It is the story of William Henderson Foote, a federal law enforcement officer who was the victim of an 1883 lynch mob. His murder was ignored in his agency then, but the government now is honoring his memory.

The Domestic Partnership Benefits and Obligations Act (S. 1910) is scheduled to go before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee for a vote.

As Joe Davidson wrote last week in the Federal Diary, some federal contractors got a 10 percent raise in April, while federal workers are in the midst of a pay-freeze.

President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation establishing the department on May 15, 1862, in the midst of the Civil War. The creation of the department was part of an enormous expansion of the federal government during the war.

Because I’m watching the United-Houston game three days after it was played (sorry about that, but my job as a traveling court jester makes it hard to watch things live), it doesn’t quite make sense to do a live match diary. So I’ll offer my thoughts in condensed form, skipping the parts of the column that usually sag a little (trenchant analysis) but retaining 100 percent of what I do well (hair jokes).

Jeffrey D. Zients, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent a memo to government officials Friday saying, “Each agency shall spend at least 30 percent less on travel expenses covered by this memorandum than in FY 2010.”

Going up? — Former President George W. Bush finally endorsed Mitt Romney (the suspense was killing us) from the inside of an elevator. Our colleague Karen Tumulty reports that the former president has been low-key on the campaign trail—particularly when compared with another ex-prez (hint: rhymes with Shlinton).

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) is leading a group taking off Friday for a week in Taiwan and South Korea, looking at three days in Seoul and three in Taipei.

Many of Obama’s key financial supporters are gay--including finance director Rufus Gifford and Democratic National Committee treasurer Andrew Tobias--and the campaign has regularly held fundraisers focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender donors.

Lobbying records released last week show that there wasn’t much opposition this winter when Congress quietly opened up U.S. airspace to aerial drones, which some advocates for civil liberties say raise a host of concerns about privacy.

The last three times control of the House has changed hands, the winning party has run on some form of public, cohesive agenda that could be embraced by incumbents and challengers alike. But as House Democrats mount an uphill climb to recapture the chamber this November, it’s not clear whether they plan to follow that model.

The answer is a political action committee called Votesane. But it’s also a trick question, because the unusual two-year-old group doesn’t really give money to anyone. Rather, it serves as a conduit for individual donors to pass money along to the candidates and committees of their choosing, regardless of party or ideological persuasion.

On the other side, there’s, well, exactly the same thing.

So perhaps it is not surprising that on the important social issues that came before the Supreme Court this term, Maryland’s Democratic Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler and Virginia Republican Ken Cuccinelli II took opposite paths.

The ambiguities, contradictions and unaddressed consequences in federal statutes keep the court in business. And in interpreting Congress’s work, justices employ all manner of tools, including other statutes, the court’s own precedents and sometimes a good dictionary.

“A law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce — a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner. Right?” President Obama told a gathering of newspaper editors last week.

Take, for example, her handling of the effort to get India to reduce — if not eliminate — its purchases of crude oil from Iran. The idea, of course, is to strengthen the sanctions against Iran in hopes of preventing Tehran from developing nuclear weapons.