This is part of a recurring series on what former members of Congress are doing in their post-congressional careers.
She’s been out of Congress now for six years, but old habits are hard to break: On a Thursday morning in early September, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s roller-bag was packed in her K Street office, ready to go.
Just as she’d done for nearly 30 years in Congress, she was ready for the weekly flight back to Miami, where she’d spend the weekend with her husband, Dexter, and hopefully a grandkid or two.
“Some things never change,” she said with a laugh.
But some things have. While Ros-Lehtinen, 73, a Republican who served her South Florida district from 1989 through 2019, became accustomed to that weekly commute over a period of decades, now she does it as a lobbyist at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLC.
When she’s in Washington, she lives with her son, Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, an LGBTQ rights advocate who was the first openly transgender child of a sitting member of Congress. He makes her coffee, she says.
Now a registered foreign agent, her clients include or have included Uzbekistan, Morocco, Palau, the United Arab Emirates and the Marshall Islands, according to Department of Justice filings.
“Before I was helping constituents,” she said. “Now I’m helping clients. So I’m still in the help business.”
There are, of course, differences. For one thing, she gets to pick and choose what she works on; as a lobbyist, she’s given the opportunity to say no to clients whose interests don’t dovetail with hers. Those choices are not without controversy; the organization Democracy for the Arab World Now, for example, has been sharply critical of her decision to represent UAE.
For another, she’s not subject to the less palatable whims of Congress: the unpredictable schedules, the fundraising calls. There’s a bit more autonomy, and that’s fine with her.
“I enjoy policy — shaping it and advocating for clients, and it’s just natural,” she said. “If I’m not comfortable with it, I don’t take it on.”
Like many retired lawmakers, Ros-Lehtinen has more of a bipartisan bent than many in the current Congress. She’s donated money to former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for example, but she’s also given to Democratic Reps. Frederica S. Wilson and Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. She’s co-hosting a fundraiser for Wasserman Schultz in October, in fact. “They’re my friends,” Ros-Lehtinen said, “so I still maintain my bipartisan roots.”
Plus she still gets to flex what is clearly a key political muscle: Working the crowds. On that Thursday in September, she greets everyone from the younger lobbyists to the janitorial staff merrily, asking them about their vacations and repeatedly praising an office makeover. It’s not hard to see why she got into politics in the first place; some people are just extroverts.
To hear her tell it, she’s been that way from the start. A teacher, then principal of Eastern Academy in Hialeah, Fla., Ros-Lehtinen, who immigrated to the United States from Cuba when she was 8, said she ran for office after someone suggested it.
She talked to her family — she was single at the time, and before long, she had signed up for a weekend seminar by the Republican Party on how to run for office. Her father signed up for one on being a campaign manager. Her father mapped out a walking schedule, and before long Ros-Lehtinen was knocking on doors and making fundraising calls.
“I only knew how to be a good campaigner, because that’s what I learned,” she said. “And I was always a good student.”
She was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 1982, and to the Florida Senate in 1986, becoming the first Hispanic woman to serve in either body.
When then-Rep. Claude Pepper died in 1989, it created an opportunity: Ros-Lehtinen was one of four candidates for the Republican nomination and later beat Democrat Gerald Richman with 53 percent of the vote, making her the first Cuban-American and first Hispanic woman elected to Congress.
In Congress, it was a Democrat who gave her one of her first breaks: Then-Rep. Dante Fascell, who represented a neighboring South Florida district, was chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. There wasn’t an open seat at the time, but “he said, look, we’ll put a little table here — something that would never happen now —and I’ll work on the ratio and add you to the team.”
“And of course, he would get another Democrat as well, but that’s what Dante Fascell did for me,” she said. “He got me a seat even before I was officially on the committee.”
It was a different time. Then-Rep. William Lehman, the other Democrat representing South Florida during that era, also crossed the aisle to teach the freshman Republican Ros-Lehtinen how to use the congressional franking system. The GOP minority was largely toothless. “And then Newt came along and … he taught us we can win,” she said, referring to former Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who in 1994 led House Republicans to their first majority since the 1952 election.
In 2012, Ros-Lehtinen rose to take the gavel of the same committee that Fascell once worked to find her a seat on. Before that, when she served as ranking member of Foreign Affairs, she’d sit next to then-Chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif.
“We would look at each other and say, ‘Is this a great country or what?’ Because I’m a naturalized American and he’s a naturalized American, and here we are,” she said. (Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, was born in Hungary and immigrated after World War II. He died in 2008.)
“Every day was a delight,” she said of that time.
That sunniness remains. While some lawmakers fret about the partisan infighting, Ros-Lehtinen shrugs it off: It’ll all work out, she insists.
“I didn’t go out bitter and saying, ‘Oh, Congress is broken, nothing works,’” she said. “Congress is fine.”
That said, she has no interest in going back.
“I did my time,” she said. “I got out with good behavior.”
The post Life after Congress: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen recalls her career as ‘a delight’ appeared first on Roll Call.
