Jonah Reyes

The most consequential thing I ever watched a legislature do happened in a committee room in Santa Fe at a quarter past eleven at night, in 2003, with four reporters present and three of them asleep. A single amendment changed who qualified for a state program, and almost nobody noticed for a year. I have been reading bills line by line ever since, because that is where the story usually is.

I covered the New Mexico statehouse for most of the 2000s and moved to national policy coverage in Washington in 2009, in time for the health-care fight, the debt-ceiling standoffs, and more government-shutdown deadlines than I would like to count.

My sentences run longer than most reporters'. I have made peace with that, because process deserves precision more than it deserves a shortcut.

I grew up in Albuquerque and studied political science at the University of New Mexico. I find the bureaucracy funnier than I let on in print.