LOL - this seemed weird. So, I looked it up -- there was no real session on 1/26. Murkowski opened session at 10am and it was done for the day at 10:10am. They did nothing. Basically, what happened is that Murkowski was there over the weekend during the storm, and when things were still clogged up due to the storm on Monday, they decided to kick business over to Wednesday. Folks who were not needed did not show up, which was almost everyone.Something was a little different in the Senate on Tuesday morning. And Sen. Lisa Murkowski noticed it.
The Alaska Republican was one of only a few lawmakers in the Capitol building following the weekend blizzard, and it was her job to handle the formalities of delaying Senate business until her colleagues could get back to work. After finishing a bit of parliamentary business, she described what she saw in the ornate chamber.
“As we convene this morning, you look around the chamber, the presiding officer is female. All of our parliamentarians are female. Our floor managers are female. All of our pages are female.”
Murkowski noted that she and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who was wielding the Senate gavel, hadn’t planned the all-women session. It was, she said, just a coincidence.
“Something is genuinely different — and something is genuinely fabulous,” Murkowski said.
She theorized that the lack of men in the ranks of members and staffers might not have been a simple fluke. “Perhaps it speaks to the hardiness of women,” she added, “that put on your boots and put your hat on and get out and slog through the mess that’s out there.”
Note, yes, the Senators who were there were women. But the articles on this are not clear -- there were only two Senators there. There are 20 female Senators, 18 of which did not show up on Tuesday, just like the male Senators.
The "pages", says Murkowski, were all female. There are 30 total pages, only some Senators have pages. Murkowski and Collins both have pages, one each, and those pages are female. Pages for other Senators would not generally be the Senate chamber if their Senator was not there or they did not need to be there.
Murkowski also reffered to "floor managers" being female - Floor managers are Senators designated to lead and organize consideration of a bill or other measure on the floor. They usually are the chairman and ranking minority member of the reporting committee or their designees. Floor managers, being Senators, would have to be one or more of the Senators in attendance at session. So, Murkowski was referring to herself and Collins, the only Senators there. The floor managers were Murkowski and Collins who led and organized consideration of the measure on the floor to cancel everything for 1/26 and kick it to 1/27. They organized themselves.
Then, she referred to "parliamentarians." There is one Senate Parliamentarian, which is not a Senator. The current Parliamentarian is Elizabeth McDonough. There are two senior assistant parliamentarians, Leigh Hildebrand and Michael Beaver. She doesn't specify who is in attendance, but clearly when she says "all" of our parliamentarians -- she's referring only to a couple of people who are women every day. Only one of the three people who could be referred to as a "parliamentarian" is a guy, so on many days "all" the parliamentarians will be women, because only one of them is a guy, when that one assistant parliamentarian is not there. They aren't always in the Senate Chamber.
If this little opportunistic "oh, snap" moment tells us anything, it's not that women are "hardier" than men and will show up to work in tough conditions when men won't. It's that female politicians are not any different than their deceptive and disingenuous male colleagues.
