A fun time at the House of Representatives

This last Friday, as part of the organized activities for my LSE class reunion in DC, we had a tour of the U.S. Capitol. One of our DC classmates was able to get a staffer from the Republican House minority leader's office to be our guide. While I'd been in the Capitol a few times for work when I was with UNHCR, I had never visited as a tourist. The tour itself would have been a fun experience in and of itself. However, a couple of other aspects of the tour made it even more interesting.

Little did we know when we arranged the tour, but the House Republican energy bill protest was going on. Basically, a handful of the more conservative Republicans had decided to keep giving speeches about energy policy on the house floor during the August recess. The mikes were off, the C-SPAN cameras were dead, and the Democrats (and most of the other Republicans) were back in the their home districts campainging. But these Republicans wanted to put pressure on the Democrats to consider expanding U.S. off-shore drilling. Regardless of my problems with both the politics and ethics of this move, watching this "shadow session" for a few minutes was entertaining. And because Congress was not in session, all the tourists got to sit on the House floor, in the seats where Representatives usually sit. (Typically tourists must stay in an upper level gallery.)

Our LSE group was a mix of Americans and Europeans. The Europeans were pretty amused with the energy policy arguments, especially one individual who is a policy expert on energy and environmental issues. I would have liked to see him ask the Republicans a few questions. The level of discourse was very dumbed down (they were addressing tourists and not other Representatives) and it was actually a bit embarrassing for the Americans IMHO.

The best part of the energy speeches was Rep. Thelma Drake's (from the Norfolk area) justification for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). She claimed that she always envisioned ANWR as a "pristine" and "beautiful" place. However, after going there and seeing that it wasn't as pristine and beautiful as she imagined, she now thinks it's okay to drill there. So I guess that means our standards of environmental preservation should be based on what we think is "pretty." Who cares about fragile ecosystems, the food web, special preservation, etc.?The only thing that matters is whether people think it would look good on a postcard. I guess that means we should only worry about cute endangered species and not the ugly ones. This woman would have gotten reamed if she would have made this argument to anyone else but tired, sweaty tourists.

One aspect of the Republican speeches we witnessed that really confused the Europeans was the opening prayer. More on that in my next blog entry. I have to do a little more research before discussing that issue.