An hour later, the Speaker and his chief of staff have traversed to the north side of the Capitol—a trip that requires crossing under the Capitol Dome—and are sitting in the ornate suite of the Senate majority leader. Susan Stroud’s ceremonial office in the Capitol makes the Speaker’s own ceremonial Capitol office look meager.
Everyone knows the nicknames. The Senate is now “House Stroud.” The cautious inscrutable majority leader is “the Southern Sphinx,” and “Wake Up, Lil Susie,” when she is slow to respond. Nicknames attach themselves to politicians like gum on the floor of old movie theaters. And for a woman, the whispered corridor sobriquets often involve misogyny, sexism, physical slurs, innuendo, and every kind of harassment imaginable. In her rise to the top, Stroud steeled herself to it and gained strength from overcoming it. In one of her early local races, an opponent had dubbed her “Madame X,” a reference to the famous portrait of a mysterious young woman whom the artist depicted as undeniably pretty but perhaps empty-headed. The painting, on loan from New York at the time, was on posters all over Gulfport and Jackson under the title Who is Madame X? Stroud, initially furious, had turned the phrase to her advantage and won. Now, during her fourth decade in politics, that nickname could instill fear in her enemies over her unpredictability: What would Madame X do?
They sit in facing chairs, their chiefs of staff with them. Stroud stares at the Speaker, the frumpy man whom she considers a kind of cut-rate Columbo, smarter than he seems but not as smart as he thinks.
With them is a fifth person the Speaker has not expected. Senator Llewellyn Burke of Michigan, chairman of Armed Services. Not formally a part of the Senate leadership, Burke is a member of Stroud’s more informal “kitchen cabinet.” Burke, it seems to the Speaker, is an informal counselor to nearly everyone in this goddamn town. He is even friends with the president and is the former boss of the Oosay investigator, Peter Rena.
“Les Winley is peddling this memo around,” Stroud says. “Which means he has given it to the press, too.”
“I assume,” says the Speaker.
“So let’s consider the details.”
It is something Stroud says often. She is always careful about “the details.” About protocol. And timing. To whom she is talking. About appearances.
And if she had any core political philosophy, it was probably purely practical: Always play the long game. That’s why she likes the Senate. Senators run every six years. Presidents run every four—and they’re out after eight. The long game is the whole point of the Senate.
“I’ve got chairmen chomping at the bit,” the Speaker says.
“We all have people chomping at the bit, Mr. Speaker. I just got off the phone with Senator Bakke. He wants to hold hearings, too.”
“Lew, what’s your gut tell you?” Stroud asks Llewellyn Burke.
“Well, if the Speaker has people who want to call hearings in the House, and you have people who want to call hearings in the Senate, why not create a joint committee of both chambers?” Burke says.
“Joint. House and Senate?” Stroud responds.
“You and the Speaker could handpick the members,” Burke suggests.
Stroud rubs her index finger against her thumb, a habit she has when thinking. The high-gloss red polish on her nails catches the light. She smiles.
“A joint committee could both contain this and empower it,” Burke says to Stroud.
She nods and glances at her chief of staff.
“Be careful who you put on it, Susan,” the aide says.
“Mr. Speaker?”
The Speaker is unsure what to think of this idea. It is confusing and unusual, but it would at least give the House equal billing. “Let me sleep on it,” he says.
AFTER THE SPEAKER AND HIS AIDE ARE GONE, Stroud and Burke spend more time mulling over who should be a part of the Select Joint Committee on Oosay.
There would be fourteen members in all, eight Republicans and six Democrats. To get there, they begin with the so-called Gang of Eight, the members of Congress to whom the CIA has already granted special access to classified intelligence. The eight include the highest-ranking Democrat and Republican on the House and Senate intelligence committees, plus the highest-ranking member from each party in the House and Senate—the Speaker, the Senate majority leader, and the two minority leaders.
To that, Stroud adds a Democrat and Republican from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Reform. That would give that little creep Dick Bakke a seat. Then a Democrat and a Republican from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to accommodate Curtis Gains in the House. Added to that, she names two more Republicans to give the majority party two extra members of the committee.
As a member of the Gang of Eight, Stroud herself would be part of the formula. But being on a committee investigating Oosay would both dirty her hands and tie them.
“Lord knows, I can’t be on this. Nor, I dare say, can the Speaker. Would you sit for me?” she asks Burke.
“You don’t want an old dog like me, Susan. I’d send the wrong message. How about Wendy Upton?”
“Why her?”
“If Dick Bakke has thoughts of using this committee as a presidential launching pad, why not give Wendy a boost, too?” Burke says.
Wendy Upton, the junior senator from Arizona, is a former army attorney who’d been groomed by the ageless and legendary Judiciary chairman Furman Morgan to enter politics. She was the intellectual leader of the GOP on Judiciary, and on her other committees as well, with a kind of prosecutorial independence and sense of right and wrong that made people around her seem to be their better selves. She is being pushed by some in the party as the future of mainstream conservativism, and many are urging her to consider a run for the White House.
“Don’t make her chair,” Stroud’s chief of staff advises. “You don’t need the grief with the Common Sense Caucus.”
THAT NIGHT, the Speaker’s home phone rings at 10:30 P.M. He has just fallen asleep.
The caller ID announces it is Susan Stroud.
“Goddamn it,” the Speaker growls. He’s being played.
The Speaker is famous for needing his nine hours a night—an early-to-bed, early-to-rise man. The Senate majority leader is calling him late, hoping he’ll be impatient, maybe even asleep, and agree to anything.
She isn’t the first to pull this shithead stunt with him.
“Okay, I agree!” she chimes after he picks up.
She agrees to what, he wonders.
“Let’s do a joint Senate-House select committee on Oosay,” Stroud says.
The Speaker tries to focus. He is sitting up now, feet on the floor off the side of the bed.
“Here’s what we propose,” Stroud explains.
She goes through the numbers—how many Democrats, which committees to draw from.
“So your boy Gains gets a seat,” she says. “And you and I each get to pick one more member of our choice.”
The Speaker hates getting rolled, and he hates the House always getting shit on by everyone—the Senate, the press, everyone.
“Gains is chair,” he hears himself say.
It is the first thing he can think of. Gains had suggested being named chair this afternoon, and he said he’d consider it.
Yet he likes the idea instantly. A House chair. A Common Senser. No doubt Stroud will think she can control him anyway.
“Be serious,” she says.
“I am. Gains got the memo. And I’ll have hell to pay if I give this over to the Senate to run. We could have done a committee on our own, Susie.”
Susie. She will hate that.
He could screw with her head, too.
“Bakke got the same memo,” she says.
“You won’t let Dick Bakke chair this in a month of Sundays any more than I would.”
“I get to advise on your other House member who serves in your stead,” Stroud says.
She’s making him eat it, too. He couldn’t pick his own surrogate without her managing it.
Oh, what the hell.
“Done. But the goddamn press release is produced jointly. And not till we have all the names. Or the deal is undone.”
“Sleep tight, Bill,” Stroud says. But she is reminded again that the slovenly old man is maybe not the fool he seems.
The next morning there are the usual eat-shit-and-die phone calls with the Democrats in both houses. But by midmorning there is a deal.
As if the Democrats had any choice.