What's Worse than A Grifter in Congress?

A Drunken Grifter in Congress

Just so you don’t feel sorry for all those hardworking people in Congress, you know like Cory Booker who just spoke for 25 hours straight (proving once again that Democrats are all talk and no action) … let me tell you about a little business perk they have.

It’s booze. Lots and lots of booze.

The official catering service of Congress is a company called Sodexo and they now will deliver beer, wine, and hard liquor right to a Congress person’s office. They even promise same-day delivery because, you know, when you need a fifth of bourbon, you don’t have time to wait.

This is Not a Joke

Before the Sodexo office delivery option, Congress people might only get booze at catered events. Congress regularly has catered events, receptions, and lobbyists are pretty big at showing Congress people a good time at multi-martini lunches.

But now your Congress person no longer has to wait for a lobbyist or some fancy event. Now booze can come flowing into their office like a river thanks to Sodexo. Just pick up the phone (or better yet, get your unpaid intern to make the call), and a case of wine or a few bottles of whiskey can be in your hot little hands stat.

This isn’t new. It was put in place in 2022 when Biden fumbling around the White House wondering where he was and Nancy Pelosi was still clip-clopping around Congress in stilettos.

Sodexo, a French company, really knows its market because in addition to “drinks on demand” (“Hello, Sodexo, send me up another martini!”) your hard-working Congres person can also buy beer, wine, and hard liquor by the case. In fact, if you want a beer, you can only order it by the case.

The service costs money and most of the hooch is in the reasonably priced range. Wine sells for $25 a bottle at the high end, and hard liquor can run up to $35 a bottle. I don’t know if I’m being prudish here, but I think if you are buying alcohol on the job and demanding delivery to your office during the work day, you probably have a drinking problem.

Are They Buying Their Own Drinks?

Well, on paper, of course. Just like on paper, Congress people do not have a slush fund to buy the silence of sexually harassed coworkers and they don’t do insider trading. So officially, Congress people buy their own drinks.

This is where facts come in handy.

Every member of Congress gets a Members’ Representational Allowance or MRA which is designated to cover “representational expenses” that the elected official incurs as a result of serving in Congress. Congress people have to rent offices in their home districts, they need staff people, they have travel expenses, and they may need to buy office supplies. Apparently, if you are a Senator you have to buy your own stapler. So you get a nice fat MRA to help defray your expenses. And your MRA is about five times your annual salary. Imagine if your job paid you 500% of your annual salary to cover random expenses.

According to the rules, a Representative or Senator cannot convert the MRA to cash, so they have to spend it. As far as I can tell, coke dealers don’t take MRAs, but Sodexo does. Now the rules say that Sodexo cannot take an MRA to cover “social expenses” which may include liquor, but I’m not sure how they screen “social” food and beverage from “nonsocial” food and beverage. If you search online and ask “Does Sodexo take MRA from Senators and Representatives to pay for liquor?” Google says, yes. Yes, they do.

Every Day a New Scam

The main purpose of the MRA is to help Congress people fund their activities in Congress, which includes office expenses. They can use their MRA money to pay the salaries of their staff, consultants, office expenses, travel, and the rental fee for offices in their district.

The MRA kicked in around 1996 and but not all Congress people get the same amount. It’s all taxpayer money, but some people in Congress apparently merit more than others. The farther from D.C. you live, the more you get. That’s why Nancy Pelosi gets more than Bernie Sanders. The relative rental costs of offices are also factored in, so if you need a New York office (hello, AOC) you’ll get more MRA than if you’re renting an office in a district within Mississippi.

While most Congress people hack up their MRAs and dedicate a certain percentage to salaries for staff members and consultants, another sum for travel, and a third for office space, and so on, that division is up to the Congress person.

And they can create an MRA slush fund to cover other niceties like breakfast burritos or afternoon snacks or in-office booze. (Technically, MRAs do not cover booze except that they do.)

So how much do these guys get?

At the low end, Stacey Plaskett (non-voting nut job from the Virgin Islands) gets $1.28M of MRA money to fritter away. At the highest end, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico takes in $1.91M. On average, a Congress person has a budget of about $1.37M to spend as they want on offices, travel, and entertainment.

Nice work if you can get it.

And, yes, we pay for them. Taxpayer money. A Congress person earns under $200k a year in salary, but gets a million plus in expenses. As far as I can tell, this expense account is never audited. No wonder Liz Warren can’t go one day without sending half-a-dozen hate-tweets to Elon Musk.

And since an MRA does not roll over from year to year, you have to spend everything each year or you lose it. Most Congress people do fritter away 90% to 95% of their MRA. I don’t know about you. but a million dollars for a secretary, an assistant, a small office in my home state, and some travel sure sounds like a lot.

The Rules

Now technically, the House of Representatives says that you can use the MRA for food and non-alcoholic beverages providing it was nourishment you needed during legislative planning sessions—but it draws the line at booze. You can’t spend your MRA money on hooch. Just like the law says that you can’t divert federal funds into a nongovernmental organization that kicks it back to you. Yeah, and you know the law that the government can’t forgive student loans. It’s a rule like that.

As you start to dig into researchon MRAs (which most of us are not even aware of), you discover that there are two tracks. The first track is the “official story.” You can spend part of your MRA on Sodexo food if you have to stay late on Capitol Hill to work. The second track is the more truthful one: you can use your MRA to buy booze and Sodexo will deliver it to your office. By the case. During the workday. No questions asked.

Whether or not your Congress person is using MRA to buy booze, we have to wonder why Congress has set things up so that they can get office delivery of liquor during the workday. Does your office allow you to have cases of liquor sent directly to your office (same day delivery promised)? I have never worked anywhere that allowed people to drink in their office during the workday much less shop for hooch, and I’ve worked for some cowboy outfits back in the day.

Even Politico, which tends to view Congress people (particularly Democrats) as demigods of noble motives and incapable of all impurity, has admitted that people at work in Congress are sometimes drunk.

Back in the olden days, when a Congress person was working they used to ssay he or she was “on the floor.” Being on the floor meant working in Congressional political slang. Today, being on the floor likely has a more literal meaning.

But let’s be kind and call it the “drinking culture” of Congress. Most people in Congress attend social events related to their work at least once a week and these events tend to serve copious amounts of liquor. Of course, when Congress people are surveyed they say they just have one drink (44%) at such events, and 22% said they never drink at all at these parties. And they also say that there are no people filming porno in the Senate chambers when the Senate is not in session.

Riddle Me This

What are the facts? Take this quiz.

• What city in America has the highest rate of binge drinking?

• What city in America has the highest rate of problem drinking?

• What job offers lots of free booze to people who are ostensibly “working”?

• What job offers free in-office delivery of beer, wine, and hard liquor?

• What job has Friday afternoon beer pong competitions in the area where work is supposed to be conducted?

The answers to the first two are Washington, D.C., and all the rest are “Congress.” Here is a painting from 1751 by William Hogarth. It’s called “Gin Lane,” but it could be called “Capitol Hill.”

To be fair, the problem with Congress is not one problem. It’s one problem with three faces. The three faces are gerontocracy, alcoholism, and stupidity.

What’s Wrong with Congress and No, More Booze Won’t Fix It

Many people are in Congress who are long past their expiration date. Dianne Feinstein should have been in hospice while she was still being wheeled around the Senate and voting. Nancy Pelosi is hobbling around in a walker. Bernie Sanders is older than Mick Jagger (but doesn’t have the moves). Mitch McConnell seems to be having ministrokes during the workday. These ancient people are not our wise elders. They’re kooks in cognitive freefall.

Then we have the stupid people in Congress, the ones who think that Guam will tip over as an island if too many people live there. The guy (Jamal Bowman) who thought that pulling a fire alarm would open a door. The late Sheila Jackson Lee could be a whole column all by herself, and then you have the Squad and the various progressive lunatics.

So we have on the one end—people with neurological deficits in their brains and on the other end of the spectrum we have people are uneducated, unlettered, unread, and unencumbered by common sense. So in the middle… we have a river of alcohol.

Let them drink booze.

Why does Congress need so much booze it has to be delivered straight to their offices? I’m no Nancy Drew, but if you’re having cases of liquor delivered to your office, you’re drinking on the job. Why should that be encouraged?

Alcoholism and Sociopathy

Well, for one thing, evil people tend to drink.

According to the Office of Justice, sociopaths and psychopaths (both groups) consume more alcohol than those who lack these afflictions. A scientific paper by Dr. Joel Solomon and Meredith Hanson notes that “the degree of overlap between the two conditions [sociopathy and alcoholism] is remarkable.” Likewise, criminals drink more than non-criminals. But it’s not like drinking makes you a criminal. Most people who are heavy drinkers arrive at their drinking having already been criminals. In other words, show me somebody who is starting to drink, and I’ll show you somebody who likely has already broken the law.

And this does not mean that people who drink are criminals. Many fine upstanding people drink alcohol. But I do not know too many fine upstanding people who need alcohol delivery in the middle of the workday.

And despite the movies, criminals rarely specialize. Criminals tend to be more opportunistic. The same guy who sells cocaine will steal a car and, given the right circumstances, counterfeit money or double park. The same guy who jumps a turnstile in the subway will shoplift or punch a guy in a bar.

A dedicated, sophisticated burglar who exclusively steals high-end jewels is a fictional affectation. Criminals are rarely specialists. Most criminals are guys and gals who pursue criminal activity as the situation arises. What that means is that if you send a criminal to Congress, he or she is likely to (a) drink themselves stupid and (b) expand their repertoire of criminal deeds. And what better place to go from being a lackadaisical part-time criminal to a full-time crook than on Capitol Hill? Only a person out of touch with reality would assume that office delivery of cases of liquor during the workday is a reasonable behavior.

There is no need to have door-dash style booze in Congress. But this is not a slam against Sodexo, which is just giving its customers what they want. As soon as cocaine is legalized in D.C., I bet they add that to the menu.

And one more thing. When Congress people fly, they can have Sodexo bring the food and beverages on their private flights and that includes booze. There have been rumors, largely debunked by lefty fact-checkers (you know, the same guys who said Hunter Biden’s laptop had all of the earmarks of Russian disinformation), that state that Nancy Pelosi has spent over $100k on “inflight services” that include liquid refreshments.

She isn’t the first Congress person to legislate drunk. Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) was notorious back in the day for traveling with cases of Cutty Sark scotch on Air Force 1, but I suspect he had to pay his own bar tab. Then again, maybe not.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to see what Congress people spend at Sodexo, nor is it possible to ascertain what portion of that expense was for booze. That’s a pity, considering it’s our money.

If you work for a corporation somewhere or have ever worked in any type of serious business enterprise, did they allow you to pick up the phone and have the company food service operation (if there even was one) send you a case of booze pronto? And could you expense the liquor so you didn’t even have to pay for your own drinks? If your boss walked in and noticed a case of wine on your desk, would that be problematic for your career?

No, businesses do not do this. Why would business and other serious professions not allow this wonderful perk? I mean if it’s a good thing for Congress who are tasked with making the laws of the nation, why aren’t we delivering booze to people who work in our hospitals or universities or tech companies? Why doesn’t your dentist get in-office deliveries of booze so he or she can drink between appointments? How about the people who run the local day care or nursery school? What about truck drivers? Why can’t they get free booze at every rest stop?

The reason is that these people work for a living and have serious jobs. That’s how they’re different than Congress.