Anniversaries can be weird. Forget them and you’ll hear about it. Ignore them and someone will feel left out and hurt. Indulge them with too much fanfare and it’s tacky. So let’s start with this: Thank you for having us be a part of your day for the last 70 years. When the first edition of Roll Call hit the Capitol on June 16, 1955, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., was 4 years old. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Vice President JD Vance, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., were all years from being born. Overall, 122 of the current 538 members of Congress were alive when that first Roll Call rolled out. (Here’s a very Roll Call thing to note: That number includes delegates from the District of Columbia, Guam, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner, the only member of Congress who serves a four-year term.) It’s nice to be a part of things. It’s not always comfortable. I’m under no illusion that if people just had a few bolts of bourbon after work and played cards under a haze of cigar smoke until dawn that they would all get along and Congress would pass bipartisan legislation with popular support that would have a positive impact on the country. I do think when people spend time together in a variety of settings it helps them see each other more clearly, as well as their perspectives and something about the places and folks they represent back home, which in turn breeds respect. I wrote for Roll Call’s 60th anniversary edition about how the Congressional Baseball Game was entwined with our own from the start, and how our founder, Sid Yudain, worked with congressional leaders to bring it back after a hiatus. Those things do matter. But I also acknowledge the specter of political violence that hangs over Congress, most recently with the June 14 assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark — and that this did not come out of nowhere. Just in the last decade-and-a-half, there has been an attempted assassination of President Donald Trump last year on the campaign trail; an assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob trying to stop the certification of President Joe Biden’s electoral win; the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., at a Congressional Baseball Game practice a little over eight years ago in 2017; the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., back in her Tucson-based district in 2011. That’s not an exhaustive list, but one gets the point. And it’s not just the near term. Shortly after I first moved to Washington in 1998, two Capitol Police officers, Officer Jacob J. Chestnut Jr. and Detective John M. Gibson, were shot and killed on July 24 by an assailant hunting for congressional leaders. More than a year before Roll Call started publishing, Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire in the House gallery on March 1, 1954, injuring five members of the House. The 19th century is replete with brawls, duels and canings, and let’s not forget the British burned the Capitol and most of Washington in 1814. I don’t want to be a bummer here, but to not acknowledge the rough time the congressional community is experiencing right now, as well as its history, would be disingenuous. You take the good with the bad, and the humdrum and the hard, the joy and the trauma and it adds up to a life. All of which, in my opinion, makes it all the more important for us to show up and do the work. Amid the fast pace of news, we at Roll Call also want to provide readers with a sense of what else is happening in Congress, whether it’s strain within the Capitol Police Department or a stuffed moose in the Hart Senate Office Building; tension among boomers and Gen Z or mural art in the Longworth House Office Building; the death of a relatively unheralded former member; the question of where are the clouds in “Mountains and Clouds.” Platinum, a pricey and precious metal, is the gift most associated with a 70th anniversary. I’m really privileged to be a part of a publication that has not only hit that anniversary but continues to seek ways to connect with its readers and its community, with an eye to continue doing that for other anniversaries and all the days in between. We’ll be rolling out stories and reflections from the people who helped build Roll Call in the days and weeks ahead. It’s nice to be here.
