Editor’s letter

Like so many political junkies, I was a congressional intern.

For two summers in college, I worked at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, first as an unpaid mailroom grunt, and then in the sergeant-at-arms office for a piddling stipend. Back then, in the late 1980s, metal detectors were still a relatively new feature at congressional office buildings—they were only installed after the Capitol bombing of 1983, a little-remembered stunt in which radical leftists protesting the U.S. invasion of Grenada planted dynamite outside the Senate Chamber and blew off a door. The bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building by white supremacist Timothy McVeigh in 1995 brought another round of increased security measures, as did the 9/11 attacks. Most of the local offices that senators and representatives have back in their home states, though, still have very little security.

That’s why it was so easy for an attacker to burst into the Fairfax, Va., office of Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly and assault two staffers, one of them an intern on her first day on the job, with a baseball bat. (See The U.S. at a glance, p.7.) Connolly represents the district where I grew up, and I saw myself in that intern. She’s lucky to be alive, and the rest of the staff is rattled. “We’re hanging in there,” communications director Jamie Smith told me. “We’ve conferred with the sergeant-at-arms office on extra security measures.” One can only imagine how much worse the attack could have been if the assailant had been one of the 1 in 20 Americans who owns an assault rifle. The surge in threats against members of Congress, which ballooned from about

4,000 in 2017 to 9,600 by 2021, is nothing less than an attack on our democracy. Security spending by members of Congress has already more than doubled since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot— how much more can it go up? The more our leaders must fear their own constituents, the more removed they will be from the people they serve.