Photo by cacophony76The last two smoking rooms on Capitol Hill, in the Cannon and Longworth House Office Buildings, will close for good this week, The Hill reports.
How can Congressional office buildings even have smoking rooms anymore? Because they are technically exempt from D.C. law, so they aren’t subject to the workplace smoking ban the District enacted at the beginning of 2007. But when Democrats took over Congress a couple years ago, they began aggressively moving toward getting rid of smoking in all Congressional buildings, starting with the Speaker’s Lobby and ending with these two tiny break rooms that even most Hill staffers probably didn’t know existed.
The Hill’s story includes an indignant quote from a staffer who frequently used one of these smoking rooms that seems tone-deaf even to a smoker. “It’s just so inconvenient,” he said. Seriously man, you’re a smoker in 2009. Surely you’ve gotten used to inconvenience by now.
