A young man draped himself across the threshold of the Member’s entrance to the House floor last week, but the fellow wasn’t protesting the USA PATRIOT Act extension on which the chamber was voting.

He was there with his mother. During a long series of votes Thursday night, Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.) brought her 2-year-old son, Joaquin Sullivan, to the floor.

Sánchez tried to leave later for a dinner with Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), and that’s when the tot lay down across the doorway in what was described as a “Gandhi pose.”

A Capitol Hill guard was overheard sympathetically commenting that he had a 3-year-old child.
And our tipster says Sánchez asked if parenting got easier.

“Meltdowns are a 2-year-old’s job,” she tells HOH through a spokesman.

There are times when Sánchez has to pick her son up from day care and then return to the chamber for votes.

“It is a necessity of child care,” Sánchez spokesman Adam Hudson says.

Correction: June 1, 2011

An earlier version of this story misspelled Gandhi.