Opinion: Ticket Replay: It took a guy to do this? New Speaker Boehner orders a change to benefit just 71 members

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During the holiday season, as in years past, The Ticket is republishing some of our favorite items from the previous political year. This story was originally published on Dec. 2, 2010:

For some reason it took a male Speaker of the House to accomplish this:

The nearly six dozen female members of the incoming House of Representatives will have a new restroom just as close to the chamber’s floor as their male colleagues. A sometimes significant comfort, given legislators’ propensity to blather.

Ohio’s Rep. John Boehner, who retakes the Speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi come the new Congress in January, is ordering up a myriad of changes symbolic and meaningful in the chamber to underline the transition to the leadership of a Republican majority this time.

His transition team under Rep. Greg Walden is still drawing up lists.

Out, for instance, go the frivolous House resolutions on somebody’s birthday or some team’s victory. And now we learn, in comes a brand-new restroom for the 71 female members of the House. And it’ll be bipartisan too.

Until now female members have had to traipse much farther than male colleagues to find restroom facilities, even during these past four years of leadership under the country’s first female speaker.

This is good news for everyone except one person. The House Parliamentarian’s office adjacent to the legislative floor will disappear to make way for the new bathroom stalls.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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