In times of need, Capitol Hill comes to the rescue

Flowers and notes of condolence quickly piled up outside her Longworth office, and the few lawmakers in Washington on that Saturday raced to Capitol Hill after hearing the news. Their arms were full of food, and they offered to help in whatever way possible. 

{mosads}Since then, rotating crews of staffers who work for other lawmakers have taken turns manning the phones and responding to e-mails coming into Giffords’s office as her staff attempts to juggle her recovery process and the outpouring of public support.

“The community here in Arizona and on Capitol Hill has been fantastic,” Giffords’s communications director, C.J. Karamargin, said in a phone interview from Arizona. “Every member of our staff has been so thankful that people are rallying around and lending a hand. It has been such a heartening display of support. It’s amazing.”

Capitol Hill is a highly charged political world in which divisions get drawn among party and policy. But in moments of tragedy or crisis, the 541 Democratic and Republican lawmakers and more than 10,000 staffers come together to form a community whose open arms know no bounds. They provide a vast support structure to help people endure the unimaginable, whether it’s by lending a shoulder to cry on or offering an extra set of hands for the added workload. 

Patrice Willoughby knows the power of Capitol Hill’s supportive community firsthand. Willoughby was Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones’s (D-Ohio) chief of staff when the 58-year-old lawmaker died suddenly from an aneurysm in 2008. 

“The outpouring of support is really one of the things that helps you get through it, because people come out of the woodwork that you did not know, and their showing of support is really the thing that lifts you up and makes it possible for you to go forward,” said Willoughby, who worked in Congress for nearly 11 years. 

Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), a good friend of Giffords, said he had to do whatever he could to help her staff as soon as he heard the news of the shootings, which also killed her district outreach director, Gabe Zimmerman. Hours after the rampage, Crowley delivered food and drink to her Washington office.

“When you get into these kind of situations, you don’t know what it’s like psychologically and what effect it will have on you physically, so it’s important to have people look after them,” he said. 

Another tragedy hit Capitol Hill last week as lobbyist Ashley Turton was found dead in her car just blocks from the Senate office buildings. Turton had worked as Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s (D-Conn.) press secretary and chief of staff. 

Though they never met, Willoughby had e-mailed with Turton. The White House, where Turton’s husband works, invited all congressional offices to her memorial service last Friday. Willoughby attended, saying it was packed with former co-workers, friends and acquaintances, some of whom knew her only electronically or through work. But that’s a testament to the type of bond Capitol Hill creates, Willoughby said. 

Turton’s death and Giffords’s shooting are the latest tragedies to visit Capitol Hill, but Congress has endured several other traumas in the recent past. Each one has seemed to bring the community closer together. 

In 1998, a gunman stormed the Capitol, fatally shooting two U.S. Capitol Police officers. In the days and months afterward, Capitol Hill united behind the department and the officers’ families, raising money for their children and funeral expenses and offering them every service they could. 

After Giffords and Zimmerman were shot, Capitol Police Chief Phillip Morse wrote to the 1,800 officers in the department, saying this was an opportunity to return the support. 

“For those of you who were on the department in 1998, you understand how it feels to lose one of your own to an act of senseless violence,” Morse wrote. “When Officer [Jacob] Chestnut and Detective [John] Gibson were killed, the entire congressional community rallied around us. It is now our turn to rally around them, and we will.”

Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (Calif.) office has worked closely with the offices of Democratic whip Steny Hoyer (Md.) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to organize the bipartisan flood of help for Giffords, which has included fielding hundreds of calls from the media each day and taking on some of the office’s workload so that staff could travel to Arizona last week for Zimmerman’s memorial service. 

“Congressman Van Hollen said, ‘Whatever they need, give them,’ ” spokesman Doug Thornell said. 

The shooting has also given the House an opportunity to put partisan arguments on hold while it tends to the needs of one of its own. 

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) waited in the hospital where Giffords was being treated, while Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) office hand-delivered a card and a bouquet of roses to her staff in Washington. Her neighbor in Longworth, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), put a message of condolence on his office door that same day. 

Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) experienced a similar degree of bipartisan support in 2006 when he suffered a brain hemorrhage, communications director Julianne Fisher said. 

“It was just a wonderful outpouring of support from people on both sides of the aisle,” she said. “His family was hearing from the majority of senators, and people just continued to reach out to our office.

“I think that members of the Senate and the House, including their staff, share a deeply held belief in the American government,” Fisher said. “Sometimes we get so focused on the day-to-day politics and the winning and the losing — and they are important issues — but we forget that we are all colleagues under the same umbrella and believe in our government enough to make it our lives.”

House Chaplain the Rev. Daniel Coughlin has been talking with staffers since the shooting and Turton’s death, emphasizing the role that grieving and prayer play in the healing process. He’s been inspired by how staffers have reached out to one another and are taking on each other’s pain. 

“There’s a great networking of staffers on the Hill,” said Coughlin. “For them, if one person is suffering, then all of them are shaken.”

There’s a cyclical nature to supporting one another, too. Fisher said Johnson’s chief of staff offered help to Giffords’s office, just as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) did when Johnson fell ill. And when Kennedy died in 2009, Johnson and his staff extended their hands to his staff. 

The irony, Karamargin said, is that an act as horrible as a shooting could lead to something so wonderful as bringing parties, lawmakers and staff together. His boss would be proud, he said.

“For four years, I’ve heard my boss talk a lot about the need to work together and how she’s tried to work together on some of her important issues, which she is convinced need to cut across party lines,” Karamargin said. “It gives me cause for hope that out of this tragedy can come something hopeful about the way elected leaders can cooperate in the national interest. I don’t think there’s any doubt in my mind that communities, whether it’s Tucson or Capitol Hill, can come together.”

Giffords’s office feels Congress’s love

Dozens upon dozens of lawmakers and congressional aides have helped Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s (D-Ariz.) office keep afloat during this time of crisis, spokesman C.J. Karamargin said, adding that he and his colleagues couldn’t have survived these weeks without them. A few examples:

• Almost immediately after the shooting, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) sent her communications director, Jonathan Beeton, to Arizona to help Giffords’s staff field hundreds of media inquiries. Karamargin didn’t know Beeton before last week, but said “by the time he left yesterday morning, we were great friends.” “He has provided us with invaluable help, expertise and insights, organizing interviews, dealing with the crush of press requests.”

• House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) sent senior adviser Ed Cassidy to Tucson last week, where he presented the family of Gabe Zimmerman, a Giffords aide who was killed in the attack, with a framed copy of the resolution the House passed in Zimmerman’s honor. Cassidy told the family that Zimmerman is the first congressional staff member to die in the line of duty. 

• Freshman Rep. Hansen Clarke (D-Mich.) sat next to Giffords during the swearing-in ceremony earlier that week, so when he heard about the shooting, he flew to Arizona to help in whatever way he could. Clarke didn’t tell Giffords’ office that he was coming because he didn’t want to politicize his going or concern her staff with making arrangements for him. “I just got on the plane and left,” he said. “I was really concerned about staff morale.” During his two days in Arizona, he helped answer phone calls and talked with constituents about their concerns.

• After getting word of the shooting, Karamargin raced to the Tucson hospital where Giffords and the others who were injured were being treated. When he arrived, he saw Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) already standing in the waiting room. “He said, ‘When I heard, I just had to come,’ ” Karamargin recalled. “And I thought he might have been in Tucson already, but no, he said he drove down from Mesa, which is about two hours away.”