As part of Roll Call’s 70th anniversary, we’ve asked several notable alumni to reflect on their time working for the paper.

When I moved across the newsroom, from CQ to Roll Call, I went from tracking procedure to tracking people. 

At CQ, we laid bare the business of governance through boxes ticked and rules mapped out, using clear and precise language honed over decades to render the complexities of the legislative processes understandable. 

At Roll Call, my job was to chronicle the people without whom legislation wouldn’t exist — those whose efforts stitched together the laws and policies of a government meant to serve more than 340 million people across 50 states, various territories and the District of Columbia.

The shift from studying the system to studying its stewards was profound. It taught me that whatever else Washington ran on, it would collapse without a foundation of basic respect, and, I’d argue, kindness.

Over the years, walking through the halls of House and Senate office buildings, through press galleries and scrums, several truths crystallized: First, the Capitol runs off the young. Reporters, interns, staffers — scarcely a fully developed frontal lobe in sight. And yet, with that youthful energy came a real purpose. Most people weren’t there for money or fame, or even to get a six-figure lobbying gig a couple of years down the line, but for love of country, of its people and of its promise.

What unified almost everyone on Capitol Hill was a desire to be a part of a living history, a participant in the American experiment. 

As I reported, I didn’t just meet those who rolled in and out with elections, but the people who kept the place alive: the cafeteria workers, janitors, police officers, and others.

I read my colleagues’ stories about the Senate gym and the barber shop, and I delighted in tales of lawmakers living in group houses or the backroom of a dive bar, and of staffers committed to growing a perfect rubber band ball. 

I knew a House member who played bluegrass with his staff; another one who spoke of his faith not as a tool of regulation or subjugation, but as something intimate and personal, and still another who bonded with me over our relationships with our mothers. 

These quirks and kindness, large and small, became Capitol Hill to me — a chaotic place with a beating heart.

My job, as I saw it, was to document that which made this place unique: a mad mix of people thrown together to figure out how to make this country work. 

There were already shadows of what was coming — a member shouting “You lie!” at a sitting president during a joint address to Congress, both parties playing chicken with the fiscal cliff, conspiracy theories about an American president and more.

Even so, most recognized that Congress worked best when it championed humility, respect and a clear-eyed sort of kindness born of recognizing our shared humanity and common cause, with allies and opposition alike.

Hill people understood that their interns might someday be their bosses; that many disagreements were manufactured for someone else’s gain, and that nothing good ever came from toiling in isolation and shouting into an echo chamber. 

In the dozen years since I left Roll Call, though, I’ve watched as those lessons were ignored. It may not have started when a candidate mimicked a reporter with a disability, or when another assaulted a reporter, but those moments marked a turning point. 

Now, lawmakers, staffers, and operatives have embraced a culture of open cruelty. And since politics is simply people wrestling over policy, that cruelty has seeped into the work itself — into legislative language, executive orders, and the rhetoric trumpeted on cable news panels, social media and in town halls. 

Congress is in its cruel era. The most powerful now mock, threaten, and bully constituents and opponents alike, systematically stripping away the humanity of those they want gone — out of power or out of the country. It’s all the same.

Now, Congress and those toiling under the Dome are choosing hubris and a breathtaking viciousness to get what they want — by any means necessary. By doing so, they are sacrificing the country itself and our right to a functioning legislative branch that checks the executive and serves the people.

If nothing else, that choice signals how they’ll care for the rest of us.

Neda Toloui-Semnani, who worked at CQ and Roll Call from 2008-2013, is a multimedia journalist and the author of “They Said They Wanted Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents.” She’s currently an associate teaching professor of journalism at the Donald P. Bellario College of Communications at Penn State.