Those attacks on Washington and New York — followed five weeks later by anthrax-laced letters sent to two senators — prompted a sweeping review of doomsday planning for how to keep Congress running in the event of a terrorist attack or other calamity. The past few days has sparked anew talk about the continuity of Congress but against an entirely different threat — a threat from within, literally, a virus that several staff have already contracted.
Several Democrats have called for specific rule changes that would allow senators to work and vote from home, just as tens of millions of Americans are doing amid the pandemic outbreak of the deadly coronavirus. And Republicans, while not fully embracing the proposals, are raising fears that the economic recovery packages that are meant to deal with the virus have to be passed very quickly because the spread could make the Capitol uninhabitable.
“Here’s what it boils down to is,” Durbin said. “Can we bring the United States Senate into the 21st century when it comes to voting? The standards that we are using are standards that date back to the writing of the Constitution. Present and voting. What is presence anymore?”
For now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has rejected the idea, believing that Congress can continue to function with revised social distancing features that will keep everyone safe.
“We’ll not be doing that. Look, there are a number of different ways to avoid getting too many people together,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday, suggesting that roll calls could be vastly extended to allow small groups to cast votes without crowding one another. “We will deal with the social distancing issue without fundamentally changing the Senate rules.”
On Wednesday morning, some senators followed McConnell’s new directive to vote and leave the chamber rather than linger in the small, shoulder-to-shoulder huddles that usually occur during votes.
But others congregated, with one group gathered around the desk of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) — fresh off a three-day self-quarantine that ended with a negative test — as they discussed the emerging financial rescue package. At one point the group grew to nine Republicans, standing close together.
Gone are the teenage pages who shuttled documents or glasses of water to senators as their school has been closed like so many others. Bottled water is available in the cloakrooms, and a sign on the clerk’s desk says in capital letters: SOCIAL DISTANCE.
The new protocols were not good enough for some senators, who have seen family and friends adhering to the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention against gathering in groups larger than 10. They are hunkering down and telecommuting to work, or missing work altogether if they are employed in the restaurant and bar industry,
Some senators believe they should be under the same restrictions as the general public, both for their own personal bid to limit the spread of the virus and to set an example to the public.
And as the week began some started to wonder how much longer Congress could stay in session. Just Tuesday, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) became the fifth senator to announce some form of self quarantine after coming in contact with someone who tested positive for this strain of coronavirus.
His announcement came hours after he had attended a closed-door luncheon with other Republican senators — many in the at risk age group — and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
“We can’t confidently predict that we can just reconvene Congress repeatedly as a normal course of business, given whether it’s airline interruptions or health issues that could impact staff or members,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told reporters.
But there is no easy answer. The people who oversaw the post-9/11 review of the continuity of Congress fought the last war. Understandably so, the focus back then was on an attack against the Capitol from an outside force, given that most experts believe that a fourth hijacked plane was headed for the Capitol until passengers overtook it and crashed it in western Pennsylvania.
Congress held hearings while ideologically opposed think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, joined forces to create a commission to study the continuity of each branch of the federal government.
Each of those studies focused on how to reconstitute the House and Senate if there were an attack on the Capitol building and many lawmakers were either left dead or incapacitated — such as the Cold War-era policy of a bunker in the Greenbrier resort, 250 miles southwest of Washington, to house government officials if the Soviets launched missiles.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) arrived Monday at the Capitol hoping to figure out what planning had been made for a viral attack that would involve not relocating Congress to another building, but to allow lawmakers to meet far apart from each other.
That’s when he talked to his former chief of staff, who was part of the Senate’s review of continuity issues. No, they never planned for today’s environment.
Also, Coons said, traditionalists were afraid of allowing long-distance voting. “There was grave concern that, if you ever triggered the ‘we don’t have to come here to vote,’ well, we would never come back,” he said.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), the top Democrat on the Rules Committee, has begun to work with Republicans to see if there is some way to update procedures and modernize things.
“I’m open to talking about it,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo,), chairman of the committee, said Wednesday. But Blunt said he was skeptical on some of the more far-reaching ideas.
For now, the plan is to go forward and, if there is a major virus-caused disruption among lawmakers, the House and Senate could convene with just two lawmakers and a few staff on hand to approve must-pass legislation.
But that only applies to legislation that can be approved without any dissent.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) is supportive of the Klobuchar effort but also acknowledged that lawmakers have to stay inside the Capitol for the next few days or longer to pass several bills critical to fighting the virus and its impact on the economy.
“There’s such a crisis here that we are needed to be working and getting the job done in whatever the quickest, best, healthiest way is,” Schumer said.
Durbin looked out the same window Monday evening, peering down the National Mall and recalling that the danger was coming from the outside.
“And then they said, ‘get out of the building’,” he said. “And we all rushed out of the building.”
Durbin is ready to rush out of the building again, and into the 21st century.
