On a January afternoon in 2022, I sat masked on the Floor of the U.S. Senate perched in a familiar spot on the long bench designated for staff that lines the chamber’s back wall. As I had done countless times before, I watched my boss of nearly eight years rise to his feet, attach a lapel microphone to his suit jacket and utter the refrain with which I had become so familiar that I was nearly immune to its prompt “Mr. President…” He was beginning to tell the world the story of my time in the Senate, commemorating the end of my career on Capitol Hill.

 

That staff bench, with its mahogany frame and firm red velvet cushion, had once seemed as unrealistic for me to occupy as the Chair of St. Peter under the dome of his Basilica, the very structure that inspired the Capitol Building itself. I had spent many hours in that chamber and its counterpart across the Capitol Building in the House listening to (and often having written) the words uttered by members of Congress across the spectrum of issues impacting Americans and the world for a decade and a half.

 

This time, the speech wasn’t about a bill or the crisis of the day, it was about me. It was my swan song, a nearly 15-minute soliloquy from my boss, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, about our time together and my tenure as a Congressional staffer. Instead of feeling overwhelmed with pride at the honor of a U.S. Senator taking to the Floor to talk about my accomplishments, my stomach sank with an unsettling reality; I was leaving the Senate having failed in the most important mission of my career. After months of grueling effort, we were unable to enshrine even the most basic protections to secure our democracy in the aftermath of its most serious threat since its establishment.

 

Mine was as unlikely of a path to Washington as there could be. Before (and sometimes during) my political career, I labored with my hands and body. I’ve been a caregiver, a handyman, a garbage man, a janitor, a laborer, a winner and a loser. I’ve been broke and I’ve broken even. Overeducated and underpaid, undereducated and underpaid. If I am anything, I am a creation of the place I came from – my blue-collar Long Island home – not a DC denizen.

 

I have spent most of my life listening to, watching, analyzing, predicting and thinking about the actions and words of politicians and people in power. I built a career out of translating what they do to the most important audience of all: The People. In short, I advise powerful people on strategy, what to say and how, when and to whom they should say or not say anything. I then get the message out to the public through the press, social media, histrionics, theatrics, stunts and by any means necessary. 

 

I’m good at what I do because I never had any business doing it. I come from the other side of the ledger of the Washington elite, the working-class people that every politician wants to love and support them. I know how they feel about things and what they need to hear because I am them. Despite all my years in Washington and the many miles I have logged running back and forth through the Capitol Building, those parts of me – my roots, my truth – have always been my most powerful tools and sought-after commodity. 

 

I know intimately what it means to worry about everything and yearn for something, anything, better. I know the resilience of the people who break their backs and hearts day in and day out just to do it over again and again. I have lived through so many of the crises that drive people away from hope and toward darker tendencies. When the economy changed even slightly, my family and community felt it. When the economy changed dramatically, we all lost and started to resent each other, everyone and everything that we believed made life harder, including those in power who were supposed to be serving The People, not themselves.

 

In his speech, my soon-to-be former boss talked about some of our adventures together and a few of my proudest professional moments, like when the two of us, on a whim, hopped on a flight to McAllen, TX, to investigate and ultimately expose the Trump administration’s controversial family separation policy at the U.S./Mexico border. As he spoke, describing my work as igniting a national firestorm around the asylum and refugee crisis and bringing the nefarious practice to an end, I sunk further and further into that red velvet-covered mahogany settee. 

 

It was moving to hear the Senator’s words, but as I squirmed to avoid the gaze of the robotic CSPAN cameras mounted in the Senate gallery, my thoughts wandered back to what I hadn’t accomplished.

 

My final act as a Senate staffer was seeing through to their deaths two of the most significant priorities of my tenure in the august body: the bill to secure our democracy and voting rights for all Americans and the effort to reform the bastardized instrument of debate known as the Senate filibuster. To me, the filibuster is the thing that breaks Congress and the hearts of Americans all the time and despite our best efforts, we failed to fix it. 

 

I wasn’t naïve. I was no stranger to the cruel fact of politics that some of the most important things either never get done, or are ultimately accomplished incrementally over many more years of service than I had left in me to offer. Still, just 378 days after it had been defiled by an outrageous attack on democracy’s norms and rules, I departed from that beautiful domed building for the last time gutted, exhausted, frustrated and unfulfilled.

 

I have obsessively given every part of my being to the principle that there is nothing more fundamental or critical to our civilization than the pursuit and perfection of democracy. I have pushed my body and mind to the brink of collapse for decades as a defender of democracy because I believe it is the only way to give everyone an equal shot at a fairer and better life. Without it, we have nothing, and with it, We the People can have everything.

 

I left the Senate a battle-worn cynic. And nothing has felt right since. 

 

The ache of watching our beloved democracy take hit after hit continues to gnaw at me. If I have learned anything throughout my political career, it is that nothing will motivate a person like unfinished business.

 

Now I’m on a journey to figure out what I missed. What I got wrong about the people and places I thought I knew. The ideals and beliefs I thought we shared. 

 

After years spent talking to Americans through politicians, I am cutting out the middleman and listening to what’s on their minds, not telling them what’s on someone else’s sitting in Washington.

 

This thing that is happening in the country is as confounding as it is fascinating and terrifying. It is painful, and yet, like a TV forensic scientist, I can’t stop trying to figure out how it happened, who dunnit and how the story will end. 

 

I am not on a mission to convert anyone in some sort of roving tent revival or to proselytize my view of the world. I am just desperate to understand what is cutting us so close to severing the mast of democracy that has always held our nation upright, true and afloat, no matter how harsh the waves have been that have crashed down upon us. 

 

This journey is not about speaking truth to power. It’s about listening to the only true source of power: The People.