes. If her hearing record is bad enough, we could mount a filibuster if we had to.”

  “Is she an African-American?”

  “How did you guess that? She’s also a born-again Christian. Will you handle the religious issues in her rulings?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “We have to protect the wall between Church and State. She doesn’t believe in it.”

  “The wall is a metaphor, Senator. One doesn’t base good law on metaphor.”

  “You’re in favor of prayer in public schools?” he said, looking puzzled.

  “My kids don’t go to public schools. I’m not sure that prayer makes them any better than they would be if they were ‘publics’ but it wouldn’t make them any worse either.”

  “You want vouchers for Catholic schools?” he asked even more astonished.

  “You bet I do. I want freedom of choice for minority parents. Catholic schools are the only ones in the country that provide that choice for most of them. If a bill ever comes before the Senate, I’d vote for it. To hell with the ACLU and the AFT.”

  “I don’t necessarily disagree with you, Tommy. If you don’t want to tackle her on these matters, we’ll let you do gender.”

  “I’ll look over her rulings.”

  I realized as soon as I read the first couple of them that I’d have no problem at all. The poor woman was articulate, indeed very articulate. But she was out of the main stream of American legal convictions and apparently didn’t know she was—a Clarence Thomas in the making.

  There is a solemnity about the hearings of the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate. It is not exactly as portentous as sessions of the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition (in my imagination, never having appeared before that tribunal)—no crimson robes, no holy water, no incense. Yet the wood panels, the red hangings, the solemn faces of the Senators all imply that nothing the Senate does is more important than approving a lifetime appointment from one of our separated powers to another separated power. Such a hearing focuses two hundred years of American constitutionalism into single issue on which the survival of the framers’ delicate balances may be put in jeopardy. Senators take themselves seriously. All right, we Senators take ourselves very seriously, but never more than when we consider judicial appointments, especially of someone on the inside track to the Supreme Court, an institution whose members take themselves even more seriously than we do.

  For which God forgive them, comments my irrepressible wife.

  After her initial description of her life—welfare poor up to a law degree—we began our questions gingerly. The other side tried to emphasize her “American grit and determination.” We emphasized her rulings. It was clear to everyone in the room that she wasn’t very bright, probably not even bright enough to be serving on the district court. She was someone’s Republican token appointment, African-American skin but not much legal ability.

  The senior Democrat had questioned her about equal rights for women and affirmative action. She responded by asking whether he wanted to put men and women in the same “restrooms” and whether he thought black children were not as smart as white chi
ldren.

  I began as cordially as I could. “I want to ask you some questions, your honor, about Religion …”

  “I am proud to be a Christian, Senator, very proud. My God sustained me all through my education. I am not likely to turn my back on Him.”

  She was a tall, slender, gray-haired woman, tense and charming before the grand inquisitors. She responded to our questions in the manner of a kindly schoolmarm explaining simple matters to a class of likeable but not very bright junior high boys.

  “An admirable sentiment, your honor, with which I agree completely. But I had more in mind what we call in this country the separation between Church and State …”

  “This is a Christian country, Senator. Always has been, please God, always will be. You can’t separate God from daily life …”

  “Are you saying, your honor, that there is no such thing as separation of Church and State in the Constitution?”

  “Don’t you have a chaplain in the Senate? Doesn’t he pray over you every day? Does he separate God from the daily life of the Senate?”

  “You believe, if I read your decisions correctly, that such prayers should occur every day in all our schools?”

  “How can praying ever hurt anyone? What harm can it do to children?”

  Up to that point she had answered me in a manner that African-American people around the country, especially women, would have approved enthusiastically. She was one of their own. She had taught them in school.

  “Won’t it offend the children who don’t believe in God or whose God is not the Christian God?”

  “This is a Christian country, Senator. People who come to it realize that they have to make certain adjustments.”

  That sentence would do her in. She had just breached the wall. I could imagine the fury of the New York Times editorial board.

  “There are, as you know, Judge Barnard, many divisions even among Christians. Some parents might want a prayer like those they experience in their Pentecostal church and some like those they have heard in their Quaker meeting halls. Would not Congress and the courts have serious difficulty trying to regulate the kind of prayers which would occur in the classroom?”