Happy Monday, this is Congress Editor David Sivak welcoming you to Capitol Tea, a new weekly column on the personalities, traditions, and oddities that make Capitol Hill tick.

Why are we bringing this to you? We wanted to share the human side of Congress and its many quirks, setting aside to-the-point news writing and all of the partisan noise to deliver you an inside look at life on Capitol Hill.

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In this edition …

– John Thune’s boating playlist. Ever wonder what the most powerful Senate Republican considers a summer banger? Prepare yourself, it’s a fair amount of country.

– Markwayne Mullin’s bouncy ball. There’s an origin story behind the “fidget toy” that never leaves his side — and it dates back to his middle school days.

THUNE’S PON-TUNES

Left on the cutting room floor of our recent interview with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) was some banter about his summer visits to South Dakota’s Lake Oahe and the music he would play to unwind from this month’s megabill drama.

Thune, flicking through an Apple Music playlist titled “Missouri River,” rattled off a few favorites: Kenny Chesney’s “Summertime” and the Little Big Town hits “All Summer” and “Pontoon.”

“I’ve got a good amount of country,” Thune told me and my colleague Ramsey Touchberry, before scrolling past some of the “old stuff.” Thune, 64, is also a fan of Billy Joel, Orleans, and The Eagles.

Thune wasn’t sure he’d make a Fourth of July trip to the Missouri River with the time crunch to pass the GOP megabill, but he did end up going — posting a viral video of him doing “one, big beautiful” back flip to celebrate its passage.

We couldn’t make out the song playing in the background, but his staff did provide us with a couple of extra tracks for your summer listening pleasure: The Eagles’s “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and “The Boys of Summer” by Don Henley.

HOW THUNE AND TRUMP GOT BEHIND ‘ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL’

About that back flip: In our interview, Thune told us his plunge into the Missouri River is actually an annual tradition. This year, he went boating with family friends, plus his youngest daughter, her husband, and their children.

MULLIN’S ‘PACIFIER’

If you’re a Senate reporter, you can hear Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) coming from a mile away thanks to a pink bouncy ball he carries everywhere he goes. The ball, which can be seen in the frequent videos Mullin posts to social media, is a relatively new fixture in the halls of Congress — Mullin tells me he only started fidgeting with it a year or so ago. But you may be surprised to learn it’s a boyhood habit.

“I started carrying it in middle school,” Mullin told me in an interview outside the Senate chamber, adding that it stayed by his side through high school and his early career, much to the frustration of his wife. 

“It drove my wife nuts,” Mullin said. (He has known Christie since childhood.)

It turns out Mullin only gave up the bouncy ball after he arrived in the House in 2013, but he kept it on his desk for years as he built a plumbing business in Oklahoma.

“I’d never been asked the question, why? No one ever asked me why until I got up here, and then I quit carrying it up here because it was annoying to people or whatever,” Mullin said.

How did the habit come roaring back all these years later?

“A guy that worked for me had it on his desk, and I said, ‘Let me see that,’ and he threw it at me. And that’s the ball, and I haven’t set it down.”

That last part isn’t completely true. Mullin has been known to forget the ball, forcing him to backtrack or ask his staffers to retrieve it for him — “I’ve left it at the Fox studio, I’ve left it on the dais, I’ve left it about everywhere,” Mullin said — but he hasn’t lost one yet, even though he has a sleeve of backups in his drawer.

“This is the one I picked up over a year ago,” Mullin said proudly, before remarking that he doesn’t love the faded pink. “I wish it was a different color.”

When colleagues started asking about the ball, Mullin would joke that it’s his “pacifier” — others called it his “fidget toy” — but nowadays, he describes it as a way to avoid losing momentum as he darts from one engagement to another. 

MARKWAYNE MULLIN FINDS HIS ‘COALITION OF POWER’ IN TRUMP’S WASHINGTON

“I work very long hours here, and I’m constantly moving,” said Mullin, a member of Thune’s leadership team and a close Trump ally. “I’m constantly dealing with several different issues all at once, between, not just the Senate stuff, between the House and the White House and here, and it kind of keeps me in a rhythm.”

“You know, sometimes you have that dead space and kind of space out — this keeps me going,” he added.

In case you’re wondering, the ball Mullin carried as a child was blue.