Word: cloakrooms
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...McCain knew the worst was happening when he came into the Senate chamber for the vote. "Gramm was standing down in the well, grabbing people and talking to them, going back into the cloakroom," he says. And it wasn't just fellow Republicans plotting against the bill. McCain and Feingold realized that some Democrats privately wanted to see the bill die. It had been easy to support in the past, when it had no chance of passing. But in the 2000 election the Democrats had become as slick as the Republicans at raising soft money; do away with...
...from 1961 to '98; in San Antonio, Texas. The first Mexican American to represent Texas, "Henry B." developed his combative style in the 1930s by boxing in illegal matches to pay his college tuition, eventually becoming a Golden Gloves champ--a skill he almost used in a Capitol Hill cloakroom on a G.O.P. colleague who called him a "pinko." In 1989 he became chairman of the powerful House Banking Committee, speaking out on the S.-and-L. scandals and Iraqi arms sales--and calling for President Bush's impeachment. Though a hero to South Texas Hispanics, Gonzalez refused...
That tendency explains why McCain is not well loved in the Republican cloakroom, where after-class feelings matter. "If he would just count to five sometimes," says a G.O.P. Senate veteran, "he would probably get a lot more done." Detractors say that's why he is never able to corral the votes to pass campaign-finance reform and why his tobacco legislation, which his committee passed by a vote of 19 to 1, never saw the President's desk. Hogwash, say allies like Feingold, who argue that without McCain, some legislation would never get as far as it does...
Wonder why Bill Bradley's former Senate colleagues have little to say about the dark-horse candidate? There's a perception in the Democratic cloakroom that anyone who publicly speaks well of him these days will pay a price. "It's been made clear to me that the things I say about Bradley that are nice are heard in Gore's office," says Delaware's Joe Biden, who may endorse Bradley. Biden isn't sweating, and the threats haven't kept Senators Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and Bob Kerrey of Nebraska from endorsing him, but other Senators feel the heat...
With their earnest comments and starchy bearing, Republican Senators have tried to make it clear how seriously they take their oath to sit in impartial judgment of a President. But in private last week, that wasn't their immediate concern. The talk in the G.O.P. cloakroom was about a more awkward judgment: What to do about Bill Clinton's State of the Union speech Tuesday night? Almost a year to the day after the Monica Lewinsky story first broke, a disgraced President is on trial in one chamber of Congress, being called a liar, a cheat and a threat...