Staff Matters

A Legislator is Only as Good as His/Her Staff!

While learning the trade, Coop also became aware of the maxim that a legislator was only as good as his or her staff. Senator Villa, one of a limited number of elected Latinos at this point, was always strategic in staffing. There were often committee assignments offered by the Senate leadership with subject matter jurisdiction that would have special effect on the growing Latino population, soon to be the largest demographic in the state. 

Villa’s staff was large and highly skilled. Several had been with him for years, coming over from the Assembly when he successfully challenged an incumbent Democrat, a barely functioning alcoholic, in an ugly primary in which Alex was alternately called a communist, atheist, devil worshiper, and carpetbagger by the sloppy veteran Senator. 

The leadership, as required by Senate custom, had defended the incumbent, so when Villa was seated, he had some relationships to repair. As he did so, new staff was added to the veterans. Coop and I set about studying the twenty-odd colleagues whom he would spend more time with over the next eight years than his own family. Staff meetings resembled the United Nations General Assembly: Latinos, Japanese Americans, African Americans, the grandson of Hungarian Jews, and a recent Vietnamese immigrant, all thrown together in the ethnic salad that made up the office. 

There was a future Assembly majority leader and a future Senator in this fascinating mix of strong and opinionated humans. 

During this learning process there was one staff member that particularly intrigued Coop, because of his inscrutable nature. Kelly Bottomly was a recent law school grad staffing the Judiciary Committee, which he zealously guarded. He was blonde-haired and blue-eyed, exceptionally good looking, and rarely spoke. Coop’s first job in “the building,” as the State Capitol is called by the denizens of that deep, mysterious, and opaque swamp, entailed assisting Kelly with his Judiciary Committee assignments.

The Senator’s Capitol office only had space for four professionals and a couple of admin staff, with the remainder, including Coop, stuffed into various satellite offices around the Capitol complex. Bottomly commanded primary office space, one of only two non-environmental committee staff in the Capitol building proper. In a business where numerous staff were either political hacks or covered their inch-deep understanding of complex policy areas with a genial boorish insouciance, valuing witty repartee over accomplishments, Bottomly was a complete laconic enigma. 

He largely ignored Coop, an attitude Coop attributed to professional rivalry as he was a successful litigator while Bottomly was a recent grad who had not yet passed the bar. What was more inexplicable was that Kelly rarely voiced an opinion in the freewheeling staff meetings. Coop initially thought that Bottomly was keeping his counsel for private meetings with the Senator, likely privy to some deep and hard-earned knowledge he was loath to share with a newbie, but increasingly we both began to question even this assumption. 

The Judiciary Committee was a plum assignment, highly sought after by members and accompanied by a heavy workload. All legislation that affected the courts, civil liability, and criminal culpability were sent there. Over one hundred bills could be heard on particularly busy days, with hearings lasting well past midnight. 

A month or so into the job, Villa asked Coop to serve as backup to Bottomly, as the workload seemed to be overwhelming him. Coop began reading the bills and proofreading the internal analyses prepared by Kelly, as well as sorting the large stack of support and opposition letters that came in weekly. I would read Bottomly’s analyses at night when Coop would bring them home, and they seemed simplistic, but what did I know? 

“I don’t like him, Coop. Something's not quite right, “I said one night. “Besides the fact that he is obviously threatened by you, he clearly does not even like dogs. Humans who do not respond to my big brown eyes are not normal. Trust me, he is up to something!” 

Initially Coop did not spot anything amiss, but as he gained some confidence in his ability to thread his way through the sturm and drang of lobbyist lingo and developed a smidgen of expertise in reading a proposed law in the context of existing law, he gradually began to question the substance of what Bottomly wrote. 

We began to debate exactly why Bottomly merited this choice assignment. “Maybe,” I proposed one night, after reading a particularly inane analysis, ripped directly from a lobbyist’s opposition, “Bottomly might suffer from a common ailment among the members themselves: a lack of sagacity combined with a weakness for flattery and a less-than-athletic mind.” 

Coop nodded but was still not completely convinced. It all came to a head late one Monday evening as Coop and Bottomly were preparing a final briefing for the next afternoon’s marathon hearing. I was sleeping on the floor with the Senator's own Pyr, Isabelle. A particularly controversial bill was up the next day, proposed by California Right to Life, which placed significant restrictions on women’s freedom of choice with regard to abortion services.

The usual suspects lined up on both sides. Villa had always been pro-choice, so the recommended vote was a no-brainer, despite heavy lobbying by the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Coop was sorting support and opposition and entering them into the analysis when he came to a letter from The Eagle Forum, Phyllis Schlafly’s staunchly conservative, anti-feminist, anti-abortion organization that had successfully campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. 

Schlafly was a well-known wingnut who focused her political work on the defense of traditional gender roles. Anyone who had even the slightest connection to the political universe understood she wanted women barefoot and pregnant, tied to hearth and home, and viewed Roe v. Wade and women’s sexual freedom as an abomination unto the Christian God in whose image the country had, in her rather limited view of American history, been created. 

Coop, without much thought, placed Schlafly’s support letter in the pile with the Catholic Archdiocese, the Mormon Church, the State Republican Party, and the Southern Baptist Evangelical Conference. He took a bathroom break and returned to find the Eagle Forum letter on top of the opposition pile. 

Coop pulled it aside, assuming that Bottomly had made a mistake, but when he picked it up again Bottomly stopped him and said solicitously, “You are clearly not experienced enough to do this job, even with your litigation experience,” and promptly entered the information from the letter into the wrong column. 

At that moment, it all became clear to us both. Bottomly, who we would later learn had earned the nickname “Blonde Ambition,” from Judiciary Committee staff, lived by an ancient creed: better to remain silent and have people think you might be stupid than open your mouth and prove it! Like the deep diving whales of Moby Dick vintage, Bottomly understood that so long as the whale never surfaces it is never harpooned. But in this one instance he had breached!

Shortly thereafter the Senator came to the same conclusion, and Bottomly was gone, off to a new life as a bankruptcy attorney in Kern County after passing the bar - on his third try.

When the Going Gets Weird!

When Coop returned to the Senate with Senator Jack Chucabra several years later, he needed to get a handle on the small staff the Senator was allocated as a new, not particularly well regarded, new member. On that first morning, shortly after Coop returned from HR with a massive stack of paperwork, and I settled in under his desk, a  demure, almost painfully shy Asian woman joined us to discuss Coop’s new duties. Introduced as the Senator's Chief of Staff, Daisy Nguyen certainly broke traditional stereotypes attributed to political movers and shakers. She spoke in an almost inaudible whisper, her face hidden behind oversized, utterly unfashionable eyeglasses, and was dressed in a shapeless blue suit and white blouse buttoned to her throat - meek, timid, demure, nearly shrinking into the background as she joined the meeting. 

To describe Daisy Nguyen, the Senator’s first chief of staff as unobtrusive does the word an injustice. Ms Nguyen was a quandary, to put it mildly. Chupacabra valued formal education to a fault. He himself had attended graduate school at Chicago and law school at Yale. Each of the other staff members was highly educated and well-traveled, like the Senator. With the exception of Daisy. She was Vietnamese American, the daughter of an ex-South Vietnamese general who had fled Saigon with a suitcase of cash weeks before the ignominious end of that disastrous foreign policy fiasco. Born two years after her parents exited the Thai relocation camp, she had spent her whole life in the sheltered expat Vietnamese community in Orange County. Her only diploma was from a local high school in Garden Grove. 

She had started at the Capitol as a receptionist many years ago, and through sheer dogged determination, combined with an ability to keep her head down and herself out of the spotlight, had advanced to be the last Assembly chief of staff for Chupacabra. As chief she had the only fully private office in our intimate little environment, a glass enclosed space that even had a window from which she could look over the reception area and into the cramped space where Coop and the others toiled. 

We later discovered that the timorous Daisy was not the Senator’s first, second, or even third choice to lead the office. Since he was not the favored candidate of Senate leadership, in addition to the tiny undesirable office space, he was also provided a fairly limited budget until he could prove himself as a reliable member of the Democratic caucus. 

Combined with his prickly reputation in the Assembly (largely earned) and the perception that he was a mod Dem (untrue), he didn't exactly have the first pick of available chiefs with proven track records. Daisy Nguyen, obsequious to a fault, a seeming model of studied rectitude, perpetually sporting a furrowed brow and exhibiting a quiescent air of muted contemplation, had become his Assembly chief in October, when his previous staff director returned to graduate school only months before the Senate election, clearly believing he was doomed to defeat. 

With Chupacabra giving up his Assembly seat to run for the Senate against a well-funded opponent, a race all concerned were sure he would lose, everyone else on his Assembly staff had taken other jobs. Since no work was done in October of election years with all the staff out “volunteering” on campaigns, rewarding Daisy’s fealty and hard work with a short-lived resume-boosting promotion to chief was a low-risk proposition. 

However, when Senator Jack pulled off the upset and became one of forty members of the upper house, events would be set in motion that no one could have foreseen, especially not by the otherwise perspicacious new senator. As his swearing in was rapidly approaching in December, Chupacabra still did not have a chief, or any staff for that matter. He had offered the job to several senior Senate staff, including Skip Shure, the chief for the termed-out Senator representing the district. Chupacabra had known Shure for years, but that was deemed insufficient and, after a few weeks playing Jack against other offers, Shure turned him down. 

As a brand new and not-in-favor with leadership senator, he had limits on the salary he could offer. On the night before his swearing in, he reluctantly offered the position to Nguyen, who he figured, at worst, came cheap. This would leave salary available for other hires, and would do no harm. She happily accepted. 

What transpired over the next few months is the stuff of legend. For a complete understanding, a little more on Daisy’s personal history is required, which Coop ferreted out listening to various hushed conversations in Capitol park when news of her hiring made the rounds of the Camp Capitol gossip mill.

It seems that Daisy Nguyen was recently separated from her husband of many years, a librarian at a local middle school whom she had married at the age of thirty while still a virgin (why we know this is part of the story would become clear in the coming weeks!) moving directly from the house of her strict, VERY Catholic, and conservative parents into the home of her new husband. Together they had one daughter, now sixteen, Jade Nguyen. Jade was a bright, precocious teenager who had taken up crew, more particularly coxswaining, as her ticket to an Ivy League school - or at the very least an East Coast education and a ticket out of the confusing, strait-laced home in which she was being reared. 

Just after the election, Daisy and Jade made a trip east to a regatta in Toledo, Ohio from which they returned with a rather unique memento - a seventeen-year-old male boatsman from outside Youngstown who went by the name “Snake.” According to the story, as initially told to Cooper and education advisor, Malcolm Keats, Jade had met Snake outside the gymnasium of Herbert Hoover High School, at the regatta in Toledo. Snake and Jade struck up a conversation, flirting as teenagers will. Daisy came out looking for her daughter and, seeing her talking to the lanky tattooed stranger, she quickly intervened. Exhibiting the impeccable motherly instincts for which she would later become known, she quickly invited Snake to join her and her daughter for dinner.

One thing led to another, and two weeks later Snake had left his family in Ohio and moved to California, where he was living with mother and daughter in a quiet suburb in Dixon. It was at this point that Daisy approached Cooper for legal advice. In the name of office comity and not yet understanding exactly who he was dealing with or the complexity of the situation, Cooper agreed to meet Daisy, Snake, and Jade at a restaurant on the Delta King, a restored classic river boat moored in Old Town Sacramento, that was now brightly decked out with a new restaurant. 

Cooper arrived early, with me on a damn leash - he said it was a city law, to take in the beautiful sunset, lights twinkling off of the gold hued Tower Bridge just south of downtown. It was quite beautiful, the cityscape reflected in the sluggishly flowing river that separated California’s somnambulant capital city from the grittier West Sacramento on the Yolo County side. 

We deliberately walked up the gangway of the newly painted paddle-wheeler, admiring the gleaming brass fittings, and found a table on the top deck, looking downriver at the pleasure boats and water taxis plying the gently roiling current. Daisy and her daughter, followed closely by Snake, arrived on time at the appointed hour. Daisy was dressed as usual in a shapeless navy business suit, white blouse, and sensible shoes, carrying a cheap patent leather purse. 

Jade, leading her new housemate by the hand, was a different story. All eyes in the restaurant turned quickly as she entered. The style could best be described as teenage hooker chic. A tiny, tight black leather skirt, with a slit up to the thigh. Cheap, hot pink rayon Forever 21 blouse, seemingly missing the top three buttons. Black fishnet hose, spiked heels, and Tammy Faye Baker-style makeup applied seemingly with a spatula. This being the first time we had met Jade, I must admit to a rising curiosity. This was certainly not the vibe, nor the image of the sweet Catholic high school junior described by mom. 

And then there was Snake. Six-foot-two, saturnine, nearly emaciated, sporting oddly sultry, black-painted lips and raggedly asymmetric chopped blonde hair, with heavy metal tattoos prevalent on his neck and arms. He was dressed in a wife beater tee, jeans torn at both knees, and black lace-up boots. To say he gave off a vibe of Ohio trailer trash is being grossly unfair to those residing in mobile home parks in rural Ohio. 

The new housemate and daughter presented quite the pair. While Jade and Snake sat half-bored, Daisy ran through the sordid story. “Snake was an abused child. He comes from a broken home with an alcoholic dad in prison and a drug addicted mother. He has been in and out of the foster care merry-go-round since he was ten. He’s been beaten regularly, on the rare occasions when dad is out on parole.” 

A sad story if ever there was one. Who would not be sympathetic to such a tale of woe? “He has come to California to live with our family in search of peace and the freedom that only life on the left coast, away from that nightmare can provide.” 

“What I want is to have parental custody terminated and to have me adjudicated his lawful guardian. Is that possible?” 

“Daisy, I need you to understand that I am not a practicing attorney and even in my former life as a litigator, I did no domestic law. I can listen and possibly provide guidance, but I cannot and will not under any circumstances represent you and your daughter. Is that clear?” Coop said.

“Crystal Clear, “Daisy replied.

After much pleading and a plethora of tears about the cost of legal representation, Coop finally agreed to at least take a preliminary look. If ever the statement that “when the going gets weird, the weird move to California” would turn out to be true, we were about to find out. 

Cooper made all the requisite phone calls but could find no record of Snake in Ohio - or anywhere else for that matter. Nothing in foster care, juvie, or even a Social Security number. 

Having run headlong into a brick wall one day he decided to invite Snake to the office to try to get to the bottom of why there appeared no record of him...anywhere.

“Snake, why don’t you have a Social Security number? Maybe under a different name?” 

“Never had a job sir. Never needed one. Other than to attend the Pentecostal Church up the holler, I was rarely allowed out.”

“I checked with the Harlan County School District where you told me your family lived, and they have no transcripts. They have no record of you ever attending school,” Coop said.

“I was homeschooled until high school in a different district,” Snake replied.

Sitting there listening to the obvious evasive answers, I could tell the boy was lying, but trying to get a straight answer was like nailing jello to a tree. Nothing stuck.

The very next day, while Coop and I were still discussing the non-answers Snake had provided, a letter came by certified mail from a law firm in Youngstown. It threatened Daisy with a lawsuit for alienation of affection and violations of the Mann Act - that is, transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes. 

Daisy swore this was all a huge misunderstanding, that she had checked out Snake’s story and it all was kosher. Two days later, a Sacramento Deputy Sheriff showed up first thing in the morning with a writ from an Ohio Court mandating Snake be taken to juvenile court in Sacramento immediately, pending the arrival of his biological parents in six days. 

Since Daisy still had not hired a lawyer, Cooper, partly intrigued and half overcome by dread, agreed to make an appearance on behalf of the Nguyens and Snake in one week’s time, providing an opportunity for the family to hire actual counsel, which they would clearly need.

Over the next week, awaiting the juvie court hearing, Coop spent hours on his own dime meeting with Snake, who he got released on his own recognizance with a promise to appear at the hearing. The story changed daily. Foster care morphed into a series of relatives’ trailer homes in the Appalachian Hills of southern Ohio, and finally to abusive, serpent-handling itinerant fundamentalist Christian parents who just did not understand him and moved monthly.

On the day before the appointed court date, the whole thing came to a priapic twisted head. Daisy Nguyen, it seems, had been writing a “novel” on state computers and on state time. She had asked Malcolm Keats to take a read and edit it for her. Having an evil sense of humor and a morbid curiosity for the weird and scandalous, and truly intrigued by what this seemingly placid, outwardly boring suburban housewife could possibly have to say that would be the least bit interesting, Keats had agreed to have a read in the early hours at the office. 

Cooper was sitting quietly at his desk, sipping coffee, gently stroking my ears, when we first heard Malcolm’s gasp. Malcom then cleared his throat and made a gurgling sound followed by two “oh my Gods,” a “holy shit,” and an emphatic, “what the fuck!” Keats spun on his chair, jumped up, and circled the tiny room, the whole time shouting, “Unbelievable, unreal, wow!”

I jumped to my feet and started barking excitedly, however, Coop remained seated and calmly asked, “Come on, it can’t be that bad, can it?” Keats then laid out the salacious plotline in detail, and boy, what a plot it was. 

“The main character in the book is a fifty-year-old, sexually repressed Asian American divorcee with a sixteen-year-old daughter. While attending a high school crew regatta in an unnamed midwestern state, the daughter meets a dashing Harvard-bound rower who immediately falls madly in love with the young girl… And her mom! After a bout of heavy petting in the parking lot of the local Dollar Store, young Lancelot, mom, and daughter retreat to the local Motel 6, where mom prepares her daughter for the evening’s Saturnalia by fashioning an origami swan dipped in chocolate before lovingly placing it between the nether lips of her all too willing daughter for an erotic game of hide and seek.” 

Keats was hyperventilating. “We’ve gotta tell the boss,” he practically screamed. 

“What exactly should we tell the straight-laced Chupacabra?” Coop asked, attempting to remain calm. “That his chief of staff is some kind of deviant? That she is likely guilty of Mann Act violations, and statutory rape to boot? How do we break this to him? And she could just deny it, claiming that it is just a fantasy of a bored, middle-aged woman.” 

“We gotta talk to her, first,” Keats said. “We owe her at least that. 

“And tell her what? Coop murmured under his breath.

“That our next step is to talk to the boss. At the very least she should take the opportunity to remove the offending manuscript from the state computer and thus make her private life, private!”

Coop and Keats were still faced with the prospect of the court hearing that Cooper had agreed to attend on her behalf. In the conversation with her, Cooper made it clear that this was a one-off hearing for the purposes of giving her time to hire counsel. It was Cooper and Keats's hope that by eliminating the nascent novel from state property and absenting Cooper from the court proceedings, this whole mess would simply go away. Sadly, this was not to be.

Arriving at the mid-nineteenth century courthouse the next morning in a cold, gray, soul-sucking winter Tule fog, Cooper was greeted by Daisy in her ubiquitous business suit, Jade in a St. Francis High School pleated skirt that would make the Virgin Mary proud, and Robert Jones III, a.k.a. Snake, in a neatly pressed navy blazer and slate-gray slacks with Oxford bucks, grasping a leather-bound King James Bible. A more conservative, upstanding American family you would be hard-pressed to find. 

I left Cal in the car and greeted my “clients.” Daisy, Jade, and Snake entered the courtroom and took their seats in the first row while other litigants filed in and filled the room. My head was on a swivel as I searched assiduously for the odious redneck peckerwoods described in lurid detail by Snake. Case after case came before the court and were swiftly disposed of by the patient and kindly judge. The tiny, wizened woman in black robes listened attentively to the sad stories of abuse and neglect, divorce and custody battles, as the day wore on and the chambers slowly emptied. 

When Daisy’s docket number was finally called, a middle-aged couple, well-groomed and neatly dressed, came forward and introduced themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Jones, the complainants in the case. I tried to hide my shock. As the couple plead their case it became abundantly clear that the sad sack story laid out so painstakingly to me was a scam. I had been played. 

As the sordid tale tumbled out, all I wished was to be released or at a minimum find a deep hole in which I could crawl and hide. The Joneses, it seemed, were proper and reputable members of their community; upstanding Rotarians and Free-Masons; elders in their church, righteous, decent parents; and active in civic affairs. Snake, the youngest of five, had four siblings: one an attorney, one in medical school, and two skilled craftsmen. Snake had always danced to the beat of his own drum, something broadly encouraged by his parents right up until he lost his virginity in a Motel 6 during a regatta in Toledo!

It seemed to be a cut and dry case. However, as with everything in this bizarre tragicomedy, the weirdness had only just begun. As the diminutive chief judge of the Sacramento juvenile court put down her pen, leaned forward and peered over eyeglasses preparing to render a decision, Jade came forward and asked to address the court. Judge Koole, not amused and finally growing impatient, reluctantly decided to hear from the young girl. “You may address the court,” the judge replied, “but keep it brief and to the point.”

Jade quickly sat in the witness box, and after hesitating for a few seconds, looking directly at her mother, she addressed the court in a barely audible voice. “Snake - I mean Robert - and I are deeply in love and were married yesterday in Reno. Here is the license, and here is a photo. That is Robert, in the center is the minister and Elvis impersonator, and on the right, that is me, under the ‘Love Chapel, Tuesday Marriage Discount $19.99’ sign.”

Daisy gasped and started wailing. “You said you loved me, not the little hussy,” she screamed, before collapsing on the floor in a fit of apoplexy. The judge demanded calm and recessed the court while the bailiffs contacted the local mental health authorities who arrived shortly, and after sedating Daisy, took her away strapped to a gurney. 

Shortly thereafter, Judge Koole returned to dismiss the case, pronouncing that with Robert being of legal age to marry under Nevada’s very liberal laws, and Jade’s father having given verbal consent by phone to his daughter’s nuptials, she no longer had jurisdiction. Counsel were welcome to join her in her chambers to discuss the case over a badly needed shot of whiskey!

So this is the office I had joined with Cal. A brilliant (just ask him) and ambitious senator in a hurry to make his mark; a pretentious Yale-educated education expert; and a young hyperkinetic office manager with an attitude, among others. With Ms. Nguyen on indefinite “medical leave,” Keats and I over the next several months scouted far and wide for a chief worthy of Chupacabra, and finally settled on a talented and wonderful veteran of the capitol, Annabelle Botticelli, who brought wisdom, calm, a deep policy background, and a wicked sense of humor to the previously unruly office environment. 

With a gentle, motherly hand, Botticelli managed the staff and the senator well, pushing back where necessary, and over the next months fashioned a smoothly functioning team positioned to move legislation, both critical and insignificant, through the convoluted legislative process. We were ready. 

“This just might work,” Cal said to me several months later. “She is exactly what we need to get some serious public policy enacted. While it does not change my increasingly pessimistic perspective on humanity, maybe, just maybe, we can gain some time and move the needle just a little.”