Reporter recalls a time when shared humanity prevailed in Congress

When I moved across the newsroom, from CQ to Roll Call, I went from tracking procedure to tracking people.

At CQ, we laid bare the business of governance through boxes ticked and rules mapped out, using clear and precise language honed over decades to render the complexities of the legislative processes understandable.

At Roll Call, my job was to chronicle the people without whom legislation wouldn’t exist — those whose efforts stitched together the laws and policies of a government meant to serve more than 340 million people across 50 states, various territories and the District of Columbia.

The shift from studying the system to studying its stewards was profound. It taught me that whatever else Washington ran on, it would collapse without a foundation of basic respect, and, I’d argue,