Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington D.C.’s congressional delegate, completed what witnesses said what the worst parking job they’ve ever seen on Wednesday.
Video from the incident, turned over to Roll Call’s “Heard on the Hill,” shows Norton, a Democrat, jamming her silver sedan into an angled parking spot between two other vehicles outside of the Longworth and Cannon House Office buildings.
“Eleanor Holmes Norton is struggling to park her car right now,” one witness says in the video.
“And she has hit that red car next to her, repeatedly,” another man adds.
Norton, 77, was headed into a joint address by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and accompanied by an aide. The video shows her car parked perpendicular to the curb. The cars on either side of hers are at an angle to the curb between the parking stripes, as they should be.
There does not appear to be any impediment preventing Norton from backing her car up to properly angle her car. The video begins with her aide walking behind her car, seemingly checking out her parking job. She is then seen getting out of her vehicle, milling around for a moment and then heading off to Ghani’s speech.
As Roll Call notes, a Capitol Hill police officer on a motorcycle appears to drive by on the road behind Holmes but does not stop to flag the parking violation.
The witnesses assume that Norton was going to correct her shoddy parking job, but when she did not, they sounded off, calling into question her ability to govern.
“If she parks like she should not be a member of Congress anymore,” one witness says.
Another exclaims, “Unbelievable!”
“If she leaves it like that that’s the worst parking job I’ve ever witnessed,” another chimes in.
One of the tipsters told Roll Call, “she hit the car next to her and did not leave a note, though I couldn’t see any damage.”
But an aide for Norton disputed that claim, telling Roll Call that Holmes did leave a business card.
“After the congresswoman parked her car, we assessed the cars on either side to see if there was any damage. We could not find not any,” the aide told Roll Call. “But we left a note with a business card so the congresswoman could be contacted in case we missed any.”
The 100-second video does not show Norton or her aide putting anything — a note, a business card — on the vehicles next to hers.