In Full Swing

As the rain melts away the lingering frost from Snowmageddon, we return to our internships for our first full week in what feels like ages. The House (and Senate) is back in session, and with so many rescheduled hearings and outstanding votes, the Capitol is a flurry of activity.

The first floor of my building was filled with news cameras this morning; their lenses trained on the door of the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing room. Beginning in the afternoon, the subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing on the recent Toyota recalls and held as a witness James Lentz, the President and Chief Operating Officer of Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. I caught snips of the hearing on C-SPAN throughout the afternoon, where Lentz was cross-examined and brought under near inquisition by members.

Congressman Henry Waxman’s questions regarding the cars’ sticking pedal and sudden unintended acceleration issues were especially interesting. After reading Waxman’s How Congress Really Works, I saw in-action how he prides himself on being a protector of the consumer. In specific, he directed questions in a way to hold Toyota accountable for the incidences and for any negligence that may be involved. Also interesting was Waxman’s sometimes-adversary and sometimes-friend in the committee, Congressman John Dingell’s, marked performance for the hearing. Dingell used a hard-line approach to questioning Lentz: simply, he asked a succession of “yes or no” questions in which he refused to listen to any explanation with which the witness tried to supplement his answer. At one point, Dingell even stopped the witness mid-word and retorted, “I’m just a poor Polish lawyer from Detroit. Will you please answer yes or no so I can understand.”



After work today I attended Congressman Abercrombie’s farewell party in anticipation of his official resignation on February 28th. Unfortunately, Mr. Abercrombie never did attend, albeit with good reason: he was submitting one of his final votes for the Native Hawaiian Reorganization Act (Akaka Bill) late into the evening. The bill, which contains a recently added amendment by Abercrombie, passed the House 245-164 and will now be moving to the Senate.

Though I still have not had the chance to meet Mr. Abercrombie in person, his farewell party drew several Hill celebrity sightings. First, Senator Inouye made a brief appearance at the beginning of the evening. However, his appearance was trumped when I discovered that the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, had dropped by and was literally standing three feet away! She made a quick exit before we could meet her, but appearance left me feeling a little star-struck. Lastly, Congressman Mike Honda took it upon himself to chat with Mari, myself, and our other friends at the table. He was hilarious- he cracked jokes with us for over half an hour before he left, just on time, to cast his vote for the Akaka Bill.

While Congressman Abercrombie was successful in seeing the Akaka Bill passed in the House before his resignation, the fate of the bill will lie elsewhere. The House has twice passed the original version of the bill- in 2000 and 2007- yet each time it has died in the Senate. It will be interesting to see if Abercrombie’s amendment, which includes language that will give Hawaiians inherent power similar to other federally-recognized Native entities, will provide for a different debate or even a different fate in the Senate.

-Christy

Snow Day #5

Blizzard + not so quality windows = slight snow storm in my dorm room :(

White House Tour

On January 16, Mari, Frank, and I took a tour of the White House, arranged by Mari’s manager at Congresswoman Hirono’s office. Our tour was a unique experience- we arrived at the White House gates at 7:30 in the morning (we didn’t realize the metro starts running at 7 am on weekends, so had to flag down a taxi to get there on time!) and waited in line outside in the cold to enter. Security was even tighter than usual- ever since the State dinner mishap where an unauthorized couple made it in to the invite-only event, they’ve installed extra checkpoints! Not only did we have to submit our personal information a week in advance to have a background check completed, several security stops along the way checked our IDs and ushered us through what seemed like many metal detectors.

As visitors, we were able to tour the ground and first floor- the second and third levels are reserved for the First family and staff. Even though we were in the White House, it was hard to believe we were actually there- red ropes were all that separated us from historic portraits and furniture, and everything was so quiet it felt like a museum. It also felt a good bit smaller than I had expected!

On the first floor we were guided past a hallway lined with pictures of Presidents, First Ladies, and their families in or around the White House. Our first glimpses of the rooms in the White House were the Library (which periodically has been used as a gentlemen’s cigar lounge), the Vermeil Room with portraits of recent First Ladies, and the China Room.

We were led up a flight of stairs to several rooms on the second floor. In the East Room on the second floor, we saw the original portrait of George Washington that was saved by Dolley Madison when the British burned the White House in 1814. Apparently Mrs. Madison originally commissioned some gentlemen in the house to remove the painting in its original frame, but found it too heavy to take out! Instead, the painting was cut out and rolled up. Our tour guide noted that the frame is unusually thick so that it can cover the edges that have been cut away.

We then proceeded to the Green, Blue, and Red Rooms named for their wall and furniture colors. The last room we entered was the State Dining Room where Presidential dinners and luncheons are sometimes held. On the fireplace mantel in this room is an engraving of a quote from a letter by John to Abigail Adams: “I Pray Heaven to Bestow the Best of Blessings on THIS HOUSE and All that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under this Roof.”

At times it was hard to separate the stories that were historically accurate and those that were Presidential myth, but such is the nature of an entertaining tour. Overall it was a great experience!

Snowmageddon

Weather forecasters are predicting 1-2 feet of snow tomorrow, which is 1-2 feet more than the city's infrastructure can handle.  To help the DC citizenry prepare, the ever reliable Washington Post is sending readers to this site.

Cross your fingers the Metro doesn't strand us tomorrow on the wrong side of Union Station!

State of the Union

Last Wednesday the Superbowl of the political world hit DC: State of the Union time! 

Streets were shut down, suspicious packages were discovered and disposed of, press teams phoned in orders for takeout food, and staffers got into heated debates about whether they should take shots when the Presidents says “hope” or “jobs”. 

I kid, I kid.

But really.

As the Senators and Members departed to the Floor to ride the seesaw of standing ovations, Frank, Christy, and I joined staffers from Senator Akaka’s office to watch the State of the Union address at a nearby progressive pub equipped with a massive TV. 

The President didn’t release the bomb of cap and trade, but he surprisingly did mention the necessity of comprehensive legislation addressing climate change mitigation, even throwing what might have been a personal jab at James Inhofe.  He did call out the Justices of the Supreme Court sitting twelve feet in front of him, eliciting cheers from the Union Pub crowd and a "That's not true” mumble from Justice Alito.  He talked about jobs, jobs, jobs, announced a freeze on discretionary spending, squeezed in a sentence or two about Afghanistan, and, in what has become the most quoted lines of his address, talked about politics-as-usual, which has remained as-usual as it has ever been one year into his Administration:

To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills.  And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town -- a supermajority -- then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well.  Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it's not leadership.  We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions. 

The Presidents words on the topic were timely.  Recently a someone called and posed a simple question that I couldn’t answer—the Democrats have a majority, why can’t they pass anything?

In my meager month on the Hill, I have determined that the million dollar term in the political scene post-Massachusetts special election is “budget reconciliation” - a little known process for passing legislation with a simple minority that has been brought to national attention as the potential savior of healthcare reform.  Coming in at a close second: “filibuster.”  Thanks to the latest stumbles in the saga of healthcare reform, both are must-know terms for Hill staffers.

“Filibuster” denotes the most effective weapon in the interparty warfare that plagues Congress.  It is the minority’s means of exercising power and revolting against the majority.  The minority calls it leverage; the majority calls it obstruction; a Dutchman from the 1800s would call it the work of pirates. 

The abuse of the filibuster is the most egregious symptom of a polarized politics that remains in trench warfare one year into the Obama era.  It is a polarization made audible daily by FOX News and MSNBC, and made visible during the SOTU address by the seemingly orchestrated standing ovations on one side of the aisle, and the deadpan stares on the other.  Perhaps the great barometer of President Obama’s term will be whether he can get the entire floor to stand and applaud in unison by the time he leaves office?

However the reception of future SOTU addresses goes, it should by now be unavoidably apparent that stalled politics produce public frustration and disillusionment, never more real and palpable than when constituents write in their stories or call and ask simple questions that are impossible to answer.   

It remains to be seen whether the symbolic goals of the SOTU address—to rally the Democratic base; to cast the filibustering Republicans as the real culprits; to awe the American people with sparkling oratory and remind disillusioned Independents why they voted the President in—were achieved.  Following the brief hypnosis that an Obama speech can bring, attention on the Hill again returned to healthcare, the public option, coal ash, and where are all the jobs again? 

And of course, what blog would be complete without an appearance by Rudy Giuliani...

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

On Monday January the 18th, all three UHManoa "undergraduate fellows" decided to team up with a local non profit community organization called Grassroots Education Project. The group encouraged volunteers to arrive at the school on the holiday to participate in projects sanctioned by the school principal to improve the schools capacity to provide for and educate its young students. Some of the projects that were available and organized for that day were: organizing and properly cataloging the books in the library to ensure that they were marked appropriately for its level of difficulty, cleaning and redecorating the Teacher's Lounge, performing routine maintenance on the some of the classroom furniture and making sure that the resources the school had were appropriately distributed across its classrooms, and finally routine maintenance on the schools Macintosh computers.

Frank was involved in servicing the late model Macintosh computers that the majority of the students use for their education. The computers were often overburdened by simple programing malfunctions that could easily be resolved by the volunteers other computers had more formidable disorders and simply needed to have a master catalog created to centrally record which problems were found which computers.



Christy and Mari spent the morning cleaning and redecorating the Teacher's Lounge, which was in disarray, and later helped a Kindergarten teacher sort through and organize her paperwork.