This Congress is a bit Different

When it comes to bringing one’s spouse to live in DC. Wow, this is quite the report:

As the 112th Congress opens, the family lives of the nation’s lawmakers are in disarray. Newsweek recently reached 46 of the 107 freshman members of Congress, and only one—Mike Lee, the newly elected Republican senator from Utah—said he or she was planning to move to Washington with spouse and children in tow. Incoming Rep. Bobby Schilling will leave his wife, Christie, and their 10 children, including an infant, in Colona, Illinois. Chris Gibson plans to sleep on a blow-up mattress in his Washington office—and then hightail it back on weekends to Kinderhook, New York, where his young family resides. South Dakota’s high-profile freshman Kristi Noem has rented a two-room basement apartment at the corner of Ninth and North Carolina, but her goal is to be there as little as possible. “My whole life and dream has been to live in South Dakota and ranch and farm,” she says in a phone call from a Washington airport. “If we would have had to move here, I simply wouldn’t have run.”

This phenomenon has ramifications far beyond absent parents and poorly attended First Lady Lunches. It’s another component that portends a new level of Capitol Hill gridlock. Real legislating—the compromises and dealmaking that distinguish politics from posturing—happens only among people who know and respect each other. Family life has always been crucial to that chemistry. During Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, first lady historian Carl Anthony points out, gritty negotiations with congressional Republicans, led by Gerald Ford, were often smoothed over by Lady Bird Johnson and Betty Ford, cultivated during long years as congressional wives.

There’s also a difference in tone. If you live across the street from your political opponent, if you know his kids, if you’ve been to dinner at his house, “it’s impossible to go up on the floor of the Senate or in the media and blast him the next day,” says Trent Lott, former Senate leader from Mississippi. If, on the other hand, you live on the road and your spouse is back home, raising the kids and running the family business by herself, bipartisan socializing might not be your first priority.