Power, Influence, Loneliness, Divorce Legislators Find The Grind, Not The Glamor, Takes A Toll

Day 30 of a 60-day legislative session, and it’s raining. As usual.

It’s early in the week, and some Spokane lawmakers don’t even know if they can look forward to going home for the weekend. They may be working.

The legislative calendar is full of minutiae, from regulation of turkey raffles to taxation of hard cider. Not exactly the stuff of dreams and headlines.

Many lawmakers started their days with breakfast meetings and they won’t stop until making the rounds at several evening receptions, which even with free food and booze are still duty calls.

Then it’s back to a rented bed, more than 300 miles from home.

The Legislature is a place many of them fought hard to get to, and will probably work hard to come back to in November. Yet it’s also a place that can look a lot more important than it really is, and take a heavier toll on lawmakers’ personal lives than it should.

Of 11 married legislators representing the Spokane area over the last four years, five have divorced while in office: former representatives Todd Mielke and George Orr; Republican Sens. James West and Bob McCaslin, and Democratic Rep. Dennis Dellwo.

“There’s a Spokane disease,” said West. “You get grumpy. It’s the loneliness. The later it gets in the session the worse it is.”

Like his colleagues, West is quick to say he feels privileged to be here and lawmakers don’t have any corner on hardship. “If I was a submariner in the Navy I’d be gone six months with no contact. There are a lot of people who travel a lot and have remote assignments. Lots of wives put up with worse.”

But long winter nights in Olympia are longer for East Side lawmakers. For many, home is a rented apartment, a converted garage, a trailer, a room in a house full of other people.

While some of their West Side colleagues are able to sit down to dinner with their families in their own homes, East Siders are stuck in Olympia with another rainy winter night to kill.

Sometimes West goes to the movies. McCaslin plays two-bit poker with friends and lobbyists. Rep. Jean Silver, R-Spokane, hangs out at the condo she shares with lobbyist Rebecca Bogard.

Rep. Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, a single parent, goes home every night to her 4-year-old son in a rented house in Lacey.

Although Brown is single, she doesn’t date. “Almost everything would be a conflict of interest here, and I’m never home in Spokane. So I just see it as a trade-off.”

Every night there are several receptions to choose from, hosted by lobbyists offering free food and drink. “I had to work hard at not drinking in Olympia,” said former Rep. Orr.

Despite the rumors and legends, most say the Olympia nightlife is toned way down from the rowdiness of years past.

More typical these days are the weekly Karoke sessions at an Olympia bar, well attended by lobbyists, lawmakers and legislative staff.

“You don’t see the drinking, the guys running around with younger women. It’s not the club atmosphere it once was. It’s more professional,” McCaslin said.

“In the old days you could be a 400-pound drunk up here, with all the free dinners and booze, but those days are over.”

Now lobbyists are required to report their meals and gifts, including the names of lawmakers entertained and the amount of the check.

Then there’s the ever-more critical press, which sees politicians’ private lives as fair game. And very little is private in Olympia.

“You can’t even go out to breakfast with your mother without some lobbyist coming over and butting in and talking to you about something,” Orr said. “You’re a politician so you figure you need to talk to this guy instead of telling him to go to hell.

“That gets real old real quick.”

Legislators are at the center of an echo chamber of gossip among and about them: Whose kid is in the hospital, who just got divorced, whose custody battle is getting ugly, what someone said about someone else, who’s on the wagon and who fell off.

Then there’s the work itself. “It’s certainly not as glamorous as it looks,” Brown said.

For every day spent in debate on high-profile issues, many more are spent grubbing with details.

Rep. Eugene Prince, R-Thornton, thinks the quality of the legislative process has deteriorated, even as lawmaking has become more demanding than ever.

There were 11 registered lobbyists in Olympia when Prince worked his first legislative session in 1959 as a clerk in the bill room. Now there are more than 1,000, with about 100 lobbyists actively working the process.

That means more meetings, more legislation, more demands. “You don’t get a lot of time to yourself to really think things over,” Prince said. “I really believe we need to slow things up and take a look at what we are doing.

“We are into sound-bite legislation.”

Dellwo knows too well how hard the work can be, and how high a price lawmakers can pay.

In 1993, he remembers giving every waking hour as chairman of the House Health Care Committee to passage of the Health Care Reform Act.

“He was gone day and night for two years,” said his wife of 13 years, Jeannine.

“It’s hard for most spouses,” she said. “I love politics, and I love Olympia, but it takes its toll, even more now because usually both spouses are working. Most of the time, it’s the spouse that is bringing in the income and taking care of the kids.”

Last year the health care reform law Dellwo worked so hard to pass was largely repealed. And the couple’s marriage was over.

She doesn’t blame the Legislature. But he does.

“The mistake legislators make is thinking anything is more important than their family,” Dellwo said.

“The people back home didn’t elect you to get a divorce or ignore your family. And yet so much is demanded of you.”

, DataTimes