Basic training for Congress.

Congress may be a maze of complications, but if you've served first in a state legislature you already know the ropes. Former state lawmakers say there's no better training.

By all rights, Patty Murray's entrance into the U.S. Senate in 1992 should have been an exercise in political humility. Not only was she one of only seven women in the self-styled "greatest deliberative body in the world," she was also something of a novice who only four years before was a member of a suburban school board in Washington state.

Sandwiched between these two jobs, however, was another position that Murray now thinks made all the difference; between 1988 and 1992 she was a Democratic state senator representing Seattle's northern suburbs. In that role, Murray successfully ushered through a series of bills she had particular interest in, such as family leave for a parent whose child is sick, and she learned the niceties of working within a complex and often divided lawmaking body.

"That experience gave me things that have turned out to be essential for me in the U.S. Senate," Murray said of her state legislative background. "And one of those things is an understanding of parliamentary procedure."

"The U.S. Senate, anyone will tell you, is an extraordinarily complicated place. But the essentials of how to work here can be learned on the state level," Murray said.

"Many of the issues are the same, and frankly the personalities are the same, too. In every state legislature there are different personalities that work together and some that don't, and I see that at work here. So the experience I gained on the state level in putting together winning coalitions to pass legislation has paid off for me here too."

For Murray, state legislative experience has also provided an unexpected network of support that would not have existed had she not been a lawmaker in Olympia: three of Washington's nine congressional representatives, Maria Cantwell, Jay Inslee and Mike Kreidler, all Democrats, also served in the Washington Legislature with Murray before winning seats to Congress in 1992. "We all came here the same year and had a strong relationship and coalition developed back home that still works for us today," said Murray.

A Mom in Tennis Shoes 

But even with such apparent assets, Murray's rise to any sort of appreciable power and influence in the U.S. Senate could have initially been viewed as problematic. She came to the nation's capital as a decided outsider, much as she did when she entered the Washington Legislature in 1988. The red-and-white buttons with pictures of tennis shoes that became Murray's campaign symbol in 1992 served to remind voters of the time, years before, when she went to the state Capitol in Olympia to argue for saving a preschool program in danger of losing state funding. "A mom in tennis shoes won't make a difference," a state lawmaker gruffly informed Murray then.

In 1988, Murray, frequently donning tennis shoes, knocked on more than 17,000 doors in her successful campaign for the state Senate in Washington, stressing, as she did in her bid for the U.S. Senate four years later, her status as an outsider.

But that very status within the nation's Capitol is often seen as a liability. "Bomb-throwers," Lyndon Johnson called incoming senators who vowed to shake up the system once they were elected. Yet Murray almost immediately got on well with the powers that be in the U.S. Senate, winning important appointments to the powerful Appropriations Committee as well as the equally pivotal Budget and Banking Committee.

The reason? Her four years in Olympia. "That kind of experience can absolutely make all of the difference in the world for an incoming freshman," said Gary Hymell, a well-known Washington lobbyist and vice-chairman of Hill and Knowlton World Wide, a public relations agency. "Right away that experience is going to help get you on a good committee because the leaders in either the House or Senate know that this is someone who understands compromise, and that is the most important thing you need to know if you want to be successful in Washington. You learn that as a state legislator.

"The people who are at a disadvantage are the people who have never served in any kind of legislative branch," continued Hymell, who also worked as an administrative assistant to Tip O'Neill, the speaker of the House from 1977 to 1987, and for Hale Boggs, the Louisiana congressman who was the House majority leader in 1971 and 1972.

Experience Counts

As an example, Hymell pointed to Carrie Meek, a Florida Democrat elected to Congress in 1992. Despite her freshman status, Meek was a seasoned legislative veteran back in Florida, having served in the state House for four years beginning in 1978 and the state Senate for 10 years after that. She held a leadership position on the Senate Ways and Means Committee. "It was because of that experience that she ended up on the Appropriations Committee," said Hymell. "She was the only freshman to be picked, and very clearly the leadership in Washington looked at her background and saw that she was someone who could be trusted, who had a proven record of reliability."

That a state legislative background is a well-traveled route to election in either the U.S. House or Senate cannot be denied. Throughout the history of the country, roughly a third of either the Senate or House membership has been composed of lawmakers who were once state legislators. And through the years those numbers rarely vary--in 1974, for example, 37 members of the Senate were former state lawmakers. That number dropped to 36 by 1984 only to rise to 39 in 1993 with the election of Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, who spent four years in the Texas House of Representatives in the mid-1970s.

In the U.S. House, the numbers have fluctuated a little bit more widely; there are today 222 members in the House who served in state legislatures, up from 198 in 1984 and 176 in 1974.

Just as impressive as such numbers may be is the raw political talent and energy produced by statehouses through the years. Scores of top Senate and House leaders from John Calhoun and Henry Clay to Sam Rayburn and Robert Byrd and Robert Dole have come from state legislatures, and most credit that background not only for their later congressional successes, but as a predictor of future career interests and conduct.

"I was best known for the first bill I introduced, a bill that was the first step, legislatively, reflecting my concern for the elderly," recalled the late and legendary Representative Claude Pepper in his published memoirs. Pepper, who served in the Florida House of Representatives in the late 1920s, went on to become nationally famous by the 1980s as the chairman of the Select Committee on Aging. Pepper's bill, passed in 1929; allowed the elderly in Florida to fish without a license, not a small feat in a state where the fishing is plentiful and during a time, before Social Security, when every dollar was precious. "I was not yet thirty when the bill won the approval of the Legislature," continued Pepper, "so my concern for the elderly long preceded my joining their ranks."

Sam Rayburn, who served as the speaker of the Texas House long before his historic 17 years as the speaker of the U.S. House, displayed on the state level the same talents that would someday make him an enduring national power. "Quickly but firmly, he took command over the often raucous House, where haughty lobbyists roamed freely, members chatted in groups or slept in drunken stupors at their desks and arguments often were settled with fists," Rayburn's biographers D.B. Hardeman and Donald G. Bacon noted of his Texas years. Rayburn was not only well suited for the job, but found that he thrived on the responsibility and enjoyment evidenced by three separate stints as House speaker.

Even Tip O'Neill, whose "all politics is local" maxim has become almost a mantra for any public official hoping to win re-election, credited his later willingness to tackle controversial and sometimes unpopular issues in Congress to his first year as a member of the General Court of Massachusetts, the state legislature.

Voting against a bill requiring loyalty oaths for public school teachers, a bill that in the tense pre-World War II days of 1938 had substantial popular support, O'Neill later wrote, "I can see that my vote against the teacher's oath marked an important step in my career...in retrospect I believe my vote on that issue freed me up and gave me a tremendous independence that lasted through all my years in politics."

Leaders Rise Faster

And the value of past state legislative experience is enhanced by its quality. Lawmakers who performed leadership roles back home are more likely to climb up the leadership ladder in Washington, D.C., than those who did not. Besides the obvious historic examples of Rayburn and O'Neill, there are also recent examples: Democrat Steny Hoyer was president of the Maryland Senate in the mid-1970s before his election to the U.S. House in 1981 where he is now chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, and of the Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government Appropriations subcommittees.

Martin Olav Sabo capped his state legislative career as speaker of the Minnesota House from 1973 to 1978 before his election to Congress. (He served as NCSL president in 1976-77.) Today he is chairman of the House Budget Committee and a senior member of the Defense, Transportation, and Treasury subcommittees.

Benjamin Cardin has also quickly risen in the U.S. House. A former speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates, Cardin was on the mighty Ways and Means Committee within three years and is now an important member of the ethics committee, where he helped guide reforms in the wake of 1992's House banking scandal. "That experience on the state level, particularly as a leader, turned out to be a real plus for me," said Cardin, "not only because I understand what it's like to be a legislator, but also because I know about the internal problems of how to work within a lawmaking body from a leadership point of view."

But forecasting who from the state legislatures is most likely to succeed in Washington can be a tricky thing, according to Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar with the American Enterprise Institute. "It's hard to predict exactly who will become more powerful than someone else once they get to Washington," he said. "But you have to say, all things being equal, that anyone who comes from a state legislature to the Senate or House is going to have a better chance than someone who didn't, because that person understands the dynamics of working in a large complicated lawmaking body. And for those who were leaders back home, essentially the cream of the crop, their odds for success are even better because they learned how to bring lawmakers together."

Whether former legislators in Washington remain more state-oriented in their focus is a question without immediate answers. Congressional scholars are divided; some say they never get the sand of back home out of their hair. But others point out the new job definition of a national legislator; they now, indeed, must legislate for the nation.

"My general take on these guys is that as soon as their roles change, they change," said Alan Rosenthal, professor of political science at Rutger University's Eagleton Institute of Politics. "They have much larger constituencies to worry about now, and a good deal of their work is going to center around both national and international concerns."

Ornstein agreed: "There will be those coming from the state legislative level who start out with substantial interests in world affairs rather than state-related issues. But others will develop those interests because a committee assignment makes it relevant."

And such committee assignments aren't necessarily limited to Foreign Affairs, Ornstein continued; they could also include the Ways and Means or Banking committees where "you have to deal on an ongoing basis with trade or international economic issues."

Tackling Foreign Affairs

Washington's Murray, whose successful 1992 Senate campaign was centered almost exclusively around domestic issues, said foreign affairs have become increasingly important to her, mainly because reporters in the nation's capital have pushed international issues on her.

"It almost seemed as though the press had to corner me on every international issue that came up to see if I could handle it," Murray said. "They rarely called me on national issues, but if something was going on in Bosnia, then they called. And I think that's ended up being a good thing for me because it's forced me to study international issues and events even more."

Because of their frequently pressing nature, foreign events also have a way of injecting themselves into the agenda of even the most domestically oriented lawmaker. "When I first came here, the very first vote I had to make was on whether or not we should go to war in the Persian Gulf," said David Hobson, a Republican, who was elected to the U.S. House in 1990 after eight years in the Ohio Senate, the final two of which he served as president pro tem. "That was really overwhelming for me."

Hobson said he remembered watching the House debate on the Gulf War resolution on television in his new Washington apartment in early 1991. "We didn't have any furniture, just a pillow and a TV set, and here I was about to take part in a life and death sort of decision."

Despite the momentous drama of that debate--Hobson ultimately voted in favor of military action--the congressman has largely continued to focus on the same kind of domestic issues he followed back in Ohio. He served on an ethics committee in the Ohio Senate and does so in Washington too. In Ohio he pushed for state health care reform and in the House he has helped design a Republican bill featuring a tax-free account for any business with a health care program. "I think my example might be pretty typical," Hobson said. "The things I cared about on the state level I still care about here. The only thing different is the size and scope."

Thinking About Unfunded Mandates

One thing that binds former legislators is their concern about unfunded mandates. Nearly every one-time state legislator says such mandates are enormously unfair, and they say their experiences back home taught them so.

"I am absolutely more aware of the problems that come with congressionally passed unfunded mandates because of my state experience," said Democrat Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who served in the Colorado House between 1982 and 1986 and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992. "We kind of pass things in Washington that force states to do different things without providing them the resources. We leave the states pretty much at their own risk and with whatever innovative methods they can come up with in trying to find financing."

Campbell said that because he's seen the financial difficulties that unfunded mandates can impose on the states first hand, he is now "very reluctant to pass things unless we somehow or other provide the resources to help them."

Carol Mosely-Braun is so serious about unfunded mandates she made it the subject of the first bill she introduced after winning a seat in the U.S. Senate from Illinois in 1992. "Precisely because I've worked on the state and local levels, I've been aware, painfully aware in some instances, of the costs of things, of what happens when the federal government tells the state governments what to do, but doesn't give them the money to do it."

Mosely-Braun, who served in the Illinois House from 1978 to 1988, said her bill simply requires that every unfunded mandate passed by Congress carry with it a disclosure detailing how much the mandate will cost state and local government. "Not all unfunded mandates are bad," continued Mosely-Braun. "But they can be a burden to local and state government... those levels of government should know what they're getting into."

Republican Paul Gillmor, a former Senate president and 20-year veteran of the Ohio Senate before his election to the U.S. House in 1988, thinks that the issue of unfunded mandates is becoming increasingly important in Washington not only because there are so many former state lawmakers in Congress, but also because the size and number of mandates continues to grow.

"The problem is getting worse," said Gillmor. "There simply is not an appreciation here on the part of many members of the problems we foist off on the states. A lot of people just don't care. They figure they can push these things onto the states, Congress will look good and that will be it. But I know a lot of people here who served on the state level first and who aren't too happy about any of this."

Although Congress in 1982 passed the Local Government Cost Estimate Act requiring the Congressional Budget Office to predict all mandate-related costs on states and localities in excess of $200 million, many lawmakers still feel not enough is being done to control mandates and accurately gauge their price tags.

In response last year, more than 20 bills were introduced in Congress--more than half of them coming from former state lawmakers--giving the states varying degrees of mandate relief. Other members of Congress have gone even further, calling for an outright end to unfunded federal mandates.

"We're just beginning to realize the enormous problems mandates cause for the states," said Maryland's Cardin. "But still there is a sort of mindset here saying that this is just a normal way of doing things."

Late last year, Republican Representative John L. Mica, a past member of the Florida House who was elected to Congress in 1992, joined the chorus of former state lawmakers opposed to the hidden costs of mandates. Mica co-sponsored an amendment to a bill elevating the Environmental Protection Agency to cabinet-level status. His amendment required that cost-benefit analysis be attached to all EPA legislation. "The parade of unfunded mandates out of Washington has got to stop or at least take a break while the EPA tells us what we're getting for our money," Mica said at the time.

Although the states remain leery of Washington's ability to control mandates, members of Congress do on occasion rise in significant enough numbers to get, if not immediate results, at least some attention.

Last fall, as Congress debated passing the Brady bill, a large bloc of House lawmakers voted to recommit the measure with an amendment eliminating its unfunded mandates either by authorizing additional money for a provision requiring the states to conduct personal background checks for gun purchasers or by removing that provision entirely.

While the motion was ultimately defeated on a 229 to 200 vote, the ballot showed that an anti-mandate sentiment of considerable strength does exist. Of the 200 who voted against the new mandate, exactly half were former state legislators.

A more successful anti-mandate move in the House occurred three months later in February when Gary Condit, a former member of the California Assembly elected to Congress in 1989, prominently joined in backing an amendment killing performance standards for states receiving Chapter 1 grants.

Condit and other detractors argued that federal imposition of standards requiring high quality materials, teachers and school buildings for Chapter 1 states would, in effect, be tantamount to yet one more unfunded mandate because such standards might entice Washington into demanding that more money be spent to achieve that elusive "high quality."

Despite such actions, however, Congress watchers say there is not enough evidence to suggest that former state lawmakers are any more reliably in opposition to mandates than their other colleagues. "If you could study it issue by issue, I would bet that in the end former state legislators don't really vote all that much differently on mandates than other senators or congressmen," said Rosenthal. "They may initially be more sensitive to the issue, but I'm sure eventually their concerns recede."

Thomas Mann, the director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, agreed. "They know about the incredibly harsh effects mandates have on state governments, but that is no guarantee they'll always vote as a bloc against them. There are just too many other dimensions to the whole mandate issue to look at them as a monolithic vote."

Even if their record on mandates is uneven, state legislators in Washington generally feel they are more sensitive to the mandates issue not only because of their past career service, but also because they continue to maintain ties with their home legislatures.

Keeping in Touch

Senator Campbell of Colorado goes home frequently: "In the Colorado House they have some seats around the edge where former legislators can sit and listen to debates, and I always try to do that at least one day," he said. "Then I go into the state Senate and do the same thing."

Republican Representative Thomas Ewing, who served in the Illinois House of Representatives for 17 years before his election to Congress in 1991, said he visits Springfield "at least once a year. I've been there for the swearing in of new members and for the state of the state address by the governor. I try hard to keep up that contact."

But while such visits ostensibly keep alive important ties for the former legislators, it also frequently reminds them of the vast difference between the two worlds. "As much as we might like to talk about the similarities, the differences between the two places are profound," said Democrat Richard Durbin, who worked as an Illinois Senate staffer until his election to the House in 1982.

"I think the biggest differences are in the committees," Durbin continued. "In Springfield they were very pro forma. Committees stopped a very small percentage of bills from coming to the floor. In Washington, just the reverse is true. Very few bills make it to the floor, and they usually arrive only after there has been intensive committee work done on them."

Other differences come with the sheer size of everything in Washington. Thomas Andrews, who served in both the House and Senate in Maine before his election to Congress in 1990, saw his staff go from the pool of clerks and secretaries that all 25 senators shared to his own current staff of 17, both in Washington and Maine. "And the workload increased with the size of that staff, too," said Andrews. "In Maine there was more time to be home, to talk with people, to just take a break from the legislative grind."

And former state lawmakers who are the first or only one of their kind in Washington--such as Illinois' Mosely-Braun, the only African American woman in the U.S. Senate, or Colorado's Campbell, the only Native American--must also prepare for a workload vastly multiplied beyond their old state duties.

"I sort of inherited a national constituency when I got here," waid Campbell. In Colorado, Campbell, a descendant of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, was visible on Native American issues and received hundreds of letters and calls from the roughly 25,000 American Indians in his home state. But nationally there are more than 1.8 million Native Americans, and Campbell is their most prominent spokesman. "It is an honor that they look to my office for answers, but it is something that has made keeping up with our regular office duties difficult."

Other legislators complain that not only are the hours longer in Washington than in most state capitols, it often seems as though less is accomplished. And because they now represent much larger constituencies, they also feel a loss of contact with the voters back home. "I used to be able to get home every night in my district," said Ohio's Hobson. "But now I can't do that, and I miss it. I had more contact with the people then."

Even the physical size of things in Washington can prove challenging. "When I was in Annapolis everything was right at hand. I could walk half a block and be in the governor's office or in any legislator's office I wanted to be in," said Maryland's Cardin. "But that's not the case in Washington. It might take 20 minutes to get to a legislator's office, and then you might get lost going over there. It is not an easy system to move around in."

Yet for all of the complaints about their new lives in Washington and fond memories of the legislatures they left behind, most former state lawmakers would probably stay in the nation's capital if they had to do it over again. "It is a place of power, and they know the importance of that because if they've worked in state legislatures they know how power can get things done," said Ornstein.

Ultimately, said Illinois' Durbin, it is service in the state legislature that makes being in Washington so significant. "For 14 years I stood behind any number of lieutenant governors and senators, presiding over the state senate," said Durbin of his work as a parliamentarian in Springfield. "And for 14 years I stood [in the background] whispering in their ears and advising them. When I came to Washington and they asked me to preside for the first time, you can't imagine the feeling I had standing up there with a gavel in my hands before the U.S. House. I almost felt like a person who had been watching science fiction movies all his life and now was being asked to be the commander of a space ship. It was a great feeling."