Karen Bass is a long way from Sacramento. A year ago, she was overseeing an $86 billion state budget as speaker of the California state Assembly. Today, she is one of the last people to speak at a House Budget Committee hearing. In the Statehouse, she held the gavel and sat in the speaker’s chair. Now, in Washington, she’s at the bottom of the seniority ladder and gets some of the least-enviable speaking slots on the House floor. She’s one of only nine freshman Democrats, now in the House minority.
The transition from state politics to Congress is humbling for many new lawmakers, but for Bass, the first African-American woman to lead a statehouse, the comedown is even more dramatic. If she’s bothered by the transition from Sacramento power player to Washington back bencher, she’s not letting on.
“A lot of people ask me what it’s like to go from being in charge to being one of 435,” Bass said. “I love it!”
She guided California through a massive budget crisis last year. Now, she has little more to do than learn the ins and outs of life as one of the members of the House chamber.
In Sacramento, Bass began her mornings early. “My days as speaker began with assembling all of my staff and going through what was happening in all of the committees, what was going to come up on the floor, what was coming up in the press,” she said while sitting at a table in the Speaker’s Lobby, just outside the House chamber. “So as speaker, I had to begin my day in a global fashion, and I had to know everything that was happening with my caucus, with the Republican caucus, with what was happening in all of the committees ... And then, because we were in a crisis from beginning to end, it was what is the cash situation for the state, what was our credit rating — all of that.”
In Washington, Bass’s mornings are narrowly focused. A former physician’s assistant and community organizer who founded a nonprofit to tackle the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, Bass starts each day in a rented apartment left fully furnished for her by her predecessor, former Rep. Diane Watson (D-Calif.).
She drives the maroon Mazda LZ 626 that used to belong to Rep. John Salazar, who was defeated by one of Bass’s freshman Republican colleagues last year. A divorcee who lost her only daughter and son-in-law in a 2006 car accident, Bass now begins her mornings with a conference call or meeting — sometimes related to her recruitment efforts for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Lately, she’s been trying to make more time for the gym.
Because of California’s strict six-year term limits, Bass became majority whip on her first day in the state Legislature in 2004. As state Assembly speaker, she helped steer California through a $26 billion budget shortfall — and ultimately backed a budget that included billions in cuts to the state’s education programs.
“You find yourself making terrible decisions that keep you up at night,” she said, of the state’s budget slashing.
In Washington, there’s virtually no scenario where a rookie lawmaker could become speaker of the House in just six years.
But she does have a modicum of sympathy for the current speaker, John Boehner (R-Ohio), as he tries to steer his conference through a vicious budget battle.
“It is very familiar, the budget fight,” Bass said of the spending debate in Washington.
