On the Hill, It’s Budgets, Bills, Babies and Bottles

Messy doings on a recent Tuesday here:

In the Mansfield Room of the Capitol, White House and congressional negotiators can’t agree on the size of their mediation table, much less the budget. In the Hart Senate Office Building, Clinton appointees can’t remember sensitive Whitewater details during committee testimony.

And in the Cannon House Office Building, U.S. Rep. William H. Orton (D-Utah) delicately navigates his son’s rash-red bottom with Desitin and a fresh disposable. This is Junior’s third change today and it’s only 11:30 a.m.

“How do you do this so often, Will?” Pop inquires, beads of perspiration forming just below his graying hairline.

Round-faced Will II, all of 8 months, remains unfazed by Father’s machinations, his blue eyes fixed only on this day’s new visitors to the nursery that doubles as Dad’s congressional office.

This is the Congress for the ‘90s. Not only are there more babies than ever on Capitol Hill, but a new breed of congressional father is not ashamed to get his hands dirty. Roll Call newspaper says voters are sending younger representatives to Congress, noting that 30 freshmen were under 40 when elected last year. And a congressional study found that with each new freshman class, the ages of the children of members gets increasingly younger. “Approximately half of the members who have children have children under 18,” the study reports.

And their fathers want it all--new laws, new government and new ways to find time for their children.

The result has been bellwether legislation, with crucial votes missed due to new births, sick infants or even a Lamaze class.

Here, where the oratory of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster once echoed, soiled disposables are launched like minibasketballs into waste baskets, infants belch virtually on cue for eager television news magazines, raisins and dry Cheerios become surface-to-air missiles in the stately House Dining Room and offspring are toted onto the House floor to a chorus of bipartisan cooing.

“I think it’s great,” says Rep. Cleo Fields, 33, father of a 10-month-old Cleo Brandon. “I mean I’m proud to put [him] in his little stroller, roll him around and vote when the bell rings,” says the Louisiana Democrat.

In this government, Jordache jumpsuits, formula feedings and shoulder stains on herringbone jackets are de rigueur.

“I can change a diaper with my eyes shut,” boasts Republican Rep. Charles Bass, 43, a freshman from New Hampshire with two toddlers.

“Folks more these days make an effort, a conscious effort, to really be more involved in the raising of their children,” says Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles), 37. His 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Clarisa, has become proficient at, even demanding about, inserting Dad’s voting card and pushing the yay or nay button on the House floor over issues as historic as the Budget Reconciliation bill.

“I don’t know of any other release from your day-to-day pressures . . . whether it’s Bosnia or balancing the budget,” says Orton. “I mean [Will Jr.] will sit there and look at his hand for 10 minutes and figure out how it’s working and then he’ll pick things up. You get into that and everything else is gone--it all disappears out of your mind. The stress goes.”

Orton, a first-time father at 47, tries to turn his office into a nursery two days a week.

“I have a pretty strong parental drive that is inside of me,” says the former tax law attorney. To make it work, his assistants try to schedule in-office duties such as staff briefings or constituent meetings for those days so Dad can watch Will and work at the same time. An automatic baby swing is at the ready, and from the ceiling of a private entrance hangs a bouncy chair. This is Will’s favorite and when the door is open, passersby catch glimpses of a tiny whirling dervish.

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The rationales these new-age fathers offer up are the kind of bromides that would have brought a smirk to the face of any self-respecting politician a generation ago.

“These are different times now. We tend to forget the impact that the women’s movement has had on the whole [family] structure,” says Bass, who takes over meal preparation and feeding of a son and daughter when he is home. “I think if my relationship existed 30 years ago, people would have thought that I was a little odd.”

For Orton and others, the intense schedule borne of the GOP “revolution” this year plays havoc with fathering--and, for that matter, mothering--in the 104th Congress. Many make do, snatching quality time on long flights back to the district or gambling on civility with an armload carried into a committee hearing. It can be hit and miss.

When Becerra suddenly was faced with offering an amendment to an immigration bill in the Judiciary Committee, he handed off 3-month-old Olivia to Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.). She immediately burst into tears. “I took her back and I calmed her down and I said my piece,” Becerra recalls.

When Rep. Tim J. Roemer, 41, plans dinner with sons Patrick, 2 1/2, and Matthew, 1, it may be in spite of the setting.

“They’re constantly throwing food in the House Dining Room,” says the Indiana Democrat with bemused resignation. “There’s supposed to be a certain decorum, almost an august quality, when you bring members into the dining room with George Washington’s portrait hanging there and the blue velvet walls. And when you see ice cream dripping from the walls and raisins stuck to the ceiling it sort of takes away from the decorum.”

Fields, whose wife and child spend most of their time in Baton Rouge, places a call at least once a day and has Cleo Brandon put on the line. “He recognizes my voice now. He listens to me over the phone,” Fields says.

One of the most poignant circumstances on the Hill are the tea parties hosted by Dorothy Moran, 4-year-old daughter of Virginia Democrat Rep. James P. Moran, 50, of Alexandria. The youngest of five children, last year Dorothy was found to have a malignant brain tumor. Three months of just-finished radiation therapy seem to have controlled the tumor, says Moran press aide Kathleen Lash.

One way Dad and daughter find time is for a make-believe tea, held in the Cannon House Office Building where Moran works. “She sets up the tea parties in his office with flower arrangements and sends out invitations to those who she wants to attend the parties. And all break away and enjoy tea with Dorothy,” Lash says. “She is just 100% a little lady.”

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The Republican House leadership has, with poor results, tried to accommodate its child-bearing members by instilling “family friendly” predictability into an ambitious lawmaking schedule.

“With all due respect to the leaders, there is nothing family friendly about this Congress, except for the legislation,” a tearful--and recently divorced--U.S. Rep. Jim Bunn (R-Ore.), 39, told the Hill newspaper. “How much can you take it not seeing your 3-year-old?”

Such strain was the reason Becerra and his wife, Dr. Carolina Reyes, took the drastic step of uprooting from Los Angeles--where the Harvard-educated Reyes sacrificed a teaching post and medical practice--and moving to a small townhome blocks off Capitol Hill.

“The elasticity in our marriage was getting to run a little thin,” Becerra explains. Reyes, her career as an obstetrician and gynecologist interrupted, now job-searches in Washington.

But the alternative, these dads say, of prolonged separation from wife and child just isn’t worth it. “It really rips in your gut when you hear your wife say, ‘Well, Clarisa was asking for you,’ ” Becerra says.

Orton tells the story of a veteran congressman who “came up to me with tears in his eyes and said, ‘When I first came here, my children were this size and I spent all of my time in meetings. And I didn’t spend time raising my kids. My family fell apart. I got divorced. My children were raised by someone else. I don’t even know them. And now all I have is this job . . . ‘ He [told me], ‘You’re doing the right thing.’ ”