“I’ve got very strong opinions about what club you use, but I’m never going to play there,” Dove said in a 90-minute interview this week. “I know the course better than most people, but I never played the course.”
On Thursday, Dove completed her last “loop” as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s top caddie, ending a 6½ -year run as the most indispensable aide on the GOP side of the aisle.
She’s part of the cadre of Senate aides who work behind the scenes with almost no fanfare, clocking incredibly long hours while other colleagues leave for private-sector jobs and significantly more money. Without ever holding office themselves, people like Dove keep the Senate from completely falling apart.
She knows every parliamentary move that Democrats can make to gridlock the chamber, as well as which moves Republicans can make to unlock the debate. She knows when it’s time to get the pages to clean out senators’ desks — as she did after the recent impeachment trial ended with all sorts of candy wrappers and partly eaten food left in drawers.
And, when McConnell is in a cranky mood, she knows to hum the theme song to “Raiders of the Lost Ark” so he smiles when he walks past photographers.
“There is almost nobody in this institution with whom I have worked more closely, or whose counsel I have sought more frequently, over the past 6½ years,” McConnell said during Thursday’s tribute speeches, noting Dove’s unique history to the Senate as an institution. “The fact is, it doesn’t just seem like the Senate is Laura’s natural habitat. She literally grew up in this place.”
In 1966, Bob Dove took the lowest-ranking job in the office of Senate parliamentarian, the nonpartisan post that enforces the rules, and three years later, his identical twin girls were born. In 1986, at which point Bob Dove had become parliamentarian, he asked Senate leaders to take his girls on as pages and, by happenstance, Laura Dove became a page sponsored by Majority Leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.).
“My sister was the Democratic page and I was the Republican page, and I planted my flag and I have stayed on this side ever since,” Dove said.
At 17, she went to work in the Republican cloakroom, the sort of grunt work that wasn’t much higher profile than being a page. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, Dove returned to the GOP cloakroom and then several jobs across the street in the Senate office buildings.
When Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) became majority leader in 2003, he brought Dove back into the Capitol as assistant secretary, her favorite job ever. She was the point person for working with other Senate offices for scheduling noncontroversial legislation to get passed without debate. She strategized with the top secretary, David Schiappa, on which moves to make but did not have to deal with the “buck-stops-here” stuff like Schiappa did.
After a one-year hiatus, in which she packed her family into an RV and drove across the country, Dove heard from Schiappa, who told her to come back to meet with McConnell. The reason: Schiappa was ending his own storied career as GOP secretary.
“So what have you been doing?” McConnell asked Dove.
“Home schooling,” she said. “In an RV.”
The buttoned-up McConnell looked at Schiappa with alarm. “Yes, this is your best option,” Schiappa told him.
With that, Dove took over in 2013 as McConnell’s top floor strategist, working opposite Gary Myrick, the Democratic secretary, a 30-year staffer now working for Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.).
When things go awry during a contentious Senate debate, the duo can usually be found in the back of the chamber, or just out the back door, walking through the options for getting out of the jam.
“They’re like air traffic controllers who help senators sequence the bills, amendments and nominations we vote on,” McConnell said Thursday.
These posts require an incredibly thick skin, because it often falls on Dove and Myrick to explain to senators that their idea violates the rules or would allow the opposing party to make a countermove that they would have to accept.
“Well, I always say I play the role of Chuck Schumer in every meeting because you have to explain to them what the D’s want and why they’ll be able to get it,” Dove said. “I get yelled at some and that’s fine. I have teenagers. I’m fine, I’m used to it.”
She remains a staunch defender of the Senate, even as some current and former senators complain that too much legislative business gets handled entirely in McConnell and Schumer’s offices and not in the free-flowing debate that used to dominate the chamber in the 1970s and 1980s.
“They all lived here and they had tons in common because they were all old men who had drinks together at 5 o’clock and they had stay-at-home wives,” said Dove, the first GOP secretary to raise children on the job.
“That’s not how the Senate works anymore. They’re different, they’re a lot of different people with different life experiences and different aims and different goals, and they work it out in ways that don’t involve sitting around and drinking together.”
She’s leaving now because she wants to go out on her own terms. Her father, who has retired to South Carolina, ended up in a dispute with a majority leader over a parliamentary ruling on a 2001 tax bill, leading to his ouster.
Dove said she wants to have good memories of the Senate.
“I think the lesson that I learned from my dad is that it is a real gift to leave this place on your own terms,” she said.
