Lawmakers Face Last Roll Call, Seek New Role

With Congress poised to recess through the rest of the year, Reps. Anthony Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills), Carlos Moorhead (R-Glendale) and other retiring lawmakers have begun the humbling transformation from congressman to regular guy.

“Everybody who works in Congress or serves in Congress knows this day comes,” said David Joergenson, a longtime Moorhead aide who is hustling for a new job himself.

“It comes sooner for some, later for others. When it does finally come, there’s no denying it: It feels like you’re being dropkicked out the door, right into a snow heap.”

Beilenson’s and Moorhead’s successors will not be selected until Nov. 5. The two Californians do not have to vacate their offices until mid-December. They remain on the payroll until January. Yet both know their names will soon be scratched off their office doors and their legacies will be all that is left.

Sitting in an office full of cardboard boxes in one of the final days of his final session, Beilenson compared his exit to the bittersweet feeling at high school graduation time.

“You’ve got a couple of hundred good friends whom you’ve bonded with to some extent or another,” he said. “Some stick around the hometown. Others are going off to different colleges or jobs. Basically, it’s a period in your life where you won’t have this group of people around you anymore. That’s a feeling of loss.”

Some retired lawmakers never really move on. Even with their voting privileges gone, they enter the House floor, bask in the House sauna and park in the House garage. They cling to those days in office like they were yesterday.

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“No matter what you do after Congress, you feel like it isn’t as important as what you were doing,” said former Rep. James C. Corman, 75, a lobbyist who represented part of the San Fernando Valley until he was defeated in 1980.

“When you’re a congressman, you are talking to people all the time--from two lobbyists in your office to 100 schoolkids back home. Then suddenly nobody wants to talk to you. Your wife may want to talk to you, but she may not.”

Former Rep. Don Edwards, who retired in 1994 after 34 years representing the Bay Area, said he still tunes into C-SPAN occasionally to watch his old colleagues debating an appropriations bill or rejiggering an environmental regulation. Sitting in his living room, he sometimes wants to bellow out an argument of his own.

“Men and women need activity. They need responsibility. They need people counting on them. They need the phone to ring,” said Edwards, 80, who is jotting his memoirs despite eyesight so poor that he cannot read what he writes. “Unless you’re careful, the phone stops ringing and you don’t have anything to do.”

There is plenty to do, of course; former members are working as lobbyists, lawyers, raspberry farmers, obstetricians and Mormon missionaries. The U.S. Assn. of Former Members of Congress puts on an annual “Life After Congress” seminar and helps former lawmakers line up teaching opportunities, volunteer work and overseas stints as election observers.

Although neither Moorhead, 74, nor Beilenson, 64, has firm retirement plans, both say they intend to keep active after turning off the lights at their offices on Capitol Hill.

“I think of myself as a congressman,” said Beilenson, who has held the title since Jan. 3, 1977. “It will be different not being such a person. But I’ve had the opportunity to be that for so long. It won’t bother me to have a few years at the end of my life where I’m doing something different.”

Moorhead said he has been humbled by the many members who have quietly come and gone during his 24 years in Congress.

“Thy don’t remember anyone 10 seconds after they’re gone around here,” he said. “The institution is bigger than the individuals that made it up. The institution keeps rolling along. It has processed thousands of members over the years, 435 at a time. A handful of them become president. Some become senators. But most of them just go quietly home.”

That’s exactly what Moorhead and his wife plan to do. They have sold their townhouse in McLean, Va., and bought a place in Glendale, blocks from where Moorhead grew up. Moorhead says he may take a job in the legal profession but does not want to line up anything until his term officially ends.

Beilenson and his wife intend to stay put in Washington, although the job offers have not exactly been flowing in. He sent his resume over to the White House in case President Clinton wins a second term and has a position to fill. Besides a new career, he looks forward to more time for his family and more time for himself.

“I have a huge list of books I want to read and you begin to worry whether you can fit them all into what remains in your life,” Beilenson said. “It takes me a long time in a half an hour or an hour a night to finish a book. Now I can finish a couple books a week instead of one a month, and make some real progress on my list.”

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Although neither man leaves behind a huge body of legislation bearing his name, both Beilenson and Moorhead made their own marks on Congress. Only history will tell whether they were in indelible ink.

On the floor of the House one night last week, colleagues paid tribute to Moorhead and Beilenson, commending them for staying above the increasingly bitter partisan fray.

“Tony and Carlos represent a special type of member who is willing to work with colleagues of any political persuasion in order to get good things done here in the Congress,” said Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-San Bernardino). “Each has weathered some criticism within their respective political parties for this tendency toward supporting good government.”

Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas) said the “Moorhead-Beilenson spirit” of compromise needs to be carried on long after the two lawmakers are gone.

“That spirit of bipartisanship, when it is possible, should continue,” he said.

Beilenson wrote the legislation creating the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. He chaired the Intelligence Committee during the Bush administration--something he could not talk about much then and still can’t. He earned a reputation among colleagues as a free-thinking, straight-arrow type who turned down money from political action committees even as election campaigns grew into spending sprees.

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Moorhead spent much of his career in the minority, unable to advance legislation of his own. But he worked behind the scenes on a range of technical issues that rarely grab the headlines, like energy policy, copyright law and cable TV regulation.

Moorhead amassed one of the most conservative voting records in the House, yet this old-school politician considered Democrats his friends.

His genial nature ran him afoul of the new House leadership, who overlooked him for two coveted chairmanships and prompted him to call it quits. Moorhead does leave behind the California Institute, a bipartisan group that he helped found. Its aim is to get the state’s lawmakers to work across political fault lines for the good of California.

“I think I’ve gotten some bills through that have been very helpful, but there’s very few members who are remembered,” Moorhead said. “Some people have buildings named after them. There’s a Rayburn building and a Cannon building and a Longworth building (named after former House Speakers Sam Rayburn of Texas, Joseph Cannon of Illinois and Nicholas Longworth of Ohio). There will be people who will remember some of what I’ve done, but I don’t expect to, or ever want to, become a household name.”

No, he and the other retirees have already resigned themselves to the fact that somebody else is going to plop down in their office chairs soon, doing what they did for so long.