E Pluribus Unum

[Cactus Jack]

August, 2019
Washington, DC​

"I swear to God, whichever dumbass decided to move our capitol to Washington clearly never spent a summer day here."

Daye caught a few murmurs of agreement over the thrum of the car's engine, but she let the remark go unheeded for the moment. Pen in hand and notepad resting against one crossed leg, she went down the list of bills until she found S.1143, and paused. She didn't hate the bill, but she'd ruffled enough feathers during the tax plan fight last year. Hell, 'ruffled feathers' was an understatement-- an olive branch to leadership, however small, wouldn't hurt. She underlined S.1143 twice, and then wrote 'KILL IN COM' next to it, so hard the tip of the pen nearly gouged through the paper.

"The dumbass you're thinking of," she finally said, looking up from the notepad. Jim Cartwright sat sweating bullets across from her, fanning himself vigorously with one hand and loosening his tie with the other. "is Thomas Jefferson. That dumbass."

"Well, between this and the slavery thing, I'm starting to wonder what the hell he's doing on the dime."

"The nickel," she corrected tersely, earning a few snickers from the other staffers in the car as she went back to her notepad. Cartwright was new to the team, and new to Washington. Most everybody complained their first summer in Washington.

A few didn't stop at the first, either. "He's not wrong, though," Ellen Weisberg grumbled beside her, rolling up the sleeves of her shirt. "I don't know how you're not dying in that suit, Senator."

"This is a pleasant summer day in Concord," Daye said without so much as a glance up from her notepad. Ignoring the beads of sweat crawling down her neck and presenting a bulletproof facade of composure, she scrawled an asterisk next to the bill at the bottom of the list-- take lead on this one. Martinez was a freshman Senator, damn near the only Democrat in the Senate to come out of the midterms alive, and it wouldn't hurt to have somebody on Judiciary owe her.

"Back in Minnesota, if it got this hot, folks started stocking up on canned foods and ammunition," Cartwright groused.

"Maybe we could, uh, turn on the air conditioners?" one of the Finance committee staffers chipped in hopefully, shifting in discomfort against the leather upholstery.

Weisberg snorted. "This is your first time driving with the Senator, isn't it?" she said, as if she were speaking to a child whose naivete was both endearing and absurd. Daye shut her notepad, slipped it and the pen into the inside pocket of her jacket, and fixed the staffer with a solemn stare.

"This car," she began, with all the gravity of a judge handing down a death sentence. "is running on government funds. Air conditioning increases fuel consumption by--"

"-- eight to ten percent--" Weisberg and a couple of her other aides said along with her, sharing chuckles and grins. Daye ignored them.

"-- and that means eight to ten percent more out of hard-working Americans' pockets for your comfort." The car pulled up to the rear driveway behind the Dirksen Building and slowed to a stop, and Daye unbuckled her seatbelt. "In other words," she finished as she opened the door to step out. "Let's sweat a little to save the taxpayers a little, eh?"

.

.

.

That didn't mean Daye wasn't grateful to retreat from the withering heat into the cool sanctuary of the Dirksen Building-- or to the air-conditioned confines of her office. Sweating a little for the duration of a car trip was one thing, but making her staff work summer days without air conditioning? They'd be marching her to the guillotine before the day was out.

She pushed the door open and held it for Cartwright and Weisberg. "Afternoon, everybody," she called out, earning a sparse handful of greetings and waves in response-- much of her staff would be out at this hour, she knew, taking meetings or grabbing lunch (or doing lunch meetings). She nodded at Weisberg as she shrugged her jacket off, and added, "Get me the latest factsheets on S.1040 and Martinez's bill, please. I'm going to write something up for the committee and then make some calls." Weisberg tossed off a little 'will do!' and Daye slung the jacket over her shoulder and headed for her office. "Let's get working, people," she announced as she went. "Remember--"

"No light days," the rest of the office chorused along with her. She scowled and shut the door to her office behind her.

Her personal office, she knew, was spartan in comparison to many of her colleagues-- no photos of the family, no shelf featuring plaques and awards bestowed by interest groups, no library of books she'd never so much as opened to impress visitors. A small television was mounted on the far wall (because when it came to getting her news, Daye liked to imagine it was 1996), a leather sofa was shoved up against the east wall beneath a wide awning window overlooking Stanton Park, and her desk was flanked by an American flag on one side and a North Carolinian one on the other. A portrait of Margaret Chase Smith hung on the wall behind the desk. She took a seat beneath the erstwhile senator's gaze, grabbed the thick folder of legislative briefings that had been left for her perusal, and began to read, pen in hand to take notes.

She didn't make it two sentences into the first page before the fragile silence of her office was shattered by the beep of the phone PA system. Cartwright's voice came through, crackling with just a hint of static. "Senator, you've got Shauna on line one. She says it's urgent."

Daye frowned. Without a word, she grabbed the phone and pressed the button for line one. "What's going on?"

"Turn on CNN right now." It was hard to miss the tension in Shauna Li's voice, wound tight and narrowly restrained, and Daye's frown deepened. Phone held to her ear, she grabbed the remote on her desk, turned on the television, and started dashing through channels until she landed on CNN.

She knew what had Li panicking the minute she saw the man on the screen. He stood before a podium in front of the great arched windows of Charlotte City Hall, thronged by reporters and by people holding up signs Daye couldn't quite make out. "--- why I came back here, to where my career in public service began," he was declaring when Daye cut in. "Because for too long, our representatives in Washington have been beholden to business interests, not to the people-- because when the time came for corporations to pay their fair share, our representatives worked to get them tax breaks on the backs of the working class instead!" Beneath him, the news ticker read 'STATE REP ANNOUNCES PRIMARY CHALLENGE FOR US SENATE'.

"Damn it, Shauna," Daye growled through gritted teeth. "How did this slip past your radar? You're my state director, I need you to be on top of this."

"Look, we knew Marcus was going to announce eventually, but he's running a tight ship," Li said, her tone penitent. "We didn't hear so much as a whisper that he was going to be announcing anytime soon. I'm sorry, Senator."

Daye scowled, sinking back in her chair. On the screen, Anthony Marcus mirrored the movement, stepping back just a little from the podium and grinning as the crowd cheered him on. "No, it's alright," she finally said, annoyed at herself for snapping. "But from now on, we've got to do better. This jackass is gonna be a real problem if we let him become one."

"Right, in the spirit of doing better-- every reporter in Washington is gonna be scrambling to get a quote from you on this. I'm astonished they haven't called already."

"I don't mind letting them know exactly what I think of Anthony Marcus," Daye cut in, seething.

"Uh, Jane, no." She could practically hear Li's brow furrowing over the line, the way it always did when she was exasperated. "That's what I wanted to talk about. Look, some politicians don't need talking points. Some politicians can speak off-the-cuff just fine. You are absolutely not one of them. The last thing I want is to open up The Hill and see 'United States Senator refers to primary challenger with string of expletives'. You need to sit down with Dean and Ellen and some other people and brainstorm some answers that won't involve the network censors. 'til then, don't so much as look out the window of your office."

She was right, of course-- Daye knew that. She was no Christine Fisher, capable of coming up with winning answers and statements on the fly. If a reporter ambushed Daye, they were going to get an answer that was dull and flat to the point of unnewsworthy, or an answer that was newsworthy for entirely the wrong reasons. No sense risking that just now. "Alright--" she began, before she heard two sharp knocks at her office door. A second later, the door creaked open, and Jim Cartwright's head appeared, looking stricken. He opened his mouth to say something, but Daye raised a finger.

"Hang on," she said into the receiver, before lowering the phone to her shoulder and fixing her stare on Cartwright. "Yes, Anthony Marcus is announcing. Track down Dean and get him over here ASAP, please. I'll call in the campaign folks down in North Carolina." Cartwright nodded, still looking shaken, and then he was gone. Daye brought the phone back to her ear.

"You know," she grumbled. "I was really looking forward to spending the day drafting memoranda for the IRS and Taxation subcommittee."

There was a pregnant pause on the other line for a moment. And then Li said, in a tone of something between bemusement and resignation, "I know we've got bigger concerns just now, but Jane, you direly need some hobbies."