‘Somebody has to do it’

Not many poor people get elected to the U.S. Senate. Not many office-holders go straight there from a job as a sales clerk at Wal-Mart or McDonald's. It's been many a year since one of them ended his or her years of service in noble poverty.

And the place looks it. Ice is delivered daily, by hand, for the ice bucket in each senatorial office. Elevators are manned by actual elevator operators. In the ornate Senate Dining Room on the first floor of the Capitol, senators and their guests are served by waiters wearing jackets and ties -- not minimum wage employees of some mere "food service" contractor, but actual government employees with benefits and pension plans to die for, earning an average of $37,000 per year.

For that kind of outlay, the menus must be pretty delectable, right?

Actually ... no. This is a federal government operation, remember?

The House of Representatives put its food service operations, at the other end of the building, into the hands of a private contractor in the 1980s -- when the place was under Democratic control.

Restaurant Associates of New York, the current House contractor, turns a substantial profit on the House cafeterias, paying $1.2 million in commissions to the House since 2003.

Food offerings on the Senate side, on the other hand, pretty much stink. The world's most exclusive dining hall and its affiliated Capitol Hill restaurants, cafeterias and coffee shops have managed to lose more than $18 million since 1993, and an estimated $2 million this year. If the operations don't get a $250,000 subsidy from taxpayers, the Senate won't make payroll next month. Why?

"In a masterful bit of understatement," California Sen. Dianne Feinstein blames "noticeably subpar" food and service, The Washington Post reported over the weekend. "The embarrassment of the Senate food service struggling like some neighborhood pizza joint has quietly sparked change previously unthinkable for Democrats," The Post reports. "Last week, in a late-night voice vote, the Senate agreed to privatize the operation of its food service, a decision that would, for the first time, put it under the control of a contractor and all but guarantee lower wages and benefits for the outfit's new hires."

The cognitive dissonance -- given the way some liberal senators never tire of lambasting greedy free-market companies or cash-strapped local governments who insist on "harming American workers" by "privatizing" or "contracting out" to escape costly government mandates -- was not lost on all the members.

"You cannot stand on the Senate floor and condemn the privatization of workers, and then turn around and privatize the workers here in the Senate and leave them out on their own," thundered Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., speaking for the group of senators who opposed privatizing the restaurants.

But Sen. Feinstein, whose Rules committee is charged with handling such internal operations, insists there's no other choice. The liberal Californian was practically heckled by her peers in a closed-door meeting in November, The Post reports. "I know what happens with privatization," argued Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, a staunch union ally. "Workers lose jobs, and the next generation of workers make less in wages. These are some of the lowest-paid workers in our country, and I want to help them."

But in a follow-up presentation May 7, Sen. Feinstein warned her colleagues that if they did not agree to turn over the operation to a private contractor, prices would have to be raised 25 percent across the board. Finally, Democrats agreed, providing guarantees are offered for workers who transfer to the employ of the private contractor, allowing them to retain their current salaries and federal health and pension benefits.

New employees will be allowed to unionize, but would not receive federal employee benefits. Employees who choose to leave will receive buyout packages of as much as $25,000 -- paid by the Senate. About half the current employees are expected to take that deal.

By one estimate, Restaurant Associates should be able to turn a profit within three years and begin paying about $800,000 annually in commissions to the Senate.

"It's clearly not the sort of thing that I ran for the Senate to do," Sen. Feinstein says. "But somebody has to do it."

Economic realities, impinging even on Democrats in the U.S. Senate. Will wonders never cease?