MARY CLARE JALONICK Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON Democratic Sen.- elect Jon Tester got his first tour of the U. S. Capitol Monday, enthusiastically shaking hands of staffers and senators and looking a little overwhelmed. “It hasn’t soaked in yet,” he said. “Maybe it will never soak in.” Even the Capitol police aren’t quite used to Tester, a Montana grain farmer who looks a bit different from most senators with his flat top haircut and fingers missing on his left hand. They asked him to empty his pockets on the security belt just outside the Capitol. “Just like at the airport, you put it all through?” Tester asked. The officer nodded, but quickly waved Tester through once he found out who he was. “A lot of new faces,” observed a Capitol docent nearby. Tester, who narrowly defeated Republican Sen. Conrad Burns last week, is one of 10 new senators learning the ropes this week most of them Democrats. When he is sworn in next January, Tester will become a member of the party’s new majority in the Senate. “There’s a lot of work to be done,” he said Monday. Even so, his trip to the Capitol was mostly just to meet staffers, senators and reporters and to tour the grounds. Along with most of the other Senate Democrats elected last week, he participated in an afternoon news conference with future Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada. Reid called Tester and the other senators- elect “wonderful human beings.” “This is a great group,” said New York Sen. Charles Schumer, the Democrat who led his party’s campaign effort this year. “Some are liberal, some are conservative, some are moderate.” Tester will participate in a new member orientation for the rest of the week, learning about Senate procedure and how to set up his office. Monday night he was scheduled to attend a reception at the White House. In a brief private meeting with Reid earlier in the day, Tester said the two talked about the artwork in Reid’s office and hair cuts. Tester didn’t talk much policy, saying he hasn’t thought much about a possible vote to confirm former CIA director Robert M. Gates as Secretary of Defense. No confirmation hearings have been announced for Gates, so the possibility remains that the new Congress could consider the nomination. Tester still doesn’t have an office and doesn’t know which committees he will sit on. He is hoping for the Senate Appropriations Committee, which doles out federal dollars. Reid has said he would “work hard” to get Tester on the committee, since Burns was a member. But it’s unclear whether there will be enough room for a freshman. The new senator is also without a congressional staff for now. He said Monday that people who worked on his campaign will be offered jobs but wasn’t ready to announce who would be doing what. As for his new colleagues, Tester said he is most excited about meeting independent-minded Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici, a Republican. He said he didn’t get to meet Domenici at a September field hearing in Havre and his impression is that Hagel is a “decent man.” Of Kennedy, Tester said “he’s been in it so long.” “I’ve seen him on television since I was a child,” he said. One of Reid’s staffers showed the senator-elect around the Capitol, giving a brief history of the main rooms and ushering Tester and his wife, Sharla, into the rotunda. The couple looked up at the inside of the dome for a few minutes, taking it all in. “We told ourselves we wouldn’t come here until we got elected,” Sharla Tester said. “It’s overwhelming.”
