American Politics DC Winter Seminar Day 3: #FindKenny

Have you seen this man?

Our Friend Kenny fell behind the group while reading about the Magna Carta¹

DO NOT WORRY, HE CAUGHT UP, KENNY IS DOING JUST FINE

Anyways, Backstreet’s Back, and by “Backstreet” I mean “I, Abe Winterscheidt [pronounced “winter-sheet”],” and by “Back,” I mean “somehow not frozen by the ungodly cold outside.”

Today started brisk and early: in seven degree weather waiting at the bottom of the Capitol South escalator at 8am. We went from there over to the Longworth House Office Building. After trudging through security, we waited around in the House Agriculture Committee meeting room, only to receive some disappointing news (to quote Professor Doherty), “unfortunately his meeting has been canceled, and we are now meeting on the House floor.” Did I say, “disappointing news”? I meant “pretty neato news.”

Tailing the rest of the pack, we traveled through the subterranean catacombs to the Capitol building. Unfortunately, for inexplicable “security” reasons, we couldn’t take anything into the House floor, cameras included. This restriction I find personally outrageous, because I’ve already made it through security twice, Congress is not in session, and I can watch the House floor live on C-SPAN. Talk about transparency in government. Anyways, we met with Representative Trent Kelly of Mississippi’s First Congressional District. Representative Kelly was a fantastic speaker and a great guy, showing us around the cloak room and the floor after speaking to us, despite having a meeting he was already late to. Kelly spoke about the everyday examples of bipartisanship in the House that never made the news and about how important personal relationships were in Congress. Seeing the Congressman in his native habitat brought a whole new light upon the figure we see portrayed in campaigns and on the news – something that I would assume applies to most Congressmen.

From there, we took a tour of the Capitol building as we made our way over to the Dirksen Senate Office Buildings (the final stretch via a fast, but disappointingly short tram-ma-bomb).

In Dirksen, we met with members of Virginia Senator Tim Kaine’s staff. They talked about their personal experiences in DC as interns and staffers, and how they got to where they are today.

We made our way outside into the frozen hellish tundra and walked to Union Station, where we all split up for lunch. Then we all met at the W&M DC offices for a resume editing session that I won’t bore you with.

This afternoon, we met with Joshua Karp from the Democratic super PAC, American Bridge. Mr. Karp talked to us about the roles of super PACs in elections, and how they undertook the task of doing extensive opposition research that campaigns lacked the resources for. I found Karp personally to be a decent, though highly partisan fellow (but partisanship is literally his job description).  I noticed that others were not quite as fond, largely based on what seemed to be simple miscommunications between Karp and my fellow students. Mr. Karp was unfortunately on a time crunch, causing our day to end about an hour early. That gave us all the time we needed to freeze to death on the ride home.

Seeing that yesterday, I left you with a random kit, I will now barrage you with photos of my pets, because I cannot decide which photo of my kattos and doggo to go with:

Here is my kat, Hermione:

 

Here is my other kit, Ronald Weasley:

 

Here is my doggo, Murray:

 

And here are my kit-kats being good kattos and getting along together:

 

Isn’t that great, and you don’t care at all, do you?

Thanks, goodnight, and good morrow,
– Abé Summerblanket

Endnotes

• 1 citation needed