"Federal emergency should be declared," wrote resident Kate Dell on the Chevy Chase listserv in Northwest Washington.
"Wow, that is a great idea," chimed in fellow D.C. resident Dianne Fiumara. "I can't imagine why this is not employed. It is the Federal Government that's shut down and the Federal Govt should be able to employ itself to open back up!"
You'd think. But this is Washington. After a week that saw President Barack Obama declare major disasters in North Carolina, Arkansas and New Jersey and order federal aid to speed recovery from winter storms, the federal government did something else entirely. It shut down.
Jacquelyn Martin, AP
Anxious residents line up to buy supplies at a Giant supermarket on Tuesday, hours before another large snowstorm was expected to hit the Washington area.
Federal offices shut down Tuesday for the second day in a row, giving 230,000 government employees another snow day at home.
The House of Representatives declared itself closed the rest of the week.
The Senate took a more piecemeal approach. The Armed Services Committee canceled hearings on nuclear weapons, the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays. The Energy Committee scrubbed four scheduled hearings, admitting in an e-mail that it was "bowing to the inevitable."
The full Senate planned to go "full steam ahead" on votes Tuesday and hoped to turn to its jobs agenda later in the week. But, as a Democratic leadership aide noted in the late morning, before a predicted 10 to 20 inches of fresh snow was to arrive, it was possible that "in true Washington fashion, once the first few flakes hit the ground this afternoon, we can abandon all reason and head for Safeway for the obligatory stockpiling of milk, bread and toilet paper."
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, which like other streets here has doubled in recent days as a cross-country ski route, the White House acknowledged that, yes, there was a lot of white stuff outside. A year ago, the newly arrived, fresh-from-Chicago head of the household at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. all but called Washingtonians wusses for overreacting to a few snowflakes.
After the president braved blizzard conditions Saturday to address fellow Democrats a few blocks away, his staff announced that a concert celebrating the civil rights movement would be moved up a day to beat the impending storm. The concert, featuring Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Smokey Robinson, among other performers, was moved from Wednesday to Tuesday at 8 p.m. and will be streamed live on www.whitehouse.gov.
In a city where sightings of Cabinet members pinching melons at the supermarket and senators munching popcorn at the multiplex are ho-hum, the snow affected the area in a most democratic fashion.
Tourists who planned to visit the Smithsonian and the Capitol Visitor Center found closed doors. Schools across the area were shut, with Loudoun County, Va., calling it quits for the week. Andrews Air Force Base in nearby Maryland was closed.
Vice President Joe Biden postponed a speech on nuclear security that had been planned for Wednesday at the National Defense University, while Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called off a breakfast with reporters on the bank bailout. And the Embassy of Finland canceled a party Wednesday night to celebrate its being named the first green LEED embassy building in the United States.
Yet even as many wondered if this was already a lost week, there were signs Tuesday of a new normal after days of digging and doing without power. Mail deliveries resumed sporadically. Newspapers – albeit one or two days late – arrived on doorsteps. Store shelves remained spotty and checkout lines long, but the hysteria of last week appeared gone. At least for a few hours – when the next winter wallop arrives.
