About 10 hours after a pell-mell evacuation from the Capitol building, more than 100 members of Congress returned to send a message that the republic had withstood the most deadly terrorism attack on U.S. soil.
“We, Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, stand strongly united behind the president and will work together to ensure that the full resources of the government are brought to bear in these efforts,” said Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat pledging his loyalty to the Republican president, George W. Bush.
After the remarks concluded at dusk on Sept. 11, 2001, they held hands and sang “God Bless America.”
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Twenty-five years later, the anniversary will go largely overlooked at the Capitol. Memorial services will be held at the Pentagon and Ground Zero in New York, as well as in southwestern Pennsylvania where a hijacked plane crashed.
The House and Senate are out of session for an extended summer break. Many Republicans are waking up in Dallas after an unusual party convention ahead of the November midterms, a hyperpartisan event in which speakers compared Democrats to the mortal enemy.
The House held six minutes of speeches and a brief moment of silence on Sept. 3 honoring the anniversary.
“We were a different country then. Our country has changed,” Jane Harman, who retired in 2011 after serving 16 years in the House as a moderate Democrat, told The Washington Sun. “I can’t picture us saying the same things now.”
Harman is leading a small group of former members of Congress to meet on the Capitol steps Friday to shine a light on that 2001 moment.
Veteran Republicans, who were on hand back then and have seen the institution change, also doubt Congress could unify like it did in 2001.
“The only time we come together right now is when we see an existential threat,” Rep. Darrell Issa of California, who was a first-year Republican standing three rows behind congressional leaders in 2001, told The Sun. “There isn’t a single threat right now that is causing people to put country first.”
Some younger lawmakers suggested that their generation helped defeat the terrorists overseas and left today’s Congress dealing with smaller issues — and unsure of how to respond to such a major attack.
“You know why we can’t know? Because we sent people like me overseas to fight them over there, so that we had no more 9/11s,” said Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), elected in 2018 after a decade as a Navy SEAL
His deployments resulted in two Bronze Stars, one with a “V” for valor, losing his right eye from an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan.
“People wonder what we got for 20 years of war,” said Crenshaw, who was in high school in South America 25 years ago. “Well, that’s what you got. You got no more 9/11s.”
It’s hard to imagine today, but in mid-August 2001, 50% of adults approved of congressional performance, according to monthly polling by Gallup.
A month after the attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon, 84% of adults approved of Congress, just below the 90% approval for Bush.
Americans had rallied around their leaders in Washington.
The Capitol, which was the intended target for the fourth plane, opened for business the morning after Sept. 11, and within three days both chambers approved a war resolution.
A few weeks later, Bush signed the Patriot Act into law. Some debates took months or a few years but eventually Congress passed a law to change the radio spectrum so first responders had their own wavelength to communicate; tightened immigration laws to screen for terrorists; created a Department of Homeland Security that reorganized security agencies; and reshaped intelligence agencies under a single director of national intelligence.
“It was a recognition that we had our Pearl Harbor, pretty quickly,” Issa said.
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Without prompting, each lawmaker and former member can tell their version of that morning.
“I was sitting in the Veterans Affairs Committee, in the Cannon Building, to introduce [a new local leader] to the committee,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) recalled.
Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who retired in early 2023 after 36 years in the House, took his usual early-morning route past the Pentagon to avoid traffic. He drove to a Senate-side press conference meant to boost 911 emergency services.
It got canceled once the real 9/11 started to unfold. He drove home to Virginia.
Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro was in a Democratic leadership meeting when an aide came in and turned on the television. “Then the plane was headed to the second tower. Everyone got up, we canceled the meeting,” she told The Sun.
Eventually U.S. Capitol Police started screaming at lawmakers and aides to evacuate the office buildings, as rumors swirled about the fourth plane and more attacks.
“We just ran. We ran out of the building, ran through the streets. No one knew where the hell we were going,” DeLauro said.
Issa was supposed to be at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. Alone in his office after staff had been evacuated, he grabbed the keys to his chief of staff’s truck, went to the basement garage and drove a few other members over to the U.S. Capitol Police headquarters on the Senate side of the complex.
That became the briefing point for most rank-and-file lawmakers. Top congressional leaders had been evacuated to a secure location far outside Washington. Despite some security warnings against returning to the Capitol, both Democrats and Republicans argued for some demonstration of unity.
“The American people needed to know that the government was still standing,” DeLauro said.
At 7:15 p.m., lawmakers walked up to the center steps of the Capitol’s East Front, Republicans and Democrats, members of the House and Senate, all intermixed.
All 10 bipartisan leaders in the front row are long gone from office. Bernie Sanders, then in his sixth House term, stood near the back of the group, almost 15 years away from his first presidential campaign that made him a national figure.
Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, barely nine months into his first House term, stood next to another freshman Republican, Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake, long before Donald Trump’s presidency defined their political careers.
All told, less than 10% of the members of the 107th Congress are still serving today. In today’s Congress, of the top 12 elected leaders in the four caucuses, just three — Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin — were in office on 9/11.
Politics hit the pause button back then.
Tom Davis saw the TV coverage of planes hitting the World Trade Center in New York while he was still home in Fairfax County. As chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Davis called his staff and told them to go home.
Party committees and candidates for Congress suspended fundraising and political activities for several weeks or more.
In the news media, there were only a few cable outlets along with the national TV networks. Digital news didn’t really exist. Regional newspapers still flourished.
“The way people received their news was pretty uniform,” Davis said.
Super PACs didn’t exist and very few lawmakers worried about an extreme ideological challenge in a primary.
“We didn’t cater to the extremes,” Davis said. “Their worst instincts weren’t rewarded. They were punished.”
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That era’s lawmakers made their share of mistakes, helping erode America’s faith in its leaders.
Issa and Harman regret their votes for the Patriot Act, which was used by the Bush administration for gathering information on U.S. citizens that lawmakers would later try to rein in.
“President Bush wanted every authority he could have. The FBI saw it as an opportunity, and America was in no mood to overly debate what it took to make us safe,” Issa said.
The Iraq War won support in Congress through false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. Lawmakers struggled to respond to reports of torture interrogations in U.S. facilities abroad.
And the federal deficit, which Congress and President Bill Clinton had turned into a surplus in the late 1990s, began to mushroom again, on its way to total more than $40 trillion in debt this year.
“In many respects, we lost our way. We made some huge mistakes,” Harman said.
Congress did manage to come together during the 2008 financial crisis to pass a relief package to prevent another economic depression, but years later most voters derided that effort because no Wall Street executives went to prison.
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Congress passed massive relief packages totalling trillions of dollars. Its approval rating soared to 30%, the first time in more than a decade that that many Americans had seen it favorably — a far cry from the 50% approval just before 9/11.
Eventually, pandemic-era lockdowns turned into political culture wars across the nation.
For some lawmakers, the closest moment to 9/11 came on Jan. 6, 2021, when the far-right, Trump-infused attack on the Capitol sought to block the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump.
Once the Capitol was secured, Congress returned to work. Pence, overseeing the Senate debate as vice president, delivered a rousing speech about lawmakers fulfilling their duties, just hours after some of the rioters had chanted “hang Mike Pence.”
He received a standing ovation from both sides of the Senate.
But the House debate had little of that spirit. A handful of Democrats and Republicans needed to be separated during a near-brawl in the chamber.
To this day, Democrats say it’s hard to work with Republicans who have not condemned Jan. 6, especially those who have cheered on Trump’s efforts to wash it away from the history books.
“We believe there were people who participated in encouraging Jan. 6, that are House members, and who tried on that night to rationalize it,” Hoyer said last week.
“Donald Trump ruins and destroys everything, including bipartisanship,” said Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colorado).
Crow, now in his fourth House term, was a senior in college in September 2001. He requested to be let out of his ROTC duties and into active duty in the Army, deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.
He is now focused intensely on defeating Republicans in November through his role at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
“I’m going to try to send a lot of these folks packing and send them home, and bring in the next generation of servant leaders who are willing to have the courage to do the job,” the Bronze Star recipient said.
Issa said he tries to hold out some hope that a really existential threat would galvanize today’s Congress, but he has his doubts.
“Is the job important enough to put country first, or can you afford to be petty? And the answer lately is, yeah, we’re pettier than we’ve ever been,” Issa said.
For now, Harman is just trying to shine a light on how Congress responded 25 years ago. Maybe the former lawmakers will sing “God Bless America” again.
“It didn’t matter if the person next to you was a Republican or a Democrat, because America was under attack,” she said. “I think it’s important to honor the memory.”
Photo illustrations by Kainaz Amaria/The Washington Sun
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