While Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisconsin) office busied itself with taking down its Winter Storm Jonas live feed, members of the United States Senate returned to work on Tuesday. Or at least that was until Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) noticed something rather significant about the morning’s post-blizzard proceedings. They were, as the Washington Post noted, staffed and managed entirely by women.
“As we convene this morning, you look around the chamber, the presiding officer is female,” Murkowski told everyone in attendance. “All of our parliamentarians are female. Our floor managers are female. All of our pages are female.”
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“This was not orchestrated in any way, shape or form. We came in this morning, looked around and thought, ‘Something is different this morning.’ Different in a good way, I might add.”
As the senator from Alaska emphasized in her remarks, the all-female senate meeting wasn’t a planned affair. It was all just a coincidence, thanks in large part to the massive blizzard that blanketed Washington, D.C. with between 17.8 and 22.4 inches of snow. Yet the impromptu scenario begs the question — why didn’t any of the present senators’ male colleagues show up?
Whatever the actual or imagined answer is, Murkowski was noticeably pleased with the occurrence. She concluded her remarks, saying, “Something is genuinely different, and I think it’s genuinely fabulous.”
(Via the Washington Post)