Only Women Showed Up To Senate Floor After D.C. Blizzard

The Senate convened for a short session on Tuesday despite campus being closed due to 29 inches of snowfall from the previous weekend’s blizzard, but something, noted Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), was a little off.

“As we convene this morning, you look around the chamber, the presiding officer is female. All of our parliamentarians are female. Our floor managers are female. All our pages are female,” said Sen. Murkowski in a Leslie Knope-like address.

While other federal offices remained closed, the District government was open, but only women showed up to the Senate floor. The female senators arrived to prepare for a debate on Murkowski’s “Energy Policy Modernization Act,” a bipartisan bill she introduced with Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

Murkowski noted that the all-woman session was unplanned. “Something is different this morning—different in a good way, I might add—but something is genuinely different, and I think it’s genuinely fabulous,” said Murkowski.

The bill aims to regulate water heaters for efficiency, lift the crude oil export ban, expand oil and gas drilling efforts in the Atlantic and Arctic, and update the U.S. grid system. The bill has received opposition from presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vermont, and others who oppose an increase in drilling efforts.

Watch Murkowski’s remarks below.