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Christy Amatos, Assistant Parliamentarian, Secretary of the Senate, official portrait in Washington, DC on September 16, 2024. (Official U.S. Senate photo by Ryan Donnell)
Christy Amatos, Assistant Parliamentarian, Secretary of the Senate, official portrait in Washington, DC on September 16, 2024. (Official U.S. Senate photo by Ryan Donnell)

A Congress.gov Interview with Christy Amatos, Assistant Parliamentarian for the US Senate

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Today’s Congress.gov interview is with Christy Amatos, an Assistant Parliamentarian at the United States Senate

Describe your background.

I am a native Ohioan who attended The Ohio State University and later Boston University for law school. I have been working in non-partisan legislative work for about a decade – I started my career in the Ohio General Assembly as a bill drafter. After about a year of that, I was offered the chance to move to another legislative agency that was in the process of rolling out software to fully digitize the lawmaking process. I had no background in tech but they promised me if I knew the legislative process, they would teach me everything I needed to know about being a business analyst.

I had no idea what I was getting into but I loved it! I served as the liaison between the clerks in the Ohio Senate and House of Representatives and the team designing and developing the software. I learned so much about communication – both the unique language used in software development but also how to confront and address problems in a productive and congenial way, particularly in high stress situations. At the time, I had no idea how much those skills were going to help me in the future.

A few years later, I joined the Office of the Senate Parliamentarian in Congress, another non-partisan role but one that was more traditionally connected to my legal training. I have been here for about six years and love it. The people who work on Capitol Hill are what make this job so great – from the Secretary of the Senate staff I work with every day to the folks at the Library of Congress who engage with us on Congress.gov.

How would you describe your job to other people?

The Senate Parliamentarian is kind of like the referee of the Senate. We interpret and apply the rules of the Senate on a daily basis.

What is your role in the development of Congress.gov?

It just so happened that when I started working in the Senate, there was an opportunity to join the Secretary of the Senate’s Congress.gov team and because of my past experience, my boss suggested I join. I was definitely excited to be able to dip my toes back into some of the type of work I had been doing in Ohio. At that time, Congress.gov was live but so was the previous resource, LIS, which was a website only accessible to Congress with some additional features that the public-facing site THOMAS did not have. There were a lot of growing pains getting Congress.gov to the point where it could provide the same level of service to users that LIS had . . . and a lot of staff who were always going to like LIS better no matter what. So we had a big challenge working to gain the trust of the internal users while also continuing to work on bettering Congress.gov.

Fortunately, we were able to gather a great group of staff, both on the Secretary of the Senate side of things and on the Library of Congress side, and were able to get buy-in from some important, but previously uninvolved, stakeholders and then things really started to improve.

All of that to say that I think of my role in two parts – provide important feedback on how data is used and presented from the perspective of my office, but also to help facilitate the good conversations and working relationships that are critical to the success of Congress.gov.

One thing I do take great satisfaction in is fixing errors in really old data – we recently fixed one from five years before I was born – you know the errors have been out there for decades and maybe no one has looked at that particular piece of legislation or maybe they did not notice the misspelled word but fixing it is one more tiny step to getting Congress.gov to be as perfect as we can make it and I find that so satisfying.

What is your favorite feature of Congress.gov?

I think someone described the folks in my office as “power users” of Congress.gov, which sounds much more impressive than I ever actually feel on a daily basis. But I do use the search functions on Congress.gov every single day, so my favorite feature is absolutely one of the advanced searches. The command line search lets the user input search terms and connectors to tailor the results to be very specific without having to click a lot of boxes or choose from dropdown menus. There is nothing more satisfying than getting good search results on the first try!

What is the most interesting fact you’ve learned about the legislative process while working for Congress?

I have been working in the legislative branch for about a decade at this point, so I am not entirely sure I can pin down one in particular. Something I have started to spend time learning, however, is the history of the legislative process, and by extension, the history of the people working in the legislature.

One of my favorite anecdotes is that before the Russell Senate Office Building was named for Richard Russell, it was just called the Senate Office Building and Senator Harry Truman would joke that his constituents could address his mail to “Harry Truman S.O.B.” and the Post Office would know where to deliver it.

One of the important things I have learned about the legislative process is that it is made up of all of the people who have worked and served here, not just the elected members. For example, last year I read the obituary of former Senate Committee on Foreign Relations staffer Bertie Bowman and immediately went in search of his autobiography. He started working at the Capitol in the 1940s when he was 13 years old and did not fully retire until 2021. His story of service to his country is just one example of why so many people have done this work over more than two centuries and serves as an inspiration for those of us currently doing it.

What’s something most of your co-workers do not know about you?

This is the opposite of something people do not know about me, I am telling everyone because it makes me laugh! I just got a kitten and I named him John Quincy Catams.

The picture features a black cat with big green eyes looking at the camera while playing. The cat's name is John Quincy Catams and is the pet of Christy Amatos.
John Quincy Catams, picture courtesy of Christy Amatos.

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Comments

  1. What a perfect kitten!

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