Why no spectators at congressional

A year later, in , the Senate voted to open its legislative sessions to the public. This decision required construction of a gallery, which was ready for visitors by the end of the following year.

At century's end, as members prepared for their move to the new national capital in Washington, depressing rumors circulated about that location's ever-present mud and mosquitoes.

Those stories would turn out to be more than rumor! William Thornton, a physician and amateur architect, had designed a long classical building with a low central dome. Construction proceeded slowly, as overseers were regularly hired and fired. A financing scheme failed, depriving builders of the funds required to construct Senate and House wings simultaneously. By architects and engineers abandoned the House wing and concentrated limited resources on the Senate's.

Because that wing had a larger number of small rooms than its House counterpart, it could more easily accommodate, on a temporary basis, the building's many prospective tenants.

They included the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, a district court, and associated offices.

Consequently, when members arrived in November of , they were immediately confronted with the need for more space. Members accustomed to Philadelphia's broad streets and stately mansions immediately disliked Washington.

A New York senator commented, the new city lacks only "houses, cellars, kitchens, well-informed men, amiable women, and other little trifles of this kind to make our city perfect. On November 21, , meeting in the ground-floor room that is today restored as the old Supreme Court Chamber, the Senate achieved its first quorum in Washington. It then immediately received President John Adams , who delivered his annual State of the Union message.

Several months later, on March 4, , Thomas Jefferson walked from his nearby boardinghouse to this Chamber to take his presidential oath. Latrobe began with the House wing, but after that project got underway, he turned to the Senate wing. Latrobe found the Senate's quarters to be in sad shape with leaks and falling plaster everywhere. The architect recommended a major reconstruction to remove rotting timbers and improve ventilation.

His plan, which Congress accepted, proposed building a Senate Chamber on the second floor, to match the location of his redesigned House Chamber, and converting the Senate's old ground floor Chamber into a room for the Supreme Court. In , as Latrobe's Senate reconstruction plan proceeded, the Senate took temporary quarters across the hall in space formerly occupied by the Supreme Court. The Senate remained in the old court chamber for less than a year, complaining about its poor ventilation and lack of protection from the hot afternoon sun that poured in through the western windows.

Throughout this period, the only office space available to members was found in their respective boardinghouses. In , the itinerant Senate moved upstairs to the abandoned room—today part of the Republican leader's suite—that earlier had served as the House Chamber. Finally, in , members believed their travels, and travails, had come to an end as they moved across the hall into the room that today is restored to look like the Senate Chamber of the late s.

For the next four years, there were few complaints. Word reached the Capitol on a sweltering summer's afternoon in August that invading forces had swept aside the defending American army at Bladensburg, Maryland, and would arrive by dusk. Despite the wartime emergency, Congress had been in recess for the past four months. The Capitol proved a welcoming target for British troops with torches. The large amount of timber in its floors, walls, and ceilings ensured extensive destruction in the ensuing conflagration.

The Senate seized on the reconstruction as a welcome opportunity to gain an enlarged Chamber and additional committee rooms. The project took more time and money than Latrobe had anticipated, a miscalculation that would cost him his job in Built in , this structure was one of the largest of Washington's early buildings to survive the British attack. It housed a hotel, the city's first theater, a post office, and the federal patent office.

Congress convened in these cramped quarters from September until the following March. As many members pushed for a return to Philadelphia, worried local property owners quickly raised funds to build a temporary capitol across the street from the gutted ruin.

Members moved into the so-called "Brick Capitol" on the site of today's Supreme Court in December and remained there until March The newly completed Senate Chamber offered seemingly ample space for the Senate's 46 members. Each member had a new desk to serve as his Capitol office. By the s members seeking more workspace would add writing boxes to the desk tops. Visitors may tour that Chamber today.

Although it has been restored to its appearance of , one can get a sense of how it looked in by visually removing eighteen desks—for the nine states that would join the Union between and —and eliminating the cast iron circular gallery added in Beginning in the late s, national attention shifted to the Senate as the only forum for solving the issue of whether to permit the expansion of slavery into the nation's newly acquired territories and the states that would form in these areas.

In an effort to accommodate the rapidly increasing number of visitors flocking to the Senate in those dramatic days, the Senate authorized a new gallery along its western wall.

Soon the gallery became packed with impatient visitors seeking overflow space on the Senate floor. From the s through the s, the Senate regularly debated revisions to its rule governing floor access. Invariably, the list of those nonmembers entitled to access grew longer with the passing decades. By , with the admission of five new states within five years, the Chamber barely had room for the sixty-two members then serving. The space situation turned critical and a solution was desperately needed.

Construction began in June This massive project doubled the Capitol's original space. Lasting seventeen years and employing seven hundred men, this would become one of the largest and most expensive construction projects in nineteenth-century America. No other building could compare in cost, scale, complexity, and richness. On January 4, , sixty-four senators lined up, two by two, in the cramped old Chamber and moved in solemn procession to the spacious new Chamber.

They knew that the fate of the Union would be decided in that place. The New York Herald of January 5, , described the new Chamber as light, graceful, and "finely proportioned. Although the ceiling was thirty-five feet from the floor, the sense of spaciousness seemed much greater. A modern heating and ventilating system was designed to guarantee members' year-round comfort.

The architects who designed the new wing had heard senators' loud and frequent complaints about lack of space and they responded. Not only was the Chamber significantly larger, but its galleries would hold up to six hundred visitors, who would have easy access to their seats, unlike the cramped gallery of the previous Chamber.

Members would have party cloakrooms for private conversations. A Republican floor staffer yelled at a Democratic aide as he called attention to inconsistencies in health guidance, pointing up to the House gallery where a corner section had been blocked off with tall plexiglass barriers. The three members to use it — Jeff Fortenberry , R-Neb. Wilson , D-Fla. Tensions seemed to soothe later later in the day.

Greene and Gohmert donned their masks — although Greene and many others did not always wear them properly — and there were no other obvious confrontations. Many members did adhere to the health guidelines. North Carolina Republican Patrick T. The coronavirus-related operational adjustments were not the only departure from a typical opening day.

House members also encountered an unexpected roll call vote before they were even sworn in. Typically, only the quorum call and speaker election are conducted before members are sworn in. Other members were scheduled to be sworn in next, but Republican Chip Roy of Texas halted the flow of proceedings. House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer offered a privileged resolution to override the objection and authorize the speaker to administer the oath of office to all members.

Roy requested a recorded vote. Roy voted for the resolution because his point in objecting was to call out the flawed logic of dozens of his GOP colleagues who have alleged systemic fraud and abuse in the swing states he referenced, which they alleged caused President Donald Trump to lose reelection.

The smiling faces of family and supporters that surround him will be masked and socially distanced. There will be far fewer of the congratulatory handshakes, back slaps and hugs, something understandably hard for Biden, a notoriously affectionate man. President Trump, after months of denying the reality of his election loss and just days after being impeached a second time, is expected to leave Washington before the inaugural ceremony begins. Trump will also break with years of tradition by not joining other past presidents at the Capitol to witness the transfer of power.

Vice President Mike Pence has said he plans to attend the Capitol festivities, so he will represent the outgoing administration. Also missing will be usual images of the new first couple saying goodbye as the outgoing first couple board a helicopter back to their lives as private citizens. And while not every president has held a grand celebration, each has added to the traditions that Americans have grown accustomed to seeing.

Thomas Jefferson strolled by foot to the newly erected Capitol in and gave a speech of under 10 minutes before taking the oath of office inside the Senate chamber.

At the start of his second term, he accidentally created the tradition of an inaugural parade when a supporters joined him on his walk back to the White House. James and Dolley Madison were the first to host a White House reception and ball for his inauguration.

And Abraham Lincoln, closely flanked by the military, led a procession to the Capitol and was sworn in on the East Front, despite the country being on the brink of the Civil War. Sarah D. Wire covers Congress for the Los Angeles Times. On trip to France, Kamala Harris is introducing herself to the world in personal terms. Column: Newsom deserved downtime with his kids.

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