Over the weekend, This American Life airs a segment about me: my oil paintings, my Frederick Douglass portrait, and the moment I decided to run for the Standing Committee of Correspondents. Host Ike Sriskandarajah frames it as an Icarus story. He’s not wrong. But Icarus didn’t file for office.

The episode chronicles how I went from finding a box of abandoned art supplies on my front stoop to painting 18 Mitch McConnells, receiving a FaceTime call from President Biden, and pushing for my Frederick Douglass painting to hang in the press gallery. It ends with an announcement: I’m running for Standing Committee.

No candidate for Standing Committee has ever had a launch this high-profile. One fact I got wrong in the episode: I’m eligible to run starting October 1st, not a year or two from now. October 1, 2026. The signature deadline in December and the election in January. What this episode signals — and what I intend to demonstrate — is that if elected, I will think big and push hard for press freedom, potted plants, and gallery decorations.

— Pablo

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If you’re a Daily Press Gallery member, my aim is to earn your vote in January, when you’ll choose three of us to represent you for two years as the only self-governing capital press gallery in the world — since 1887.

If elected, here’s what I’ll do for us:

1. Press Freedom. I will fight for yours as hard as I’ve always fought for my own. In five years on the Capitol beat, I’ve never given an inch to anyone on press freedom. Sometimes I comply with rules I disagree with — but rules can be changed. Literally. Standing Committees of Correspondents have worked with the House Administration and Senate Rules Committees on matters of press access for over a century.

Here’s what that looks like in practice: I want to lift the dubious restrictions on smartphone filming in the Senate tunnels. I want press permitted onto the members’ balcony adjacent to the Speaker’s Lobby — and when we get there, smartphone filming should be permitted there too. These are not radical asks. They are the baseline of a functional press corps covering a coequal branch of government.

As I collect signatures and votes, I’ll also be collecting your grievances. More on my press freedom platform in the weeks ahead.

2. Foliage. The Senate Daily Press Gallery and Frederick Douglass Press Gallery are excellent workspaces — well-tended, practical, and ours. Both will be greatly improved with potted plants sourced from the U.S. Botanical Garden. I’ll broker that collaboration with the Architect of the Capitol, which manages the garden, and our hardworking gallery staff — who will not be burdened with watering duty. That part’s on me to figure out.

3. Decorations. The Frederick Douglass Press Gallery should celebrate Frederick Douglass the way the Speaker’s Lobby celebrates House Speakers — and not just Douglass. Louis Lautier. Alice Dunnigan and all the way back to Anne Royall. Mark Twain and Matt Fuller. Oswald, Cochrane, Rummler, and Standing Committee Chairs of yore.

These are our workspaces. We the Press can decorate them — and have, periodically, since they opened as part of the 1850s Capitol expansion. Elect me and I’ll work with the House and Senate Curators, the Architect of the Capitol, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian to curate the best display of press history anywhere in the public archive.

On credentialing: It is the biggest responsibility of any Standing Committee — gatekeeping against lobbyists, spies, charlatans, and wannabes was the original impetus for creating the committee in the first place. I take it seriously.

That said: more is more. The Capitol press corps is greatly diminished from its heyday. Hundreds of dead or dying regional outlets once fielded full bureaus — chiefs, editors, reporters, correspondents, stringers, photogs. Fewer press on the pitch is a problem for democracy and for us. I commit to voting with my fellow committee members — never against — on new outlet credentialing, approaching each case diligently and without ego. My first priority, though, will always be the press freedoms of existing Daily Press Gallery members.

I am among a handful of reporters in Capitol press history credentialed in three of the four press galleries. I know the rules, regulations, rosters, customs, and traditions of the Daily, Periodical, and Radio-TV galleries. No one is better positioned to fight proactively for your press freedoms. No one is more obsessed with making our workspaces worthy of the work we do here.

The Capitol press gallery has been self-governing since 1887 because someone, generation after generation, decided it was worth fighting for. I’m asking you to let me be that person for the next two years.

Vote Pablo ‘27.

More to follow…

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To leverage our collective influence and navigate the unique challenges of our beat, I am forming a Signal group dedicated to founders and reporters running their own shops.

Why Join?

• Strategic Organizing: Let’s discuss how to better leverage our growing presence on the Hill.

• Platform Mastery: Many of us are building on Substack; we can share specific tips, workflows, and best practices to optimize our reach.

• Resource Sharing: From credentialing hurdles to field-reporting logistics, we are stronger when we collaborate.

Get Involved

If you run an independent, journalist-owned publication and want to help shape the future of our segment on the beat, let’s connect.

Message me on Signal: pab.202

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CNN messaged me a few months back with an ask: could the network’s social media team post to r/Congress, which I mod. Of course, I said. Since then, it’s been lovely working with CNN and…

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In case you missed it, here are two news stories that this week ran under my byline:

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• FOR VANITY FAIR: I wrote a mini-profile of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries with a focus on his effort to pre…

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Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) is optimistic about securing unanimous consent in the Senate to pass her new bipartisan bill, Lulu’s Law. The bill, named for Lulu Gribb…

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August recess is the prefect time to reflect on Capitol Press, my rudderless newsletter on Congress that’s grown to 1,256 subscribers since March. The vast majority of you are Beltway in…

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The Associated Press reports that 170,000 people have signed up to volunteer in the week since Vice President Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, a stagg…

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Ted Cruz raised $168,400 during his Juneteenth fundraising swing through Manhattan, less than half of what he’d hoped for. The junior senator from Texas was scheduled for seven …

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Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) introduced an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for 2025 to remove funding for the implementation of President Biden’s Executive Order (EO) on Promoting Access to Voting. The order modernizes the vote.gov website while providing government agencies with resources to register citizens to vote and ensuring an end-to-end ballot tracking system for all absentee ballots cast by military and other eligible overseas voters.

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Briefing documents to Senator Ted Cruz were left in the Senate Refectory on Tuesday afternoon where I found and tweeted them. The tweets went viral, of course, but were soon stri…

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Gisele Fetterman has written a new op-ed calling on Biden to protect Dreamers. “As someone who grew up undocumented in the U.S., I understand all too well the pain of growing up in the shadows and the stress caused by the uncertainty of the situation,” she writes in TribLIVE, a news site covering western Pennsylvania.

“I have spoken out many times over the years about the urgent need to protect the ‘Dreamers,’ people who were brought to the United States as children and have lived here for nearly all of their lives,” she continues before calling on President Joe Biden to use “his executive powers” to “provide protections for millions of other undocumented Americans — like undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens.”

Mrs. Fetterman’s senator husband, John, agrees that Dreamers must be protected. “The supreme irony of my career: During the 2022 campaign, the GOP bludgeoned me as a socialist with a hard-on for an open border,” said Fetterman in a statement after the collapse of the bipartisan border bill in March. “Now I’m here in the Senate demanding a secure border and they won’t take yes for an answer.”

Senator Fetterman told me in February that he would not vote for legislation that harms Dreamers, a red line he made clear to senate negotiators on the doomed bipartisan bill. Despite the severely restrictive tenor of the largely enforcement-based bill, the bipartisan effort did not directly harm Dreamers, a nod to Fetterman’s clarity on the issue.

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Pablo’s View

American Families United, a mixed-status families advocacy group, has worked for years to get their cause heard in the West Wing. With the major Beltway non-profits now backing AFU’s big relief ask of Biden — for an executive order that

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Matt Priest, the President and CEO of the Footwear Distributors & Retailers of America, wore some custom Nike Air Force 1s to the Capitol yesterday that were too dope (an…

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We’ve seen politicians use hyperbolic and incendiary language to fire up their followers on social media for years. Whether it’s about immigration, policing, criminal justice, or inclusion, many poli…

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