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"FacebookPinterest\n\nA large, skylight-lit subterranean hallway connecting the House and the Senate is so choked with tourists this afternoon that a reporter or staffer trying to rush from one side of the Capitol to the other has no choice but to get caught in the slow moving current of foot traffic. It's the only real sign anything is happening in the Capitol this week. Summer in Congress is always slow, but election years in a brutally partisan and ineffective Congress are the worst. The House is currently discussing naming Post Offices. Rand Paul is giving a speech in the Senate about cutting off aid to Pakistan to an audience of floor staff. Except for the tourists, both chambers, and the mosaic hallways that surround them, are mostly empty.\n\nNot that there isn't anything going on in Washington this week. The House will vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt Thursday. The Supreme Court will deliver a ruling on the health care law the same day. Congress will vote on student loans and a major transportation bill this week.\n\nBut action (in the House especially) often doesn't start until the evening\u2014first votes are at 6:30 p.m. tonight, with more expected between 10 and 11 p.m.\u2014and late into the week. The current House schedule, designed by Eric Cantor, is supposed to keep Congress in town for two weeks, then home in the district for one week. Many of those in-session weeks don't start until late Tuesday. Sometimes they let out on Thursday. The result is a lot of hurry up and wait for the staffers and reporters whose work depends on waiting around for the House to vote. Like yesterday, it's another day spent waiting for the action to begin, for more \"spectacles of a nation absolutely riven by opposite belief systems,\" as Reid put it so nicely yesterday.\n\nNot that the little eco-system that makes up Capitol Hill\u2014the staff, the reporters, the lawmakers\u2014have any choice but to forge ahead as though Congress is carrying out business as usual. \"I have written the same story like three billion times,\" groans one reporter typing away from his gallery work station, a small, carpeted space where reporters cram elbow to elbow with their laptops propped open under televisions monitoring the floor action on C-SPAN. And he's not even on health care.\n\nRead more on Death Race 2012:\n\nFull Text: Obama's November Concession Speech\n\n[Hunger Reads: What Gay Divorce Looks Like and Mitt Romney's New Secret Weapon\n\n](http://www.gq.com/news-politics/blogs/death-race#ixzz1yvxkXpil)\n\nBob Dole is a Great American\n\nScenes From The Supreme Court\n\nFollow Marin Cogan on Twitter for more updates from the campaign trail."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/congress-watch-waiting-for-somebody-anybody-to-do-something>