Biden's right at home, Burris gets denied

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - Sen. Joe Biden is still a member of the club; Roland Burris isn’t.

Not yet anyway.

But Burris was the clear celebrity Tuesday — and got a larger and more frantic press scrum — at the opening of the 111^th Congress.

Rebuffed by Secretary of the Senate Nancy Erickson, all Burris could do was head to an outside press venue — the cold and muddy “swamp” across from the Russell Senate Office building.

That's where he told a rain-sodden phalanx of television camera crews and reporters that he may file a lawsuit to get the seat — if negotiation can't leverage it out of an unwilling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Back indoors where it was warm and dry, freshman House members and senators reveled in the giddy ebullience of being sworn in.

Family day at the Capitol
For the newly elected, it can feel like the first day of high school or college — or perhaps even their wedding day. Members’ mothers and fathers and children milled all over the halls outside the Senate and House chambers.

Members kept losing their spouses or kids, and chiefs of staff kept fretting over the possibility of losing their bosses.

On the House side, members sauntered into the Speaker's Lobby just off the House floor to pick up their voting cards and member pins.

Veteran Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson, escorting freshman Idaho Democrat Walt Minnick, wisecracked to one of the clerical staff who manned the credentials tables, “We’re from Idaho; can you tell me where the S’s are?”

A few minutes before taking his oath, freshman Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., went on to the House floor with his teenaged daughter. As they came through the door to the lobby he anxiously asked her, “Where’s your mother?”

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Connolly, the chairman of the Fairfax County, Virginia, Board of Supervisors for the past five years, said he was thinking about the responsibility weighing on him as a new member and “the gravity of the economic situation. There are a lot of parallels between this and the Congress that came into being in 1933.”

A savvy freshman, he then spotted Rep. Solomon Ortiz, D-Texas and paid homage to him, greeting him with a hearty “Mr. Chairman!”

(Ortiz is chairman of the Readiness Subcommittee on the House Armed Services Committee.)

Freshman focuses on Dulles
After courting Ortiz, Connolly turned back and showed more savvy.

His district is near Dulles Airport, which prompted the question on whether he is working on a way to get from downtown Washington to Dulles, cheaply and quickly.

“Dulles rail?” he laughed knowingly, as if to say, “is the sky blue?”

“That’s been my top priority for 14 years and it will continue to be my top transportation priority,” he said. And getting federal money to build a rail connector to Dulles fits neatly into the infrastructure theme of the opening of the Obama era, he said.

A few minutes later over on the Senate side, Biden took his oath of office from the man he will succeed as vice president, Dick Cheney.

Biden couldn’t resist an impromptu scrum with his pals in the Capitol press corps.

On the Obama team not notifying Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein of Leon Panetta’s nomination to head the Central Intelligence Agency, Biden said, “I’m still a Senate man. And I still think this way. I think it’s always good to talk to the requisite members of Congress.”

He added, “I think it was just a mistake” that someone on Team Obama failed to pick up the phone and notify Feinstein.

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