A refuge for D.C.’s tightly wound and politically exhausted serves its last cocktail

Not long after opening in the mid-1990s, the Capitol Lounge’s management issued a decree that may have seemed odd for a bar two blocks from the U.S. Capitol, where crowds of House staffers drank after work and the decor included old Nixon campaign posters.

No one could talk politics.

“Shuddup!” the bartenders barked at patrons who dared to debate, say, the merits of a presidential address or the finer points of a budget bill.