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"A collaborative political resource." |
Lisa Murkowski shares space: Senate squeeze
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Candidate
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| Contributor | None Entered |
| Last Edited | None Entered Jan 30, 2005 10:14am |
| Category | General |
| News Date | Jan 23, 2005 12:00am |
| Description | When Alaska's very junior senator, Lisa Murkowski, and her staff go to the office, their walk through the Russell Senate Office Building is a stroll past the clubby comforts of old power: marble, oak, leather, wide corridors, the echo of footsteps on a hard polished floor.
They keep walking.
Eventually they get to the "blue" carpet -- it could pass for gray -- leading up a plywood ramp to what used to be an expansive outside courtyard. Now it leads to the office officially known as C-1.
Nobody calls it C-1. Out here, the complex of three jammed Senate offices for the seniority-challenged is simply "the trailers." Had Alaskans been in charge when the doublewides were set up a decade ago, they might've been named "the Atcos," the famed no-frills portables used in pipeline construction. But then, Alaskans had two very senior senators 10 years ago, Ted Stevens and Frank Murkowski, and they didn't have to worry about trailers or Atcos.
Lisa Murkowski didn't have to worry either when she first showed up for work in Washington in 2003, appointed by her father when he left the Senate and was elected governor. One of the special perks she received under a deal with Senate leadership was her father's old office in the Hart Senate Office Building.
That deal went away when she was elected in her own right in November to the 109th Congress. That point was driven home a couple weeks after the election when she returned to Washington as No. 82 in the Senate pecking order. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, paid her a visit, but it wasn't about the women's caucus. Knowing Murkowski's eviction was imminent, Mikulski was scoping out the place for herself.
Mikulski picked another spot. Another Democrat, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, 32 on the all-important seniority list, grabbed 322 Hart for himself and Murkowski's staff was sent packing.
"It was difficult -- we went from 4,900 to 1,500 square feet," said Debbie Kapanoske, Murkowski's office manager. "W |
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