FISA and A View from the Bottom

The halls of Congress were buzzing with activity last Thursday. Tom Lantos (D-CA) passed away a week before and his memorial service was scheduled for Thursday morning before legislative proceedings. Democrats agreed that votes would not be called until after the service so members could pay their respect to Congressman Lantos. He was the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress and seemed to make friends on both sides of the aisle. Condi Rice gave a much more moving eulogy than Nancy Pelosi, for the record. Bono from U2 was there. I never quite made the connection between the two, but someone in the office said that it was because Lantos was on the Foreign Affairs committee and had worked with Bono in regards to AIDS in Africa, or something along those lines. Interesting little tidbit: Lantos' wife, Annette Tilleman, is the cousin of Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor.

Democrats went against their word and called Congress into session before the conclusion of the service to vote on contempt charges against Joshua Bolten and Harriet Miers. John Boehner, Republican Minority leader, lead his colleagues on a walk out. I think they did that because Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the House was not going to be voting on FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) which was set to expire by the week's end. The President was hoping that Congress would come to an agreement and vote on the Senate version, but that didn't happen. The Republicans vowed to remain in Congress until the Senate wiretapping bill was passed, and President Bush said he would postpone a planned trip to Africa if Democrats did not act. But they didn't act, and President Bush ended up going to Africa and Congress convened for a weeklong recess. So the FISA bill has expired and since I'm not an expert on this particular legislation, I couldn't tell you if that's detrimental to our national security our not. Gotta love Congress, though.

So if you're a little confused by all of that, don't worry. It took me a couple of days working here to learn that FISA was related to national security and not health care. Anyways, it was just really exciting to be in one of the House office buildings while all of this was going down. Everyone in our little office was glued to CSPAN and were streaming live news feeds. It was like we were a bunch of rabid football fans watching the NFL draft (maybe a bad analogy but that's all I could think of).

As I mentioned, Congress is on a weeklong recess so it's a bit slow in the office.

Our office went on a tour of the unfinished visitor's center that's been plaguing the Capitol with construction for several years now. Our tour guide said that it should be completed by November, but if they can't make that deadline, it won't be open to the public until February - after the inauguration and turnover of members. The visitor's center is pretty cool. It's massive with a bunch of inovative stuff, new meeting rooms, theaters, cafeteria, etc. So if you ever come to visit me, you'd have an opportunity to check it out.

The really cool thing about the visitor's center is the random view. It's built beneath the ground so as to not obstruct the view of the Capitol. Part of the ceiling of the visitor's center is glass, so you can look up through that and see the Capitol dome framed in the glass. It should look really cool once the construction is finished and the crew cleans all the dust and debris off the glass. If I get pictures from our tour, I'll try and post some.

This project has been in the works for years. It's amazing all the hoops they've had to go through and all the groups they had to accomodate in order to make this project happen. But I think it will add greater elements of safety and more for the tourists to do. And as the guy said, their job was to make it as accessible as possible to the people while obtaining the utmost level of security to the members and staff. It seems that they just might achieve that.