Elizabeth Warren’s Senate office for now: ‘the trailer’

[UnrepentantLiberal]

Spartan and utilitarian, the temporary office of Senator Elizabeth Warren is in a courtyard near the Capitol. (Pete Marovich for The Boston Globe)

By Noah Bierman
The Boston Globe
March 14, 2013

WASHINGTON — After shaking hands and snapping photos with visiting constituents, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren offers them a sheepish apology.

“You’re welcome to come by my office,” she tells them. “It’s just not much to see.”

This is not a politician’s false modesty. Warren’s prize for winning one of the toughest and highest profile Senate battles in the country: An office in a prefabricated building known around the Senate as “the trailer.’’

Efforts have been made to spruce up the paper-thin walls with Norman Rockwell reproductions and photographs of a Gloucester lighthouse and the Zakim Bridge. But there is no way to disguise the modest nature of the space, in a small cluster of temporary structures erected in the courtyard of a grand office building — the US Senate’s version of a mobile-home park.

Warren cracks good-natured jokes about it and insists she has far greater frustrations to confront, including complex filibuster rules that can be used by the minority to kill legislation. But her extended stay in modular housing, expected to last until June, is a freshman’s first and most tangible lesson in the plodding and idiosyncratic ways of the Senate.

More: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2013/03/14/elizabeth-warren-labors-prefab-office-she-waits-for-her-own-senate-suite/EA8icIFXqOAD0xfKw5vyFO/story.html