DeLauro: The Passion Behind The Scarves
WASHINGTON, April 09–It’s 9:45 a.m. on a recent Thursday morning, the last day before Congress adjourns for a two-week district work period, and U.S. Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro has a great deal to accomplish before the day’s end.
The Easter holiday traffic has made the six-term representative later than usual in arriving from her Capitol Hill home and Ashley Westbrook, her communications director, is briefing DeLauro on what’s ahead. It is a moment of calm before the whirlwind of the day begins in earnest. The typically frenzied day won’t end until DeLauro flies out of the capital and back to Connecticut almost 12 hours later.
As soon as Westbrook finishes her briefing, DeLauro glances at her watch and darts down the hallway of the Rayburn Office Building toward her first meeting of the day.
Her colleagues don’t seem to notice her tardiness in arriving for the hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development and the Food and Drug Administration and make no effort to edge their chairs forward as she squeezes behind them en route to her assigned seat.
DeLauro, 59, alternates between organizing the scads of legal pads and paperwork set before her and whispering back and forth with Mike Skonieczny, one of two legislative assistants she has designated to help brief her with background information throughout the hearing on the activities of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
She has already missed most of the witness’s testimony, and now the subcommittee’s senior Democrat, Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, begins questioning the FDA deputy commissioner just as DeLauro settles herself in her seat.
Kaptur wants to know how the FDA plans to prevent the spread of salmonella in eggs and other food. She holds up a plastic, candy-filled egg the Agriculture Department gave to the subcommittee as an early Easter treat, and addresses the witness, who has been skirting around her questions.
“So you’re recommending that people don’t have eggs easy up?” Kaptur asks, prompting a quick, hearty laugh from DeLauro.
“Thanks, Rosa. I need Rosa here,” Kaptur says.
Amused, but not distracted, DeLauro returns to her notes as her colleague continues. She highlights passages with her pencil, and gets so involved in the paperwork that her glasses slip down the bridge of her nose.
“I don’t go to these hearings to just sit there,” she says later that day. “I think people judge you on your responsiveness and your understanding of what their lives are about, and whether you try to do something about it.”
When the subcommittee turns to discussing medication doses for children, DeLauro tells the witness: “I am very, very disappointed with the FDA’s announcement that, as I understand it, it is going to suspend the requirements for drug makers to test their products to make sure they are safe and that they are effective for children, children are not little adults·. They require different dosage levels.”
Her voice gets slightly louder and more strident, and her face reddens as she questions the witness. DeLauro, who won a bout with ovarian cancer 16 years ago, is well known for her vigorous positions on health issues and in favor of more screening and funding for health programs.
“Thank you for that brief additional question,” jokes the subcommittee’s chairman, Henry Bonilla, R-Texas. She thanks him for his “indulgence” in allowing her to go over her allotted five minutes. The audience laughs, and DeLauro responds with a slight chuckle that immediately switches to a lighthearted apology.
She immediately confers with Kaptur on her right and Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-NY, on her left, on the FDA’s proposed policy. Then another glance at her watch reveals that she needs to be somewhere else.
Like other members of Congress, DeLauro has many demands on her time, on this day – two committee hearings at the same time – which often forces her to make tough choices about where to be and what to be doing.
Leaving her coat and bag behind, she quickly scuttles out the exit to another Appropriations subcommittee hearing in a room 60 feet away. In the hallway, senior legislative assistant Sarah K. Walkling spends approximately 10 seconds briefing DeLauro on what has already gone on in the second hearing, which started at the same time as the first.
For the next half hour, DeLauro directs her inquiries to a witness from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a new media campaign designed to combat the country’s obesity “epidemic” by promoting healthy food diets for children 9 to 14 years old.
“I believe kids can lead us to adults. I think our kids did that on environmental issues and they do that on smoking issues,” DeLauro says before heading back to spend another 30 minutes at the first, FDA hearing.
Then she grabs her belongings so she can meet some constituents, who are waiting for her in the hallway. She hugs East Haddam resident Eva Bunnell, of Authentic Voices, part of a nationwide movement working to end all forms of child abuse. Bunnell is flanked by several other people whose lives have also been affected by child abuse and neglect.
The small group chats as they take the elevator down one floor to DeLauro’s office where they reconvene in her personal office.
The members of Authentic Voices have also brought along the National Child Abuse Coalition’s legislative counsel, Tom Birch, in an effort to lobby the congresswoman for federal funds they can apply to child abuse prevention programs, according to her press secretary Westbrook.
Bunnell and her associates leave at 12:30, and DeLauro, who, Westbrook says, usually has only enough time for a cup of soup for lunch as she looks over notes or makes telephone calls, skips lunch entirely this day.
“These are busy lives,” DeLauro says, finally taking a moment to sip some water from her electric-blue coffee mug. “It has been for all 435 of us [representatives] who are here. It occupies all of my waking time and I’m pretty sure some of the time when I’m sleeping, but I love what I’m doing.”
So instead of lunch this day, she meets with Nancy Gantert Ryan of Branford and Mindy J. Schwartzman of New Haven, the only Connecticut elementary school teachers who were in town to receive the 2001 Presidential Awards for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching.
Sitting on a chair opposite the two teachers, DeLauro leans forward to ask them for the details of their achievement and the state of education and teaching in Connecticut as well as in the rest of the country.
“In the inner city, we are the [students’] mothers, psychiatrists and the whole nine yards,” says Schwartzman, who taught her fourth grade class at Clinton Avenue School how to plot and graph the velocity of water by involving them in a hands-on mathematical investigation of the Quinnipiac River
Clearly pleased by their innovative techniques, DeLauro takes the opportunity before the teachers leave to discuss improvements she believes the Connecticut school system can make to help inspire students to learn about subjects outside the norm, including biodefense-related topics.
“Then they will go into the world thinking·on a higher level,” agrees Ryan, who taught her fourth graders at Mary T. Murphy School the scientific importance of interactions that occur between an aquarium ecosystem and a “sub-supportive” ecosystem by using soda bottles.
Although running behind schedule, the congresswoman takes a few moments to collect herself before leaving the Rayburn Building at 1:20 p.m. to meet with fellow Democrats to share strategies on forthcoming legislation.
DeLauro will continue with these meetings until 5 pm. Her final meeting is with other members of the Connecticut delegation and the chairman of United Technologies Corp., the parent company of Sikorsky Aircraft, located in both Bridgeport and Stratford.
After a short stop to finally get a bite to eat at a fundraising reception hosted by U.S. Rep. Charles A. Gonzalez, D-Texas, who is running unopposed for re-election in November.
DeLauro is ready head home to New Haven. Typically she boards a plane every Thursday at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport with only herself, a briefcase and several shopping bags brimming with paperwork while leaving behind a closet filled with her array of trademark scarves and colorful attire. Tonight will be no different.
At 8:40 p.m., DeLauro’s flight will carry her and her husband, prominent political pollster Stanley Greenberg, back to New Haven where she can temporarily relax until she sets out the following day for multiple events.
Her Connecticut schedule is filled with meetings with constituents. DeLauro’s district has been redrawn and now includes three new towns and a crescent-shaped portion of Waterbury.
DeLauro says if she is re-elected this fall she wants to work with these communities and with people such as U.S. Rep. James H. Maloney, D-5th, to address their “specific needs” and their “economic development concerns.”
“I enjoy what I do,” she said, “and I’ll continue to do it for as long as the people will continue to elect me.”
Published in The Waterbury Republican-American, in Waterbury, Connecticut.
