Congress
An Elderly Lawmaker’s Staff Keeps Walking Back Things She Tells Reporters. Should They Keep Quoting Her?
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.”
Sen. Raphael Warnock is hitting the road for the last month before Election Day.
The Georgia Democrat’s final midterm campaign surrogate sprint will only increase chatter around the possibility that he might run for president in 2028, according to a nine-stop itinerary shared first with Blue Light News.
First, he’ll touch down in New Hampshire on Tuesday before hitting Nevada on Wednesday. Next, he’ll travel to South Carolina (Oct. 13), Mississippi (Oct. 14), North Carolina (Oct. 15), South Carolina (Oct. 16-17), Michigan (Oct. 20-21), Wisconsin (Oct. 23) and Ohio (Oct. 24-26).
“Senator Reverend Warnock will be hitting the trail to energize voters who are sick of the President enriching himself while ordinary people continue to pay more for everything,” a spokesperson told Playbook. “Tapping into the righteous anger that voters are feeling across the country, the pastor in the Senate will again make the campaign trail his pulpit: calling out Trump’s corruption, while leaving voters hopeful for the next generation of Democratic leadership.”
Asked recently at the Texas Tribune Festival about whether he would run for president, Warnock said: “We’ll see what happens.”
Democrats are eager to win back subpoena power if they retake Congress, but they’re split on how hard they’ll go after corporate America.
The party is united by the idea of aggressive oversight of President Donald Trump’s administration, which will help shape their messaging in the run-up to the 2028 election. But Democrats are at odds over how fiercely to use their probing power to go after the corporations, law firms and universities that courted the White House over the past two years.
“We don’t want to turn into a banana republic where you lose an election and it’s all about retribution,” Rep. Bill Foster, a senior member of the Financial Services Committee, said.
“We’re going to have to be a little bit wise about when companies simply did something they had to do to survive this unprecedented level of corruption, compared to companies that actually got on board and profited more by being a partner in his corruption,” he added.
Some progressives counter that a restrained approach would sit uneasily with the party’s base.
“It would be political suicide for Democrats to campaign on fighting corruption and then turn around and go easy on the very companies that are facilitating it,” said Ella Fanger, corporate power policy adviser at the liberal nonprofit group Demand Progress.
Prime targets for some Democrats are the tech companies that have taken steps to be on the president’s good side, like Apple, Amazon and Meta, which have all donated to Trump’s ballroom effort. Major cryptocurrency players, including Coinbase, Ripple and Tether also chipped in for the ballroom, and will be subject to questioning from Democrats.
The late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s networks and associates are also poised for probes — a push that has ensnared big banks like JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America in the past.
Sen. Chris Murphy said the party should focus on the nexus between Trump and corporate corruption.
“We should get to the bottom of the corrupt relationship that exists between corporations in this country and the Trump administration,” Murphy said, pointing to questions he’s posed about a tobacco company’s donation to Trump’s super PAC before new e-cigarette rules were unveiled.
Still, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who serves on Senate Banking, warned against the weaponization of power.
“Our focus should be solving problems that we’re seeing happening,” she said, pointing to cost-of-living issues around health care, housing and energy.
What else we’re watching:
— FIRST IN IC: BUILD AMERICA CAUCUS AGENDA — Energized by progress on permitting and housing legislation this term, a bipartisan development-focused caucus is rolling out a detailed agenda for next term. The 40-member Build America Caucus is releasing a 95-page package of proposals, first shared with Blue Light News, that outlines plans touching on health care, transportation, child care and research. The group launched last year with the goal of cutting red tape and regulatory bottlenecks to spur development.
— AI COLLAB STILL ILLUSIVE FOR CRUZ, CANTWELL — Commerce Chair Ted Cruz and ranking member Maria Cantwell might still be celebrating Senate passage of their landmark college sports bill last week, but it’s unclear the momentum will carry forward to agreement on another committee priority: artificial intelligence. Among the dozen lawmakers, aides and industry experts who spoke to Blue Light News, few expect the two senators to shed their well-established ideologies and styles after the mutual win. That could doom their ability to replicate their latest achievement in something as complex and divisive as an AI regulatory framework.
Jasper Goodman, Katherine Hapgood, Riley Rogerson and Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.
Four years ago, California Rep. Ro Khanna’s staff voted to unionize — one of a handful of Democratic offices that sought to ride a wave of organizing momentum during then-President Joe Biden’s administration.
Much has changed since, to put it mildly, but Khanna aides persevered and recently won approval of their first collectively bargained contract — the first labor agreement of its kind inside Congress.
“This was four years in the making,” Nicole Waring, a deputy director of constituent services for Khanna and the union steward, said in an interview. “We finally, finally reached the point where we were able to finalize our contract and ratify it.”
The agonizing process of turning pro-union enthusiasm into an actual binding agreement is both a breakthrough for the fitful labor movement on Capitol Hill while also underscoring how that movement has sputtered in the years since Biden left office, Donald Trump took back the White House and unionization moved off the front burner for Democratic staffers.
Since an initial wave of offices voted to unionize in 2022, that momentum has largely petered out. Less than a dozen offices are now unionized as staffers’ efforts are complicated by heavy workloads, adversarial bosses and Congress’ recent record high turnover rates that have led some aides to the conclusion that unionizing is more trouble than it’s worth.
Against that backdrop, that the eight-person union in Khanna’s office was able to win a contract constitutes a bright spot for organizers.
The agreement establishes a higher salary floor and a mechanism to renegotiate salaries if the office’s budget allowance increases, according to Waring and portions of the text reviewed by Blue Light News.
The document also codifies a procedure to resolve internal grievances. When Khanna almost certainly wins reelection, the agreement — which was officially ratified in August — will continue through next term.
“I’m proud of our office for signing the first long-term contract in the history of the U.S. Congress. I hope this can serve as a model for other offices in Congress,” Khanna said in a statement thanking his staff. “We need to be a model for the collective bargaining in our offices that we want to see across our nation.”
Waring said Khanna and his senior aides were supportive and trusting during contract negotiation but noted that, even under those positive circumstances, the effort was time- and labor-intensive.
“There’s a lot of back and forth. It takes time to review each passback of the contract, redline everything,” Waring said. “The biggest thing was we wanted to make sure that this contract would be governable, and rather than just make things convenient and take shortcuts, make sure that it was going to be something that we knew would stand the test of time.”
Khanna’s chief of staff, Marie Baldassarre, said in an interview the process for her office took years because “we realized like this is going to actually impact people’s lives, and it’s a binding contract, and so we have to get it right.”
“It’s just never been done before, and none of us were experts,” she added.
Staffers on Capitol Hill often face a grueling office cultures that can hamstring efforts to advance worker protections. Staffers for pro-labor Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), for example, voted to unionize in 2023 but then faced internal retaliation, according to the Nevada Independent.
Staffers for lawmakers across the ideological spectrum can be subjected to long hours, eyebrow-raising member requests and unrelenting demands that can spur staffer interest in pursuing labor protections — but also fears about potentially hindering their careers.
A person involved in the Congressional Workers Union — an umbrella group that provides support to individual office bargaining units — called the Khanna office contract “historic” and acknowledged it was “probably the biggest win recently” for the broader organizing effort.
“There’s small wins all the time,” added the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of the group.
Staffers for former Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) ratified a contract in the final days of his term in December 2022. While that contract was technically the first for a member office, it was largely symbolic given Levin’s imminent departure. Staff for Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Val Hoyle (D-Ore.) secured “memorandums of understanding” with their members in 2024, but not formal contracts.
“Hats off to them for getting it done,” Levin said in an interview. “In terms of what comes next, much will depend on the outcome of the midterms.”
Levin, a labor attorney, said that Republican majorities and White House have had a chilling effect on Capitol Hill unions and predicted that if Democrats take back the House majority next year, a flurry of labor activity will ensue. He added that several Democrats with close ties to organized labor are poised to enter the House, naming fellow Michigan Democrat and former SEIU organizer Donavan McKinney.
“In this political climate, the idea of getting contracts negotiated on Blue Light News, where it’s hardly ever been done, I think that seems very challenging to me,” Levin said. “I do think it’s great that another office has gotten the first contract, and I think the momentum will continue to grow from here.”
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