Inside the Office of The House historian: Anthony Wallis
Age: 27
Hometown: Whitefish Bay, Wis.
Education: B.A., University of Minnesota, 2005; M.A., U.S. Naval War College, Newport, R.I. 2010.
Last job: Staff assistant for Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.).
Favorite piece of congressional history: Going through photo negatives, I saw a three-way handshake of President John F. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and Speaker of the House Samuel T. Rayburn in 1961. Another cool thing I found was the funeral program for John Quincy Adams in 1848, in which Abraham Lincoln was listed as one of the House members in the Committee of Arrangements..
Tips for conducting historical research: Learn to utilize not only Congressional Research Service reports but also all congressional resources such as HeinOnline, Deschler’s Precedents and LexisNexis.
Current lawmaker or recent event you think will stand out in congressional history 50 years from now: This past health reform vote will be up there, but so will be the mobilization of many constituents in recent years. In the five-plus years I’ve been on Capitol Hill, I have never seen such an immense wave of rallies from both sides of the political spectrum.
Most embarrassing moment on Capitol Hill: I had to bleach my hair after promising the youth soccer team coach that I would do so if we won our division. We won. I had a meeting the next day with my boss and members of the Speaker’s staff, so I had to quickly get a buzz-cut, but it still had blondish-orangeish hair streaks, so my head looked like a leopard.
Interests outside of work: Playing guitar, cooking, working out, skateboarding, playing and coaching soccer, writing, reading, skiing, listening to music ranging from Johnny Cash to Breaking Benjamin.
Anthony Wallis has gotten used to being the bearer of bad news as a research analyst in the House’s Office of the Historian.
He often talks to reporters or staffers in lawmakers’ offices who want to declare a congressional event unprecedented.
That’s often not the case, he said.
“People always say, ‘This is the first time in history that this is happening,’ or blah, blah, blah,” he said. “Most of the time, probably not. And that’s one of the things I’ve had to reveal to a couple members’ offices and press.”
One thing that does stand out in history, Wallis said, is the House’s recent Sunday vote on the healthcare bill. Wallis wrote a memo on Sunday votes, and he remembers being a part of one of the few other Sunday votes in recent history.
He was an intern for former Rep. Jim Ramstad (R-Minn.) in 2005 when the House voted on the Terri Schiavo case. That vote also fell on a Sunday, and Ramstad’s office called Wallis into work to man the phones.
Wallis’s best advice on finding congressional firsts: “You gotta be willing to do the work and do the research and find out if it has [already happened]. I’m glad I’m part of that process.”
