What's Driving Miss Shelia?

Toward the end of Lee's first term, she began avoiding her office. Instead, she camped on the House floor and spent hours inside the Capitol's Lindy Boggs Room, an area reserved for female members to relax, chat among themselves and meet with family or friends. Staffers believe that Lee was escaping visitors. Certainly, when her staff escorted the most determined souls to the Capitol to meet their congresswoman, she seemed less than ecstatic to greet them. They'd have to wait until Lee emerged from the floor or the Boggs Room, at which point she'd explain that she'd been busy voting. At least one aide didn't buy the excuse: "You do not vote all the time."

Sources outside Washington also attest that Lee's constituent services have been lacking. The office director for a state senator whose district overlaps Lee's laughs when asked about the subject, claiming that the state senator has received a stream of complaints and pleas for help from people who have not received satisfaction from Lee.

Apparently, Lee expects a degree of reverence from her constituents and is annoyed when she doesn't get it. According to a former aide, the congresswoman once requested a meeting with all the CEOs of major oil companies based in Houston and was infuriated that the executives' secretaries wanted to know the nature of the meeting. "Who the fuck do they think they are?" Lee reportedly responded. "I'm the congresswoman."

Advisor Willie Isles acknowledges the difficulties Lee has had in Washington and says that she's now at a crossroads.

"Here's what I've said to her," he recounts. " 'If you grow, you can be mayor or governor of the state. If you are not willing to grow and adapt to change, you may be as far as you can go.' "

A former legislative assistant is less hopeful. "She would get up in staff meetings and say, 'I'm not going to change,' " he remembers. "Her behavior is only going to get worse."

Late on a Monday afternoon, Lee is in Houston, working the phones from her sunlit corner office in the Mickey Leland Federal Building. She's running nearly an hour late for an interview, and an aide apologetically explains that the congresswoman is working to solve a constituent's problem. As it turns out, the constituent is hardly a little old lady with Medicare difficulties. Instead, Lee is on the phone with Gerald Smith -- a black investment banker whose campaign contributions helped her defeat Craig Washington.

When the call is finished, Lee and Kathi Smith, her Washington office chief, sit behind a coffee table in Lee's office. The congresswoman is gracious and for the most part unflappable.

Lee has been mentioned as a mayoral candidate, but that race, she says, isn't even on her radar. (She does not note that, just the previous day, she and two other potential candidates -- Lee Brown and Sylvester Turner -- met with a group of black ministers to discuss electing an African-American to the office.)

According to Lee, everything is fine in her Washington office. She maintains that her high staff turnover rate doesn't affect her constituents. In fact, she believes her staff turnover is nothing out of the ordinary.

Asked about various personal services she allegedly requested from her office workers, she offers a quick answer: "Anything that my staff does in my office is pursuant to congressional rules."

Allowed by the rules, maybe. But is it appropriate to keep a worker sitting in a car for hours to chauffeur her to an office two and a half blocks away?

"Whatever staff does is pursuant to congressional business," she replies.
Only at one point does Lee's reputed temper surface. Asked why former staffers would invent stories of her rudeness and bad behavior, she begins a strange answer: "Why don't you check with people who have been in the Civil Rights movement or been under siege in the White House, whether it's been the Bush White House or the Clinton White House? Working hard and that kind of thing ...." She reaches for her own throat, and a Press photographer snaps a picture.

Lee is flustered, and asks that the photo not be used. Her voice becomes strained. "I am saying that seriously," she says. "I would like my picture not to be in there .... Is our tape working? ... It'll be on the tape that I asked that it not be in there."

Never mind the questions about serious employee allegations and tales of shameless self-promotion. Lee is more worried that a photo might be unflattering. For a few seconds, she reveals the frantically self-absorbed politician described by former employees -- the people in her realm who knew her best.