For Most of State’s Representatives, a Miserable Experience

Rep. Jane Harman is looking for a cup of coffee and a place to sit down. The congressional cafeteria is locked, another reminder that she and everybody else affiliated with this lame-duck House are not supposed to be here.

The curtain is finally falling on the 105th Congress, bringing an end to the Torrance Democrat’s six-year congressional career. Christmas is one week away but it doesn’t feel like it. And this surreal grand finale of impeachment, war and surprise confessions of marital infidelity is makin1730150401it considerably easier for her to leave.

“I will miss my place at the legislative table,” said Harman, who gave up her South Bay seat for an unsuccessful gubernatorial run. “I sure as heck won’t miss the partisanship or the food.”

Impeachments do not happen in a vacuum and this one has touched the careers and lives of California’s oddly diverse congressional delegation in countless ways. The president’s tribulations have distinguished some lawmakers from the crowded 52-member pack and put others in political peril. But all in all, most would agree, this has been one miserable experience.

It made Rep. Zoe Lofgren gain weight. (“This has been a very stressful time,” the San Jose Democrat lamented. “I sort of ate my way through it.”) It came while Rep. Mary Bono (R-Palm Springs) was moving out of a Georgetown house with too many memories. It fell on the day Harman was supposed to be mourning the death of her father at a memorial service that was planned a month ago. Who knew?

From Obscurity to Spotlight

It elevated freshman Rep. James E. Rogan from obscure Glendale Republican to eloquent proponent of impeachment and a likely member of the House prosecution team when, as is expected, the case against Clinton proceeds to a Senate trial.

It made an endangered species of Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-San Diego) who defied the will of many of his constituents to stand with his party against the president. It gave a last gasp of celebrity to retirees like Rep. Frank Riggs (R-Windsor), whose delay before declaring for impeachment won him a spot on NBC-TV’s “Dateline.”

But even those politicians who accept the adage that any press is good press recognize that this chapter in history is not playing well on the West Coast--a universe unto itself, alienated from Washington by distance if not world view.

“I come here to Washington and find people on a different reality plane and then I fly home and normal people say, ‘What are those nuts doing?’ ” said Lofgren, a staunch Clinton defender on the House Judiciary Committee, which approved the articles of impeachment.

The Washington that Californians are tuning into now is a city tied in knots and stripped to its underwear, nakedly partisan and barely holding on to the decorum that usually masks seething hostilities. What viewers saw on Friday likely will confirm everything they hate most about the federal city--gridlock and head-banging in a forum of extremes as alive in the California delegat1768910368as it is in the greater House. The state’s delegation, currently composed of 29 Democrats and 23 Republicans, includes committed liberals, hard-core conservatives and a group of moderates in between.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), one of the president’s most strident defenders, practically accused the GOP of overthrowing the government. “A Republican coup d’etat,” she called it in her floor speech Friday, “extremist, radical anarchy . . . driven by . . . one of the most despicable actions ever taken by the Congress of the United States.”

The Republicans reared back in apparent horror at such talk, asserting that they were only trying to uphold the law. And Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-San Diego), a former Navy fighter pilot shot down over Vietnam, broke down in tears while asserting that U.S. soldiers in the Persian Gulf would not be harmed by the impeachment of their commander in chief.

“I worried about getting back to my carrier alive,” he said, wearing a Space Shuttle tie. “They don’t care what’s going on here. They want this over, too.”

Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento) closed his House career with an appeal for both sides to end the cycle of attack, revenge and recrimination that seemed this week to have exploded.

“This is the final moment of my 20-year career . . . and it is by far the saddest one,” Fazio said.

No one listened.

Lawmakers Tired, Surly, Underfed

That all of this played out just one week before Christmas made it all the stranger. Food service on Capitol Hill was curtailed because Congress is usually out of session this time of year, so lawmakers were not only tired and surly but underfed.

Staff members whispered about canceled vacation plans. One aide said that she no longer has the energy to fly home for Christmas. All the while, the debate that would change no one’s mind droned on with historic rhetoric that, in most cases, failed to soar.

One California staff member sat in a lonely Capitol coffee shop eating a doughnut and talking about how rock-bottom mean-spirited everything felt. “We either all need to get drunk together,” he said glumly, “or the good Lord needs to reach down and whack us up the side of the head.”