Senator Jim Justice threw his bulldog Babydog a birthday party on Capitol Hill

Hundreds of congressional staffers lined the corridors of the Hart Senate Office Building at four o'clock on Wednesday afternoon to watch an English bulldog in a cowboy hat go past in a covered wagon, because Senator Jim Justice of West Virginia was holding his dog's seventh birthday party three weeks early.

The party was advertised on a digital billboard outside the senator's office as "Babydog's 7th Birthday Rodeo", under the line "Saddle-up for a paw-ty!", and it promised "cake (lots of it), belly rub diplomacy, bipartisan biscuit distribution, and tail-wagging unity", Mediaite reported, and TMZ's Washington reporter, Charlie Cotton, saw the sign on his way past and was invited in by the senator.

The billboard also carried a line credited to the dog herself: "Because no matter what's going on in Washington, there's always room for cake, cuddles, and good company." Babydog then arrived in a cart dressed up as a covered wagon, in the hat and a red bandana, and was wheeled along the corridor while the queue took its photographs, and Cotton handed his camera to a colleague so that he could have one too.

Three weeks early

Babydog's birthday is on 15 October, Justice told TMZ, but Congress will not be in session that week, so the people who wanted to mark it did so at four o'clock on a working Wednesday, and the senator walked the corridor beside the wagon while the House of Representatives, TMZ noted, was not even in town.

"Babydog's birthday isn't for a few more weeks, but we had to celebrate a little early with our friends on the Hill," Justice wrote in a post with photographs on Wednesday, WV News reported, and went on, "She sure does have a lot of folks who love her, and Cathy and I are grateful for every one of them," and Cathy is his wife.

Asked by Cotton why a United States senator was making such an effort for a dog, Justice said that he had bought her chicken nuggets for the day, and called her an icon and a "celebrity that's got a thousand times more notoriety than I have, and that's good with me," and when Cotton asked whether politicians with pets make better politicians, he put the odds at a thousand to one.

"Well, I mean, it's her birthday, for crying out loud."Jim Justice, to TMZ, on Wednesday

Where she came from

Babydog was a present to Justice from his children in 2019, and got her name from a grandson who kept calling the puppy "baby dog" until the family did too, the senator has said. She was at his side through both of his terms as governor of West Virginia, from 2017 until he left for the Senate in January 2025, at news conferences and in the Capitol in Charleston, and the Washington Post has called her a fixture of the state's politics.

In 2021 the state ran a lottery for people who got the coronavirus vaccine under the slogan "Do it for Babydog", with pickup trucks and a million dollars among the prizes. In January 2022 Justice ended his State of the State address by lifting her up to the cameras and telling the singer Bette Midler, who had called West Virginians "poor, illiterate and strung out", to kiss her hiney, and in 2023 a waterfall in Babcock State Park was renamed Babydog Falls.

When Justice spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July 2024 she sat on a chair beside the lectern, and the New York Times wrote that she drew a reception with "an energy generally reserved only for former President Donald J. Trump". When he reached the Senate she was kept off its floor, because she is not a service dog, and in April 2025 he read a statement in her name, on the importance of love, into the record without objection.

Her sixth birthday was celebrated in the same building last October, in the middle of the federal government shutdown, and Senators Chuck Grassley and Tommy Tuberville came, and the cakes were shaped like her, as was reported at the time. This year's had the wagon and the hat, and a queue that Lootpress and Mediaite both put in the hundreds.

Wednesday also happened to be National Dogs in Politics Day, which falls on 23 September because on that date in 1952 Richard Nixon went on television to say that whatever else was said about him, his family was keeping the cocker spaniel called Checkers. Babydog turns seven on 15 October, when the Senate will be in recess, and she is still not allowed on its floor.