Rookies go to Capitol Hill with calls for change

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Old and new Washington collided on Capitol Hill on Monday, and new won.

Within moments of flicking on the Senate lights, Sen. Mitch McConnell announced that when it came to pork-barrel politics, he had changed his mind. The Senate’s staunchest fan of so-called earmarks reversed course and supported a ban on those special spending requests, a bow to the tea partiers and others in the populist, anti-establishment wave that gave the GOP control of the House and six more seats in the Senate.

“Old habits aren’t easy to break, but sometimes they must be,” McConnell said on the Senate floor.

His announcement put an exclamation mark on the return of lawmakers to Capitol Hill on Monday for a “lame duck” session before the newcomers take their places officially in January. There’s still major business for the current Congress, from tax cuts that will or won’t be preserved to possible special Social Security checks to spending bills to keep the government going.

Monday was an extraordinary day that blended Congresses past, present and future as the fading Democratic majority began to yield.

It wasn’t going quietly.

For the more than 100 rookies dining and orienting around campus, there was no starker lesson than the spectacle of Rep. Charles Rangel, a once-mighty committee chairman now facing ethics charges — four decades after his arrival was supposed to herald the shake-up of an old, corrupt political order.

There were plenty of other lessons, pedestrian as well as profound, for the new folks: not only how to be an employer, a first for some of them, and how to avoid Washington’s ethical traps, but also where to eat, how to vote, how to get to the subway beneath the Capitol, even which elevators to use.

As for politics — in case any politicians had missed the message of the Nov. 2 elections — triumphant conservative activists, many of them tea partiers, rallied on the Capitol lawn with signs urging Congress to heed their call for smaller government and greater accountability.