Over its nearly 150-year history, the Senate chamber has been the backdrop for countless debates and historical laws ranging from declarations of war to guarantees of civil rights.

But the floor has a powerful, intimate meaning for lobbyist Nancy Taylor, possibly more personal for her than for most of the men and women who have served in the Senate.

In addition to being home to what its members call the world’s greatest deliberative body, the Senate chamber is also where Taylor went into labor when her twin daughters were born in August 1990.

Taylor, then a senior aide to then-Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), was taken from the cloakroom to the hospital, and the girls were born about a day later.

Those who work for Congress know that the long hours and the congressional calendar can put pressure on their families, that spouses and children have to learn to cope with the effects of those demands on their Hill denizen family members.

Taylor says the timing of her daughters’ births was no accident: They were born on Saturday, Aug. 4, 1990, the very day the 101st Congress adjourned for its summer break.

“My girls understood: August recess,” Taylor says. She was back at work on Sept. 5.

“When you work on the Hill, you follow through and you finish projects,” she says in the small meeting room adjacent to her office at Greenberg Traurig, where she has worked as a healthcare lobbyist since 1993, shortly after the firm’s Washington office opened.

“She’s really a tireless advocate,” said Maria Ghazal, the director of public policy at the Business Roundtable.

Taylor has a reputation as an expert on federal health policy, and as energetic, affable and hardworking. Maybe too hardworking.

“When I go to the Hill, people tease me. … I had someone tease me the other day that I’m too comprehensive,” she says.

Taylor worked for Hatch on the committee for 10 years before leaving in 1991, including more than five years as health staff director. She talks about those years with fondness but seems to be just as excited about the work she’s done representing healthcare interests over the last 15 years.

“I love my clients. Make sure you say that I love my clients,” Taylor quips to a reporter. Those clients include the health insurance company Humana, the American Health Care Association’s nursing homes and the CEOs of the Business Roundtable.

The Salt Lake City native came to Washington in 1981 to work for Hatch, who was taking over the committee from Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) following a change of power in the Senate.

“It was a very political time because Reagan had just taken over and there were a lot of new people in town,” Taylor says.

It was two years after she graduated from the University of Utah, where she studied political science and economics. She had been teaching high-school math and had started a graduate program in mathematics when she was lured into politics. Taylor had never been to the East Coast before arriving in D.C. to start her job on the Hill.

“I was 24 and had wide-open eyes and [was] very anxious to work long hours, and did, and loved every minute of it,” Taylor says.

She speaks reverentially of Hatch’s skills as a lawyer and a legislator. The legislator “understood, pragmatically, how to get things done [and] also had a vision,” Taylor says.

Taylor also offered high praise for her counterparts on Kennedy’s minority staff, who she says handled themselves with professionalism and grace during the transition.

“The Kennedy staff were superb and they took the Hatch staff under their wings,” she says.

She’s proud of the work the committee and the Senate were able to accomplish during her time on the Hill, Taylor says. “I was very lucky that I got to work on a lot of laws, and it was a very prolific era for a lot of healthcare laws,” she says.

During Taylor’s years on the Labor Committee, the panel ushered in the Ryan White CARE HIV/AIDS-treatment program, the Hatch-Waxman Act prescription-drug-approvals reforms and laws that require hospital emergency rooms to treat people without regard to their ability to pay.

Taylor says she learned a lot working for Hatch, whom she credits with tenacity and the willingness to negotiate to get things done.

As an example, Taylor cites the debate in 1990 over the Americans with Disabilities Act. Then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) proposed an amendment that would have barred people with HIV or AIDS from working in food service.

Hatch and many others opposed the language, arguing that there was no evidence the diseases could be transmitted by food. Helms held his ground but his amendment failed on a 39 to 61 vote. In part, to address the concerns expressed by Helms and the others, Taylor says she helped Hatch come up with a compromise, which gave the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) the authority to designate diseases that would make people ineligible to handle food. The amendment passed 99 to 1, with Helms dissenting, and HIV/AIDS has never been added to the government’s list.

Taylor attended Catholic University’s law school at night while working on the Hill, earning her degree in 1988. Her choice of law school also illustrates her commitment to her job: “The reason I chose Catholic is, it started at 6:20 (p.m.) and G.W. started at 5:30 (p.m.),” Taylor says.

“I didn’t let people know who I was or where I worked,” Taylor says. It didn’t always work. “They would have speakers in, and occasionally I’d kind of have to hide my face because they might be, like, the head of the medical-device bureau,” she says.

But being an experienced health-policy aide had its benefits, too. “I remember I was so grateful when they gave us our final paper [assignment]. The question was, ‘Please describe the key elements of the Hatch-Waxman law,’” a statute she had helped draft.

Taylor’s contemporaries at Catholic’s law school include former Medicare officials Tom Scully and Tim Trysla, veteran Republican staffer Chuck Clapton and even Democratic Senate candidate Bob Casey, Jr., who graduated from the day program the same year Taylor finished night school.

Despite her love for her work on the Hill, the intensity of the environment and the long hours eventually made Taylor ready to move on.

“I knew that was not something that I could handle” and give her family the attention it needed, she says. Taylor left the Hill in 1991, viewing the departure as the best way to take more control over her time and to spend more time with her infant daughters.

“When you create a work pattern in a certain environment, the expectations for yourself and for others around you remains,” she says. “You change your work environment if you want to change your level of expectation.”

Not that Taylor takes it easy at Greenberg Traurig. “I never get downtime,” she says. She works the legislative and regulatory side for her clients when Congress is in session and focuses on the agencies and other work during recesses.

Still, she says, the private sector affords more flexibility. “At least practicing law, I can control it better. When you’re working on the Hill, you can’t control anything … so you’re always on,” Taylor says.

Being an attorney is an important part of her professional identity, she says, so she relishes working at a law firm.

“I wanted to be in a big law firm where I could use my law degree more,” she says. “What we do is legal work in a different forum.”