Vote Pablo '27
I'm running for Standing Committee of Correspondents on press freedom, foliage, and a decorating vision for the galleries.
BIG THANKS to the colleagues in the Daily Press Gallery who have agreed to lend their signature to my campaign for Standing Committee of Correspondents. Getting on the ballot requires 15 signatures from gallery members — I now have seventeen and counting. It also requires that the outlet running be in good standing for at least 18 months. Migrant Insider hits that mark on October 1st. I’ll submit my signatures in December.
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…