Keeping Faith in Congress: Why Persistence, Compassion, and Teamwork Will Save Our Democracy

By Lois Capps and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi

In 1996, Walter Capps won a seat in US House of Representatives. Less than a year later, he suffered a massive heart attack at Dulles Airport and died in his wife's arms. Lois Capps, a retired school nurse, decided just a few days later to run for her husband's seat. She won that election and went on to serve six more terms in Congress, representing the central coast of California and advocating progressive causes.

In Keeping Faith in Congress, Lois Capps poignantly tells her story--of her husband's death and her decision to run, of her daughter's death to cancer just a few years later, of her efforts to work across the aisle, and of her work on behalf of her constituents.

No matter what personal or professional obstacles she faced, Representative Capps never lost faith in democracy. Instead, even the challenges taught her lessons. Now she shares those lessons, hoping that others can be inspired to work on behalf of the common good.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781506440330

Book preview

Pelosi

PREFACE

Stories teach.

I’m not the kind of person who lectures others. As you’ll see in the pages that follow, my Norwegian Lutheran midwestern upbringing precludes that kind of thing. I do consider myself something of a teacher—I taught nursing back in the day, and I also taught in my role as a public-school nurse—but I’m not the kind of teacher who tells others what to do or how to live their lives. Instead, I tend to tell stories, hoping that they will instruct.

This book, therefore, is not didactic. The chapters are not Aesop’s Fables, with a tidy moral at the end. Nor is this a political memoir—I honestly don’t consider my life dramatic enough to write that kind of book.

What I’ve done here is tell stories in each chapter, stories that center on a theme. Some of the stories, like the ones about the deaths of my husband and daughter, are quite personal in nature. Others are about significant bills I sponsored or trips I took with other elected officials. My hope is that these stories teach and inform and that you, as a reader, can draw your own conclusions about how we might save our democracy from the impulses and interests that threaten it.

I served in Congress during an interesting time. In my two decades, my party was both in the majority and in the minority. I served alongside both Republican and Democratic presidents. I sat through an impeachment (and voted against it). I also voted against the Iraq War, a vote of conscience for which I am still proud.

I also watched our country and my colleagues become more and more polarized, with dire consequences. And yet, I continue to believe in democracy. I think that our system of government will survive its current crisis, just as it has survived past crises.

My faith in democracy is rooted in my unshakeable faith in my fellow Americans. Of course, we all have vain, petty, and even sinful urges, but time and again we have risen above those and done what’s best for the country and for each other.

Some might accuse me of naïveté, but they’re wrong. I’m not naïve. However, I refuse to get cynical. Cynicism is a cancer in democracy. The answer to the problems facing America is not cynicism but active participation. As the subtitle of this book proclaims, we need persistence and teamwork, and everything needs to be undergirded with compassion.

Just yesterday, as I was making final edits on this book, nearly a million young people marched in rallies around the country in the March for Our Lives. They were protesting gun violence, and I am quite sure that every one of the 435 members of the House of Representatives paid attention to the message that those young people were sending. That is why I still have faith in American democracy, because while it may be messy, and it’s surely not perfect, it still works.

Of course, the title of this book has a double meaning. I have faith in Congress, in my colleagues, and in American democracy. But I also held on to my religious faith while I was in Congress. My faith happens to be Christian, and I am committed to that faith. But I’m also committed to E pluribus unum—that out of many faiths and beliefs, we are one. I think it’s possible to believe what I do and still respect my fellow citizens who hold other beliefs or who have no faith. It’s essential to our democracy that it is fundamentally secular. However, my fellow Democrats have a problem: we have ceded all talk of faith to conservatives. While I’m not one to proselytize, I do think it’s important that those of us who are faithful and progressive learn to talk about being both faithful and progressive. The religious Right does not own Christianity. In fact, I think an argument can be made that Jesus was a progressive in his day.

I hope that my words about faith in this book will not be off-putting to those who are not Christian. This is simply my story and the faith of my parents and my tradition, which shaped me.

Among the titles we considered for this book was My Time of Grace in Congress. While that didn’t ultimately make the book cover, it does accurately state something I believe strongly: my two decades of public life were pure grace. I didn’t expect to run for office any more than I expected to bury my husband. But these things happened, and I did my best to roll with them. Looking back, all I see is grace—the grace of God, but also the enormous grace that was extended to me by voters, staff, volunteers, and colleagues.

You, dear readers, are one more grace to me. Thank you for reading. I pray that this book is a grace to you.

Lois Capps

March 25, 2018

Santa Barbara, California

1

AROUND THE TABLE

Democracy is born in conversation!

When my husband, Walter Capps, campaigned for Congress in 1994 and again in 1996, he often used this quote. It underscored his belief that the framers of the US Constitution envisioned Congress—and particularly the House of ­Representatives—as composed of ordinary folks. Representatives would lay down the implements of their trades, shake the farm-field mud from their boots, and come to the halls of Congress from time to time to write laws and govern.

I came from the same type of stock as Walter—midwestern farmers and pastors. And though my own service in Congress was even more unlikely than his, I came to embrace this same idea of democracy and conversation. Much of that conversation centered on an ordinary place in an ordinary home: the humble dining table in our kitchen, the place where family members and friends have gathered for significant conversations and important decisions through the years. It’s at this table that I am writing these words now.

And it was at this table in 1993 that Walter, a popular professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), with no previous political experience, announced to our family his interest in running for ­Congress—and as a Democrat in a district that had been Republican since World War II! His course, Religion and the Impact of the Vietnam War, was famous on campus. He had always been politically engaged—including his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War—but he’d never run for office. In fact, he’d never even mentioned it. His announcement was met with both astonishment and skepticism in that first conversation around this table.

Walter had recently returned from a trip to Washington, DC, with a group of students. They had raised money to take some Vietnam veterans to see the newly dedicated Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall. While there, Walter wanted to visit the newly elected representative of our district, Michael Huffington, but Michael’s staff could not locate him. It turns out that our representative had already begun running for a Senate seat, and Walter (along with many of us) was growing frustrated with his lack of representation. That, along with the upcoming vacancy of Michael’s seat, piqued Walter’s curiosity.

Walter’s announcement at the dining table was not met with overwhelming enthusiasm by the family. Our youngest, Laura, was excited but others raised practical concerns about the world he would be getting into. As they saw it, Walter would be leaving a place of hard-earned respect and achievement as a humanities scholar at the peak of his career for a very different world: the rough-and-tumble fray of national politics. In truth, Walter had plenty of his own second thoughts throughout the campaign process. His head was filled with Jeffersonian ideals and the lessons of de Tocqueville, the subject of a summer course he had taught to high-school teachers through the National Endowment for the Humanities. But it soon became clear that the mundane realities of campaigning had more to do with fundraising phone calls and meetings with party bosses—activities that were not high on his list of priorities. It was a tough road for him, but he persevered.

What I remember feeling the night of his announcement was a combination of trepidation and a palpable sense of excitement about a new adventure, starting something unknown together as a family. As a preacher’s kid, raised in a series of parsonages in Wisconsin, Montana, and Washington, I was accustomed to uprootedness and change, and I even came to enjoy the experience. I trusted Walter’s conviction, and I was confident in his overall appeal and ability to inspire. But I worried that we were getting in over our heads, and that he might end up getting discouraged by the demands and grind of a campaign. Ultimately, it became clear that this was something he felt compelled to pursue, and within a couple weeks it was from this same dining table that Walter made the first round of phone calls to close friends and prospective supporters.

It’s a simple table. Plain, not fancy. We purchased it soon after moving to Santa Barbara in 1964, and it seemed elegant then, including six tall chairs with back rungs that our toddlers would climb like ladders. Once, when my sister visited from Oregon for her birthday, one of the chairs was fashioned by our young children into a queen’s throne, using streamers and decorations, complete with a fan for effect—my sister sat stoically as the fan blew on her all through dinner. The extra table leaves are made of solid wood; they’re clunky and awkward, but we add them to accommodate Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter gatherings. It was also around this table that we entertained guests who came to speak in Walter’s classes at UCSB: Joseph Campbell, Thomas Merton, George McGovern, Sister Mary Corita Kent, Senator Bob Kerrey. Those dinner conversations were profound and influential experiences.

It is still hard for me to believe that only a few short years later, I would find myself at this very same table, a widow, making similar phone calls as an unlikely congressional candidate myself. In the years following, I would sit at this table and hold conversations with constituents, make fundraising calls, and talk with my staff and advisors. And yet, the papers and notes were cleared off every night so that our family could sit down and eat dinner together.

•••••••

There have been other tables, too, on my journey of public service. The debate table is one, set up in a hall or community center where voters can hear candidates share their views on a host of issues. Walter ran his first campaign in 1994 against Andrea Seastrand, and she was his first