Congress

An Elderly Lawmaker’s Staff Keeps Walking Back Things She Tells Reporters. Should They Keep Quoting Her?

Published

1 year ago

July 7, 2025

A few weeks ago, my Blue Light News colleague Nicholas Wu and NBC’s Sahil Kapur ran into D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton in the Capitol. Like good congressional reporters, they jumped at the opportunity to pepper a lawmaker about the news of the day. In this case, one question concerned Norton herself, a civil rights icon who is now the oldest House member: Would she run for another term next year, by which point she would be 89 years old? “Yeah, sure,” Norton said.

Coming on the heels of multiple stories about Norton’s alleged cognitive decline, the statement made news. But a few hours later, Norton’s office began unmaking that news. The Democrat “wants to run again but she’s in conversations with her family, friends, and closest advisors to decide what’s best,” a spokesperson told Wu. There was still no final decision.

It was all awkward and embarrassing — and did little to buttress Norton’s insistence that she’s as sharp as ever. And then, amazingly, it happened again. Last week, Kapur once again approached the delegate and asked about her plans. Once again, she said she’s running: “Yeah, I’m going to run for re-election.” And once again, her spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, telling Axios that “no decision has been made.”

The spokesperson, Sharon Nichols, did not offer any explanation for the discrepancy. She also didn’t respond when I asked her for details of what happened or whether journalists should take future Norton statements at face value.

That last question is relevant even if you don’t much care about the electoral plans of one non-voting delegate. For people interested in how Washington works, it’s an increasingly common issue in our era of gerontocracy: Just how are you supposed to interact with an elected official who might not be all there?

It’s an ongoing private conversation among reporters, animated by a sense that the watchdogs haven’t been zealous enough — but featuring no real agreement on how to handle these moments.

“I’m on the fence about it,” said New York Times congressional reporter Annie Karni, the author of her own recent piece about Norton’s struggles. “Is it newsworthy to be even doing this dance where you ask her a thing, she says something that makes no sense, and staff has to walk it back? Like, what are we doing? Or are we showing the problem? I don’t know what the answer is.”

“Every reporter has a story about this,” said Kristin Wilson, who was a BLN Capitol Hill producer until last year. Incidents that couldn’t be explained away sometimes made news, like the time the late GOP Sen. Thad Cochran got lost in the Capitol, or the time a colleague had to instruct late Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein to “just say aye” at a vote. When Texas Rep. Kay Granger struggled with dementia at the end of her term last year, it fell to a Dallas news site to reveal it. But many quieter interactions involving nonsensical quotes never got published. “I think we have pulled punches,” Wilson said.

Wilson recalled an incident when her team was interviewing the late GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch for a story on senators’ hideaway offices: “Hatch kind of went off on a tangent of a story, and as he’s telling the story, his aide is just like looking at me and his eyes are just massive, like he knew Hatch had just sort of gone down a bad path.”

In the end, the tangent wasn’t germane to the story. “Blue Light News is like living in a small town,” Wilson said. “And you know all these people, and you’re around them all the time. Are you going to be that person in that small town that you’re in?”

For journalists, the answer to that question is supposed to be: Yes, that’s exactly who we are! But the exigencies of managing a Hill beat that requires a daily stream of scoops makes it tough to latch onto every potentially embarrassing comment. Publishing them, after all, might enrage the staffers who tip you to those scoops — and confuse readers who just want accuracy.

It turns out Norton’s staff had good reason to think they could simply contradict their boss’ comments without it becoming a story: There’s a long history of spokespeople cajoling media outlets into cleaning up the incorrect, impolitic, or downright addled things that lawmakers say when they get buttonholed by Capitol Hill reporters.

Oftentimes, these involve non-craven fixes. “My rule of thumb was that I’m not in the business of playing gotcha,” said Todd Gillman, a former longtime Washington bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News. “People misspeak. They mix up a bill, a vote or a person. There’s a slip of the tongue. I’ve always let people clean up things like that. I’m going for substance.”

Yet the culture of cleaning up makes it harder to say no when you suspect that the slip of the tongue may actually be the substance. “Seems like the tradeoffs don’t change, though the calculus might,” Gillman told me. “Are you willing to incur some wrath for ignoring their lobbying?” Until Joe Biden’s presidency pushed the national conversation about aging officials, the answer wasn’t always self-evident.

And it comes up particularly often in the Capitol, one of the strangest media environments in America, a place where beat reporters can count on running into VIPs in public hallways and asking for quotes on even the most obscure matters. It’s as if Hollywood reporters could count on buttonholing Clint Eastwood every time he was at the office.

For staffers, this means a lot of work keeping track of potential messes. Brad White, who ran Cochran’s senatorial office before the Republican’s retirement amid health problems at age 80, said his colleagues’ clean-up work was more often about vernacular than mental capacity. “He would confuse some reporters because somebody would say, ‘Well, how are y’all coming on the budget negotiations?’ And he would say something that was more of a generational statement from Mississippi, like, ‘Well, we’re getting down to the lip lock.’ And nobody knew what the hell that might mean.”

All the same, as Cochran struggled, White managed around the edges. “He was an older guy,” White said. “He’d have good days and bad days, and there were days maybe that I would decide today is not the day we need to talk about this issue.” In Cochran’s case, he said, the senator was planning to resign but the timing was complicated by a budget process. “If you’ve got a member that is facing those types of issues, and you can tell that they’re working their way out, then that deserves some grace,” he said. “If you got a member that has no business being there and they’re clutching onto it like the Pope, then maybe that’s worthy of a discussion.”

To their credit, Wu and Kapur both reported the interactions with Norton as they happened, and reported the office’s statements to the contrary. It was an easy call, they both told me: The question at issue — would Norton run again? — was personal and ultimately can only be answered by her. It’s not the same as flubbing details of a 1,000-page bill.

Ed Wasserman, the former dean of the University of California’s graduate school of journalism and a longtime writer about media ethics, thinks the journalistic hand-wringing about how to describe cringey moments may actually make it harder to enlighten the public: “One of the problems is that reporters routinely handle incoherence and inconsistency by ignoring it, so a decision to convey it to readers as significant already rests on a belief that there’s some underlying dysfunction,” he said.

Wasserman said the principled position ought to be that lawmakers’ moments of confusion are news, period. Cleaning it up “is not really an option,” Wasserman said. “This is clearly performance related. And their job performance is your job to report on.”

The challenge is that it’s also a reporter’s job to cover the day’s debate about a bill or a nomination. Inserting incoherent comments from a lawmaker can confuse most readers — even if it enlightens a subset of folks interested in that particular lawmaker’s state of mind. “It’s weird that in the Capitol, people know which lawmakers you can’t really talk to substantively, and avoid them,” said Karni. “When you’re not reporting on the age issue, which I have reported a lot on, I think it’s important to just know who is not able to participate like that.”

By way of example, she cites yet another kerfuffle over yet another Norton comment: In April, the lawmaker told a reporter that she might try to become the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. The news kicked off a round of Democratic agita about aging leadership clinging to power. Hours later, her office put out a statement from Norton taking herself out of contention. The incident may have said something about Norton, but it didn’t really help the (probably larger) number of people who just want to be up to date about the committee’s future.

“Is this productive? Is this fair? She’s clearly not running for Oversight. So having her say that, it created a dumb news cycle with this kind of faux outrage,” Karni said. “You could say, ‘Are you thinking about running for president?’ And she might say, ‘I’m thinking about it.’ So what are we doing when we’re asking that question?”

It makes for a weird status quo: One set of lawmakers who can be grilled about legislative issues, another who are considered out to lunch, everyone keeping secret mental lists of who’s who, and no one feeling able to publish them because, after all, who can really prove what’s going on in someone’s head?

“The conundrum is you’re not going to be able to reach that judgment without applying certain standards that you’re not necessarily able to reach because you’re not a psychiatrist or you don’t really know them,” Wasserman said. “But at the same time, you know enough. You see what’s an indication that they’re not enough in command of the intellectual challenges of the job. … You have no reason to apologize for that. It’s your job.”

Congress

Trump apparently shares Tom Cotton’s phone number in push to make Daylight Saving Time permanent

Published

2 days ago

October 3, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump appeared to share Sen. Tom Cotton’s phone number in a Saturday morning social media post imploring the Arkansas Republican to get behind a bill to make Daylight Saving Time permanent.

“Almost everybody wants “The Sunshine Protection Act” to pass, except for Tom Cotton,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “To the Great People of Arkansas, please let your Senator know it would be a GREAT Bipartisan WIN for the United States Senate, and for America, itself.”

The president has spent months personally pushing Senate Republicans to end the practice that sees Americans change their clocks twice a year, cementing more sunlight hours in the evening for all twelve months of the calendar. Cotton, whom Trump called “a friend of mine” in the Saturday post, has long argued that making daylight saving time permanent would leave children, farmers and other early risers in the dark for hours on winter mornings.

One of Trump’s key selling points on Saturday: the PGA tour.

“The PGA TOUR, as an example, needs more Daylight in the afternoon in order to finish their Tournaments,” he said, attaching a letter from PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp endorsing the bill. ”Likewise, regular Golfers, Tennis Players, Hunters and, perhaps most importantly, Farmers who want more Daylight to play or work.

A Blue Light News call to the cellphone number went to voicemail. A spokesperson for Cotton did not respond to a request for comment. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The current version of the bill was introduced in the House in January 2025 by Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), with Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) leading the Senate version. The legislation would make daylight saving time permanent across most of the country, ending the twice-yearly clock changes. The legislation has been stalled in the Senate since July.

The president encouraged supporters of the bill, dubbed the “The Sunshine Protection Act,” to call Cotton to “let your Senator know it would be a GREAT Bipartisan WIN for the United States Senate, and for America, itself.”

During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, he publicly gave out the personal cellphone number of then-rival Sen. Lindsey Graham after the South Carolina Republican criticized him. Trump, who came to count on Graham as a reliable Senate ally after he won the presidency, revisited the moment during Graham’s funeral in July, acknowledging that sharing the number was something he “shouldn’t have done.”

Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.

Congress

Sanders to rally for Troy Jackson in Maine

Published

2 days ago

October 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Bernie Sanders will hit the road for Troy Jackson in Maine starting Oct. 10, the first time the progressive leader will stump for the candidate this cycle.

The Vermont independent plans to hold three rallies with Jackson, according to an itinerary shared first with Blue Light News: first in Bangor on Oct. 10th followed by Lewiston and Biddeford on Oct. 11.

The Maine swing will kick off Sanders’ travel for the final stretch of the midterms, covering ground throughout October for House and Senate candidates, POLITICO reported.

“Bernie and Troy know that working people built this country and deserve a government that fights for them,” Jackson spokesperson Dan Gottlieb told Blue Light News. “Susan Collins has had nearly 30 years to deliver, and working Mainers are still getting squeezed while she serves the billionaires and corporate interests who bankroll her campaigns. Mainers don’t need another six years of excuses.”

Sanders campaigned ahead of major wins for progressives in the primary season, speaking at more than 60 rallies since last year’s Fight the Oligarchy tour and endorsing more than 90 candidates up and down the ballot.

He’s also opening his substantial $23 million campaign war chest, POLITICO reported, and contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars toMinnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s Senate campaign and others including Angie Nixon in Florida and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison,

Sanders will return to Maine after initially backing Graham Platner’s campaign for Senate. Allegations reported by POLITICO ultimately led him to call on the Democratic nominee to drop out of the race.

Sanders had not formally endorsed Jackson since he clinched the nomination from Platner, though he previously backed Jackson’s initial run for governor.

Congress

Hill: Trump’s ‘lack of favorability’ creating challenging politics

Published

2 days ago

October 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Financial Services Chair French Hill said he has “no concerns” about winning back his Arkansas seat in the upcoming midterm elections, but the six-term House member acknowledged the political headwinds for his party.

“I consider the atmosphere a very tough political environment right now because of President [Donald] Trump’s lack of favorability at the top, and you know people are concerned about, as I say, what it’s like to live under an inflated economy the last four years,” Hill said in an interview.

Hill is in a solidly red district, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, and said he is up against a “weaker candidate this time than I’ve had in past races.” Polling in the district, however, has shown a tighter race. The two polls done this year placed Democratic challenger Chris Jones ahead of Hill by a few percentage points. Any perceived polling victory for Jones is still well within the margin of error, and one of the polls had a Democratic sponsor.

Stephannie Lane Baker, a spokesperson for Jones, said that “of all the Republicans in Congress, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee doesn’t get to dodge responsibility for this economy. He’s in trouble, and he knows it.”

Additionally, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s PAC, Ready for the Fight, committed more than $1 million in television ads through the next five weeks for Jones’ race in Arkansas’s 2nd District, Jordan Abudayyeh, a spokesperson for the PAC confirmed. Overall Democratic spending on advertising for the race was just over $1 million, primarily made up by contributions from the Ready for the Fight PAC, with Republicans spending almost $2.7 million on ad buys, according to AdImpact, an advertising tracking service.

Hill said he has addressed affordability concerns “head on” this Congress.

“My work on housing, my work on the Price Stability Act, my work to try to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse, and drop the federal budget deficit as a percentage of GDP,” Hill said. “All these things can contribute to a more affordable environment for people. So I’ve tried to make that a forefront of my campaign this year.”

Hill was a key architect of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan housing affordability bill that became law in July. The Price Stability Act, which is unlikely to become law this year, would narrow the Federal Reserve’s current dual mandate of pursuing maximum employment and price stability to focus exclusively on containing inflation.