Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Letter from Washington:

Amodei hooks up with fellow Nevadans in D.C.

Mark Amodei isn’t well known around Congress yet. But his mom is.

“Paul Ryan wants to meet my mother,” Amodei said during an exploratory walk around his office building a few hours after getting sworn in as Nevada’s newest congressman. “He says, ‘tell your mother thank you, I’d like to meet her.’ ”

Amodei’s 79-year-old mom — whom he cast in campaign commercials to defend him against charges that he wanted to “end Medicare” — might be the most memorable figure from his hotly contested, but ultimately decisive victory over Kate Marshall.

Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District had been without a representative since Dean Heller moved to the U.S. Senate to fill the seat vacated by John Ensign in May. And last week Amodei was finding his way around Capitol Hill.

Amodei boarded a flight to Washington, D.C., just hours after his win Tuesday night (“I’ll never get on one of those planes again without something to read,” he said); too quick a turnaround to bring family along to watch his swearing-in Thursday morning.

He described the experience as a “whirlwind” that had him “feeling, literally, like the new kid in school, and a long ways from home.”

“I still consider myself a visitor,” he said, recounting how he’d been an intern for former Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt in 1980 — “a thousand years ago by Washington standards” — and had been back only a handful of times for public lands work since. “I don’t know my way around town really,” he said.

Nor even around the whole Nevada delegation. Amodei had never met Rep. Shelley Berkley until just before his swearing-in. He doesn’t really know Sen. Harry Reid either, he said.

“He called me yesterday ... he said ‘congratulations and I look forward to stopping by sometime, I don’t know much about you,’ ” Amodei said.

A battery of more-familiar Nevadans are helping ease the transition to D.C.: His oldest daughter has been working the Internet to hunt for apartments close to the Capitol, and the state’s Republican representatives, current and former, are offering advice about life on the Hill.

Amodei chatted with former Nevada Rep. Jon Porter; and with Heller, who got a ribbing from his former colleagues when he came to greet him in the House, Amodei said.

“They said ‘good replacing Dean and good riddance,’ they need somebody to push around the wheelchairs over there in the Senate. And I thought ‘wow, this sounds like the English House of Commons.’ ”

Rep. Joe Heck has been particularly helpful, Amodei said.

Amodei has no office staff yet, so Heck loaned him Colin the Intern on Thursday to answer phones.

“I didn’t do anything before the election, because you need to get elected first, and that’s bad luck or bad karma or whatever,” he said. “But you are given a budget for ... everything from the phone bill to IT to travel to staff ... and if you blow your budget, it’s out of your pocket.

“When you campaign on responsibility” like he did, “you’d better be a responsible guy,” Amodei said.

But Amodei’s job — and whether or not he gets to keep it 14 months from now — depends more on his votes, the first of which he took Thursday: a “yea” to pare back the powers of the National Labor Relations Board, which the GOP has been after since it stopped Boeing from building a production plant in South Carolina, where union rules are more business friendly.

In the future though, he hopes to make his mark on issues that are more closely tied to Nevada.

“There’s not an open seat on the natural resources committee ... but if somebody wants to move off in a way that works for them, then that’s my No. 1 priority,” Amodei said, who added that he’s thinking of making his first piece of legislation a bill to help Nevada copper miners by opening up some land in Lyon County.

“I’ve always been a guy that’s tried to build your reputation by your work,” he said. “So I’m going to try that here too.”

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