The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza gave his most recent “Worst Week in Washington Award” to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., whose assault weapons ban got stripped from a Democratic gun control package last Tuesday for lack of support. Fair enough, but if nonhumanoids can be eligible for the award (and why discriminate?), I’d say that drones had the “worst week in Washington” last week.

On Wednesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, members from both sides of the aisle seemed genuinely disturbed by the idea of “government drones buzzing overhead monitoring the activities of law-abiding citizens,” as Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, put it. When one of the witnesses, an industry lobbyist, complained that the very term “drone” had unfairly “hostile connotations,” he ran into a buzzsaw courtesy of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who snapped, “We’ll decide what we’ll call them.”