It’s a Thursday in December, and the halls of Congress are pretty quiet. You’re just as likely to see a staffer carrying a Crock-pot to a holiday party as you are an elected official.
On the floor of the United States Senate, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, aka the Senate President Pro Tempore, aka the person third in line to the presidency, gavels lawmakers into session. After eight terms in Congress, the 82-year-old is preparing to leave this institution.
As the current longest serving member of the U.S. Senate, it’s fair to say Leahy is an institution himself. He arrived here at 34 years old, and since then, he’s moved up in the world. Literally — from a windowless basement office in the Russell Senate Office Building to one on the fourth floor.
That’s where a smattering of staffers still work. They sit at desks in rooms connected by a long hallway.
The rooms are in various states of deconstruction. In one, nails poke from a bare wall where Leahy’s own photographs used to hang. In another, cardboard boxes stack up, ready to be shipped to Leahy’s archive at the University of Vermont. In a third are posters with images of Leahy in previous terms, made up specially for a farewell party.
As Senate President Pro Tem, Leahy also has an office on the first floor of the U.S. Capitol. It’s situated in the Brumidi Corridors, which are hallways decorated with elaborate fresco paintings. The murals of cherubs, animals, plants and stars arc over the shiny, blue-and-tan tile floors.
Inside the office is a Christmas tree and a roaring fire. I sit down with Leahy to hear about his impending retirement, and what he’s going to miss: the people he’s served with, the classified briefings, the complexities of issues like agriculture, passing legislation. Not to mention this office — he has a clear view of the Washington Monument, and we sit beneath a giant, sparkling chandelier that he jokes about taking home with him.
“But all of that is overshadowed by the fact that we’re looking forward to being back home and having our own schedule,” Leahy says.
I ask him what he imagines it will be like to wake up and not be a senator.
“I’ll say, ‘You mean, I don't have to be at that 7a.m. meeting?’” he says. “I can sit around in my pajamas and my cup of coffee, and watch the news? Go work out, and then whatever work I have to do, I do at my own leisure. You walk around with these things that get updated all day long, schedule cards” — he pulls out two small white cards from inside the breast of his suit jacket — “and you live by them.”
For decades, Leahy’s days have been full of things like committee hearings, walking the long hallways beneath the Capitol, speaking with the press, attending ceremonies, flying back and forth to Vermont and abroad … all while wearing some combination of jacket, button down and tie. (These days, he’s also sporting a pair of comfy sneakers.)
But that’ll all be over soon, and then Leahy can trade in his power suit for a wetsuit — he says he’s really looking forward to scuba diving with his wife Marcelle. He shows me a photograph of the two of them from a previous trip.
“She's the one in pink,” he clarifies.
He does have to wait, though, until the hip he broke over the summer heals. After two surgeries and a 31-day-stay in the hospital, he returned to Congress in a wheelchair. Now he’s walking with a cane.
“They want my hip totally healed before, just because of the obvious motion,” Leahy says. “I said, ‘Well then hurry up and heal.’ Because we love doing that.”
Before he calls it quits, Leahy has one major piece of business left. Senate Republicans and Democrats have disagreed on the proportion of defense versus domestic spending in an omnibus bill to fund the government, funding which technically runs out on Friday.
“Now, we Democrats do agree with our Republican colleagues, that inflation threatens the national security,” Leahy said last week in a speech on the Senate floor. “We all agree on that. But non-defense programs face an equal threat and demand an equal response because of inflation.”
On Tuesday, Leahy’s office announced he and other leaders have reached consensus on a framework agreed upon by both parties, as well as both the House and Senate.
In his floor speech last week, Leahy said he stayed the previous several weekends to be available for negotiations.
“‘Cause if we don't do it, we're going to have a continuing resolution at last year's level, with no adjustments for inflation,” he said. “And the real life consequences that entails.”
Whether or not the bill passes, by noontime on Jan. 3, it won’t be Leahy’s job any longer.
Then he says he and Marcelle need to sell their Virginia home of 45 years, finally clean out the basement there, and make their way back home to Vermont, where they’ll be moving into a Burlington apartment by the lake.
There they’ll have some time to reflect on where they’ve been for the past half century.
“The memories that we have, Marcelle and I are looking forward to time we can just slow down and say, ‘Oh, do you remember that? Oh, yes, we went — wasn't that fun?’ You know, we can speak in shorthand about these things. But now we can sit and relish them… And go scuba diving.”
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