Heard on the Hill: The Candy Men Can

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Upheaval in the Republican Party is widespread — and its effects are reaching deep into the very fabric of life on Capitol Hill. It’s even affecting ... the candy drawer.

Cue the dramatic music.

The drawer, a Senate tradition that goes back to the 1960s, has been on a roller-coaster ride that reflects some Republicans’ woes of recent years: It was manned by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) until he lost his re-election bid in 2006. Then, Sen. Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.) took on the duty of keeping the drawer

stocked until his death in 2007. The job subsequently fell to Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), who recently announced he plans to retire in 2010.

That announcement has left the fate of the candy drawer up in the air. It will, by tradition, become the duty of whoever is assigned to the unofficial candy desk on the back row of the Republican side of the chamber.

And although the desk is located on the Republican side, it’s meant to be nonpartisan — meaning Democrats can (and do) dip into it, too.

But Democrats also maintain a candy stash on their own side, and compared to the Republicans, they’ve had a relatively stable sugar supply. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) told HOH that he has been stocking a desk on the Democratic side — in a little-known tradition that even the Senate Historian’s office doesn’t know much about — with sugary goodies for the past 24 years.

A Rockefeller spokeswoman confirmed that her boss has enjoyed keeping fellow Democrats (and Republicans sometimes, too) on a sugar high for more than two decades. Rockefeller, we hear, has quite a sweet tooth himself and began buying candy for a desk in the Democrat’s side of the chamber so that he could always have a few of his beloved sweets nearby.

Unlike the more official candy desk on the Republican side — which is filled with sweets donated by candy manufacturers from the home state of whichever Senator is in charge of it — Rockefeller pays for the confections out of his own pocket.

Isn’t that, um, sweet?

Biden’s Balls Get Their Due. In the lavish praise swirling around the Senate floor last week as Senators paid tribute to their departing colleagues, amid all the treacly hyperbole, it might have been easy to miss usually prim and proper Sen. Orrin Hatch dropping some unusually coarse language.

On Thursday, the mild-mannered Utah Republican was waxing profound on the many merits of former Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden (“integrity, truthfulness, passion,” yadda, yadda) when he took the unexpected step of praising Biden’s, um, balls. And we don’t mean the kind used in sports.

That’s balls as metaphor for gumption. Cojones.

Hatch, who is a clean-living, non-swearword-using Mormon, conveniently got around the “oh-no-he-didn’t” factor by quoting someone else complimenting Biden’s nether regions.

“As a kid growing up in Scranton, there was (to be perfectly blunt, as Joe would say) a breathtaking element of balls,” Hatch said during his floor speech. He went on to note that the phrase was actually a quote from Richard Ben Cramer’s 1993 book, “What It Takes.”

“That was Richard Ben Cramer, not me,” Hatch noted, lest anyone should think Hatch himself would dare to talk blue — and on the floor of the Senate, no less. “‘Joe Biden had balls. Lot of times, more balls than sense,’” he continued to quote from the book.

HOH has previously documented Hatch getting around his no-curse-words policy by quoting the dirty language uttered by others. The Utah Republican is especially fond of telling stories about legendary Mormon leader J. Golden Kimball, who was prone to profanity.

HOH plans to try that excuse sometime herself: It’s a quote, I swear.

Breaking the Glass Ceiling. It seems Congress is all about smashing gender barriers these days. For the first time ever, a dude is in charge of the Congressional spouses’ freshman class.