Curtis Tate Published

Capito Gavels In Senate Committee With A Gift From Democrats

A woman in an orange jacket holds a wooden gavel next to a man in a dark suit and tie in a wood-paneled room with others present.
Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, R-West Virginia, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island.
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U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito took the gavel as a committee chair Thursday, and it was no ordinary gavel.

Capito led her first hearing Thursday in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

The panel took up the nomination of former New York Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin for administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

After Capito made her opening remarks, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the senior Democrat on the committee, presented her with a gavel made in Wheeling in 1956 with wood from the old West Virginia statehouse.

“It was part of the estate of Hulett Smith, who was governor from 1964 to 1968, and also was the predecessor to my father, so I thought that was a very considerate, bipartisan effort on Sheldon Whitehouse,” Capito said.

Capito’s father, Arch Moore, succeeded Smith as governor. Capito became the committee’s chair after Republicans won a 53-seat majority in the Senate.