Ryan's cot makes D.C. office home

Speaker early to bed, early to rise, showers at House gym, gets to work

WASHINGTON -- The speaker has no house.

Of all his unusual traits for his new role -- relative youth, a love of Clif Bars for lunch and an excessive interest in tax policy -- the most notable may be House Speaker Paul Ryan's insistence on sleeping in his Capitol Hill office.

Like scores of other members of Congress, most of them Republicans, Ryan chooses to bed down on a cot in his office every night that the House is in session. He chooses this over the speaker's official palatial suite in the Capitol, which Ryan has said stinks of smoke from its previous occupant, John Boehner.

So it is that he sleeps in his far smaller office in the Longworth House Office Building, one of three such buildings that over the years have become veritable homeless shelters for members of the House.

For the lawmakers, the choice is fiscal, practical and political. Many say they find Washington rental prices too high. Others say it allows them to work longer and harder hours, unfettered by commutes and the distraction of late-night television.

Still others, like Ryan, say Washington is simply not their home, so why get a basement apartment and a few lamps and pretend?

"I live in Janesville, Wisconsin," Ryan said in an interview with CNN earlier this month, referring to his 5,800-square-foot Georgian home (locally referred to as the Parker Mansion because it was built by George Parker of Parker pens). "I commute back and forth every week. I just work here. I don't live here. I get up very early in the morning. I work out. I work until about 11:30 at night. I go to bed, and I do the same thing the next day."

He added, "I can actually get more work done by sleeping on a cot in my office, and I'm going to keep doing it."

The cot club has at least 50 members. No one keeps an official tally and many are loath to talk about a practice that some groups and other members have criticized over the years as essentially taxpayer-subsidized housing. Its members include the most senior Republican leaders, Ryan and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the majority leader, as well as a handful of women.

(Only one Republican senator, Jeff Flake of Arizona, is believed to sleep in his office, but he declined to confirm this, as he smiled sheepishly before slinking into an elevator.)

Those who imagine slumber parties and lawmakers padding in their slippers along dark hallways would be disappointed. Most say they arrive after 11 p.m., attack a pile of papers and go right to sleep.

Former U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin, R-Ark., who is now Arkansas' lieutenant governor, used to sleep next door to Ryan's office. Griffin said he is a bit nostalgic about the late-night vending machine runs.

"You can't beat the late-night sausage biscuits or a microwave hamburger," he said. "I am sure the Delicious Police would ban just about everything down there if they could."

Ryan occasionally stays with members of his extended family in Bethesda, Md., when his wife and three children are in town. But most nights, he does as most office sleepers do -- attends a benefit or dinner, heads to the office, pulls out a cot and goes to sleep. (Ryan, unlike many lawmakers, aims for a 9 p.m. bedtime.)

He is up before 6 a.m. Like most in the cot club, he schleps to the House gym in workout clothes, exercises, then takes a shower there.

(Ryan is apparently perplexed by all the interest in the fact that the speaker, the man second in line for the presidency after the vice president, brushes his teeth in an efficiency kitchen sink in his office.)

The gold medal of office sleeping, however, goes to Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, now on his third bed since he arrived in Washington in 2009.

First there was the blowup bed, but "I must be too fat," he said, "because I woke up one morning on the ground." After too many midnight deflations, he moved on to a Coleman cot ($44) but its springs were too weak. Lately he has settled on a more sturdy frame and mattress from Wal-Mart ($69).

He keeps sheets in a closet, along with a warm blanket, which is especially important, he said, because the heat goes off from roughly midnight to 4 a.m. In another closet he has several suits and the rest of his clothing. He also keeps a small vacuum cleaner on hand for last-minute housekeeping, and frozen pizzas that he can heat in his toaster oven.

"For me the No. 1 driver is money," he said. "I have two kids in college." He conceded that the arrangement was "not for everybody. It's uncomfortable, and it's just lonely."

Yet some like a final solitary escape from a day of endless jawboning. "I love it," said Rep. Kristi Noem, R-S.D. "If I can't sleep I get up and work."

Is it at all creepy?

"My mother worried about that," she said. In fact, most members find the omnipresence of the police and cleaning crews assuring.

Office sleeping first became a thing in the 1980s, shortly after Dick Armey, R-Texas, was elected to the House and decided to make the Cannon House Office Building his Sheraton. Speaker James Wright, D-Texas, ended the practice, saying essentially that it was gross.

Critics aside, legislators have quietly continued office sleeping in recent years. In at least one case it is a kind of tradition.

"My predecessor slept on his couch for 18 years," said Rep. Bill Huizenga, a Michigan Republican elected in 2010, referring to former Rep. Peter Hoekstra, also a Republican, whose couch is now in a museum in his home state. "When I was running for election, people asked me three things: What are you going to do about spending? What are you going to do about Obamacare? Are you sleeping on your couch like he did?"

SundayMonday on 11/22/2015

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