Every workday morning about 9:30, Mike Richards grabs his polish and rag and starts the most difficult task of his custodial day: shining up the Brass Rail, the fence-like rim that encircles the third floor of the Illinois State Capitol’s rotunda.
It’s a demanding job, if only because of the sheer elbow grease involved. The Rail courses 168 feet around, presenting long stretches of bar and scads of rivets for the meticulous polisher to negotiate. It takes two hours to get it gleaming in the morning sunlight that falls from the stained-glass dome directly overhead. The guy who usually does this job just had wrist surgery, necessitated, he thinks, by the repetitive stress of it all.
But Rail duty is also hard because it’s high-profile work, thanks to all the unsolicited critics who will gather around the lustrous barrier during the day and cover it with their fingerprints. These critics are, for the most part, lobbyists, people who are in the business of professional complaining and agitating, and the sort of people apt to know Richards’ boss.
Richards slathers up his wet rag with Porter’s Friend brass polish and starts buffing away at yesterday’s oil and grime.
“It’s a lot of work,” he says. “The first thing everybody does when they come in is run over and grab the Rail. As soon as you get all the way around, it’s messed up where you started.”
The Rail is the workplace of the Third House, the coterie of advocates and hired guns who descend upon the state capital from the months of January through May (and sometimes longer) in the effort to persuade lawmakers to vote a certain way on issues of principle and money.
In essence, the Rail is the equivalent of the town square, or going further back in time, the Greek agora, where people gather to do business, trade information and watch others doing the same. This is where you hear up-to-the-minute reports about what’s happening in the state legislature, about which bills and deals are dead and which of them are still breathing. When legislative committees finish their work each day during the session and lawmakers head back to the House and Senate floors, the hordes of advocates take up residence around the rail, which swoops between the giant walnut doors of the two chambers that stand opposite each other, north and south.
As Richards is wrapping up his morning at the Rail, the members of the Third House are just beginning theirs.
A state senator-turned-lobbyist leans absently on the Rail, palms first, then quickly pulls back when he sees Richards watching.
“Be my guest,” says Richards. “That’s my job security.”
It’s 11:45 a.m. on a mid-May day, and the Rail is just getting started. Lawmakers are arriving on the third floor for the noontime start of business, and the lobbyists are beginning to congregate. The meter has started to count their billable hours.
The Rail is dotted with some 20 people, many clutching notebooks and cell phones as they study the assembling throng.
Jim Fletcher is one of the first people on the scene, a legal pad in the crook of one arm as he scans the list of senators he hopes to catch on their way into the chambers.
Fletcher, deputy governor to former Gov. James R. Thompson from 1977 to 1980 and now one of the most successful contract lobbyists in Springfield, is working on several issues and needs help from Republican senators this week.
He’s also here to hook up with other members of his lobbying team, each of whom is working different lawmakers on the same bills Fletcher is, on behalf of such clients as Arlington Park, Exelon, Mt. Sinai Hospital and a host of others. They meet up here to compare notes and try out their pitches.
Eyes skimming the crowd, Fletcher is one of those people who can simultaneously do his work and talk to you about it. He describes the Rail, where he spends so much time, in both physical and metaphysical terms.
“It’s positioned exactly between the House and Senate to give you a place to stand where you can see everybody and talk to everybody you need,” says Fletcher. “In that way, it’s a centerpiece of the whole process.”
Today, a gaggle of labor lobbyists is standing close to the House Speaker’s office, at the easternmost point of the circle, probably waiting to be let in for a meeting with one of the House Democratic leaders. Labor leaders are having celebrated luck this session, the first since Democrats took over both chambers of the General Assembly as well as the governor’s office in last year’s elections.
Closer to the imposing doors of the House chamber today are business lobbyists, who still wield power but are working harder at the Rail this session than they used to when hard-line conservatives called the shots in the Senate.
Nearer the Senate’s doors are those on both sides of the social debates that have occupied the spring session, lobbyists pushing for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and a gay rights law and those working ardently against them.
Everyone assumes one or another Rail position. Mostly, they lean on the railing and talk. Maybe they stand attentively outside the chamber doors to catch lawmakers walking in. Or they cluster at the walls on the periphery, setting their cell phones and notepads down on the bricks that jut out to form a makeshift counter. The walls also present nooks and crannies that, in the days before cell phones, served as slots to leave notes for friends and allies.
Technology has changed a few things, but in most other ways, the Rail remains the emblem of the 19th-Century-style lobbying that still runs the capital.
“The Rail is better than cell phones,” Fletcher explains. “You still have to look people in the eye. You need to get groups of people together quickly. And you have to make decisions. That’s always done better face-to-face.”
Suddenly a suburban senator appears from around a pillar, adopting a fast stride toward the chamber door.
“Oops, gotta go,” says Fletcher, and he heads off to catch the early arrival.
Such manners are perfectly okay around the Rail. Actually, you don’t have to say anything at all resembling “excuse me.” The Rail has its own set of social rules, and one of them is that you’re free to break eye contact while talking in order to scan the crowd for your targets–even if the implication is, “I’m looking for someone more important than you.” When you spot such a quarry, you can take off without a word of parting.
Today, the so-called “budgeteers” are hot targets around the Rail. Sens. Donne Trotter (D-Chicago) and Steve Rauschenberger (R-Elgin) and Reps. Gary Hannig (D-Litchfield) and Mark Beaubien (R-Barrington)–the budget point people in their respective chambers–can hardly make it around the rotunda for all the people who want to talk to them.
Ironically, House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) and Senate President Emil Jones (D-Chicago), the two most powerful men in the legislature, can stroll through easily, repelling potential hangers-on with the sheer improbability that they have time to stop and chat.
Sometimes, the lobbyist is the one being sought, and the Rail is the place to be found. At times, business will just fall into a lobbyist’s lap because he or she was there at the Rail at the right time. One such advocate recalls being hired on the spot with the promise of thousands of dollars just to walk a few feet and put in a good word with a friendly lawmaker.
Usually, though, the Rail is a sea of lobbyists, all of them vying for legislators’ attentions and practicing an art form that is neither for the retiring nor the agoraphobic.
“You’ve got to get in there first,” says longtime labor lobbyist Ray Harris, a 17-year veteran of the place. “Move before he does,” he says of a competitor.
Next tip: Be quick and clear and to the point, so when lawmakers see you, they know they can stop and get the fill without a big investment of time.
“The interaction needs to be pleasant and productive,” Harris says. Respect the lawmaker’s time and intelligence. Don’t ignore those little marketing details that make you a pleasant person to talk to as opposed to an annoying one. Dress decently. Don’t kill them with the cologne.
“And I always have my mints,” says Harris. “Don’t forget the mints.”
To be sure, there’s dealing at the Rail.
A few years ago, a lobbyist got exposed for calling several lawmakers out of the House and handing them envelopes containing checks for up to $300 apiece, all of them campaign contributions from his clients. The move was completely legal back then, although news of it has since inspired some changes in the rules.
Usually, though, such things stay private, as the code of Rail conduct also contains a provision calling for silence.
“I think people who talk about their conversations at the Rail risk not having more conversations at the Rail,” says former Gov. Thompson, a Chicago lawyer who has been around the capital this session to throw his weight behind tobacco giant Philip Morris.
“Have to pass, but thanks,” Thompson says, in an uncharacteristically tight-lipped response to a request for some Rail stories.
“Don’t ask,” says another lobbyist, well aware that his political patrons wouldn’t much like for his name–or his stories–to show up in newsprint.
Anyway, the deals aren’t the most important thing that occurs at the Rail, veterans say. More important is the information exchanged and the relationships forged there.
“For real business, I try to talk to legislators in their offices or on the phone,” says Judy Erwin, once a press aide to erstwhile Senate President Phil Rock (D-Chicago) and herself a former state representative who now lobbies for a firm with clients that include AT&T and the Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers of America. “I remember being irritated at being called out (of the chamber) as a legislator, so I keep that at a minimum. That’s really more for the visiting firemen, the ones who aren’t here a lot.”
The “visiting firemen”–shorthand for local citizen groups who come for scheduled “lobby days”–are here almost daily during session. One day this week it was the union of service employees filling the hallways and calling lawmakers out of the chambers. They, too, are here to build relationships with their elected representatives.
They come in shifts. Early in the session, the Rail is crowded with the regulars, the advocates and contract lobbyists who’ll be tracking several issues and bills throughout the session.
In March, the buses begin to arrive with senior citizens, union workers and such recipients of state services as the disabled. Then come the school trips. The money shows up at the end.
“At the end, it’s men in suits,” says Mike Kasper, a former House legal counsel who now lobbies with Fletcher. “Look around the last couple of weeks. It’s middle-aged men in suits with very serious expressions on their faces.”
This year in the final weeks of the session, the money has poured in on behalf of the telecommunications giant SBC Communications. Its clout-laden president Bill Daley has led the company to a major legislative victory with an army of well-heeled lobbyists and thousands of dollars in campaign contributions as artillery.
Gaming interests were also prepared to flood the Rail in the final days of session, but Gov. Rod Blagojevich announced in May that he would not entertain a gambling expansion this year. So as the session has geared up toward its frenetic final days this spring, the attention has turned to the crafting of a budget–and the various corporate interests who might have to fork over more money to help float the state through a difficult time.
“Oh, yeah,” says Kasper. “You’ll see a lot of serious expressions.”
It’s 4 p.m. of a later day in May, a lazier one in which the Third House is starting to disperse from the third floor. A few advocates linger, staring over the railing at a gaggle of reporters standing outside Blagojevich’s office a floor below and wondering what’s going on inside.
The suits are leaving, but the social activists are still here.
There’s roughly a week to go before the scheduled end of session, and the House has just passed a resolution supporting the Equal Rights Amendment, a mere 21 years after a Congressional deadline for ratification. Supporters believe that, if Illinois will only put its stamp of approval on the proposal, they can breathe new life into the nationwide movement to change the U.S. Constitution to prohibit gender-based discrimination.
Pam Sutherland was here fighting for passage back in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, women demonstrators were chaining themselves to the railing outside the Senate chambers in support of the ERA. Also at the Rail–there’s some disagreement among old-timers about whether it happened on the House or the Senate side–some angry supporters from Champaign threw pig’s blood on the floor.
“They had Secretary of State’s police all over the place,” Sutherland recalls. “A woman sat right there on a hunger strike for so long she was in a wheelchair at the end.”
The pig’s blood incident embarrassed a lot of the pro-ERA activists at the time, though Sutherland says the General Assembly’s refusal to pass the measure had become pretty infuriating by then.
“I see how they got pushed to such a point,” says Sutherland, now executive director of Planned Parenthood and one of the agency’s registered lobbyists. “It didn’t defeat the ERA, but it didn’t help.”
This time around, women of the ERA era are taking a much, much lower-key approach, almost as if they feel they shouldn’t have to ask for an amendment stating their equality. Interestingly, male lawmakers are doing most of the legwork.
“We’ll talk to a few legislators,” she says.
A few feet away on the Rail, however, the anti-ERA contingent is ramping up a more aggressive strategy against both the ERA and its ideological twin, the gay rights bill. Rev. Bob Vanden Bosch wasn’t here in the 1970s, but he inherited the cause from a fellow Baptist minister who taught him one basic rule for work at the Rail:
“If you’re here, God can use you,” he says. “If you’re not, he can’t.”
Come the end of this session, Vanden Bosch, whose business card identifies him as an “ambassador for Jesus Christ to the Illinois state legislature,” plans to be as available as possible. Today he’s looking for Downstate Democrats, whom Vanden Bosch believes will lay both the ERA and gay rights issues to rest in the upper chamber.
“I’m talking to as many people as I possibly can,” says Vanden Bosch.
When the day ends, the Rail empties quickly, the venue of work now shifting to the cocktail hours at downtown restaurants and bars, like Boone’s Saloon, Norb Andy’s and D.H. Brown’s Taverns. Lawmakers file out of the building, with the lobbyists not far behind. The din of the building dies down quickly as the occupants descend the marble staircase and head for the exits.
Jim Fletcher and Mike Kasper often meet at “the Lady,” a statue on the Capitol’s first floor, to leave together. Today, Pam Sutherland has already returned to her office to finish up some paperwork. Vanden Bosch is packing up slowly, hoping to catch straggling lawmakers.
“It’s not about ability,” he says, waiting for a parting shot at a solon. “It’s about availability.”
(He must have known something. The ERA and gay rights bill would ultimately founder in the closing days of the session.)
Mike Richards, meanwhile, is back at his country home 20 miles away. His workday starts early tomorrow morning, with cleaning elsewhere in the Capitol before the Sisyphean task of buffing and polishing starts again.
There will be plenty to do. The Rail is covered with smudgy evidence of the day’s work.
