11 New Senators Get Briefing on Rules--Including Ones They Vowed to Break

They came and they saw, but at the end of a long and exhausting day, it was unclear who would conquer whom.

Eleven newly elected senators, including California Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, arrived on Capitol Hill on Monday for “freshman orientation”--a nuts and bolts crash course on how to perform their new jobs under the Senate’s labyrinthine list of rules.

“I’m a little overwhelmed right at this moment,” Feinstein said as she found herself caught in the eye of a storm of microphones, cameras and jostling reporters.

“I’m still trying to understand how the Senate works,” she added plaintively. Breaking the legislative gridlock she campaigned against in her victory over incumbent Republican Sen. John Seymour, “may be more of a job than I reckoned on,” she conceded at the end of a day of meetings and briefings at which she was introduced to the Senate’s telephone book-length list of rules.

“It (the rule book) seems to be based on the Senate as a deliberative body rather than one that passes legislation,” she said.

The 11 newcomers, who include four women, one African-American and one American Indian, got to the Senate by campaigning for change and by promising to cut through the parliamentary red tape to deal with problems such as the economy and budget deficit.

But before breaking the rules, they first had to learn what they were--all 1,608 pages of them. And before balancing the budget, they had to learn how to pay their staffs, write legislation and find their way around an institution so tradition-bound that the desks in the Senate chamber still sport quill pens and inkwells.

Boxer, a former House member elected to fill the seat left open by the retirement of Sen. Alan Cranston, said that moving up to a Senate that now has six women members, including Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.), its first African-American woman, was “a very special moment.”

Now “it looks more like America,” she said, referring to Braun and Colorado Democrat Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the first American Indian to be elected to the Senate.