Photos from US Capitol, Supreme Court and National Archives
National Archives
I took these pictures Monday during my last day in Washington D.C.
The day started with my friend Bob Fischer and I going to Senator John Thune’s office in the Russell Senate Office Building where we received a tour of the Capitol from Dylan Kessler, one of Thune’s interns.
We rode the little “subway” car underground between the office building and the Capitol, then proceeded to the new Visitor Center to get our ID badges. We saw the Crypt where they had originally planned to inter George Washington (his family objected, and he is still interred at Mount Vernon). We also saw the old Senate and House chambers and the original Supreme Court chambers, long before the court had its own building.
The rotunda was perhaps the highlight of the tour, with the large historic paintings and statues in this massive room. At one point, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel brushed past us as he hurried on, presumably toward Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office.
Moses relief on wall of U.S. House of Representatives (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
I wasn’t allowed to bring my camera inside, but we also toured the chamber of the House of Representatives; the House was not in session on Monday. While the room looks huge on television, it was relatively small when you actually see it. It has room for 448 permanent seats and four tables, so it’s not tiny, but compared to the cavernous way it appears on television, it seems remarkably smaller in person.
The image of Moses you see to the right is one of the lawgivers in relief on the wall of the U.S. House of Representatives chamber above the gallery. In fact, it is opposite the Speaker of the House, so she looks straight forward into the face of Moses every day (though you could never tell it by the legislation Speaker Pelosi pushes). Seeing an image of Moses in the hallowed halls of government is enough to make a God-hating secularist revisionist swallow their snuff! This image was available on Wikimedia Commons.
After this great tour we went across the street to go inside the Supreme Court building where we peeked inside the court chamber and saw many historic displays.
We had planned to have lunch with one of President Bush’s former advisers (he and Bob are friends) at the Capitol Hill Club, but he was called away unexpectedly to a meeting out of town. He did, however, make reservations for Bob and I to go ahead and have lunch there without him. It was a very nice facility with some fine dining.
That afternoon we toured the National Archives where we saw, among many other things, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the U.S. Constitution. After having revered these documents for so long, it was wonderful to finally see them up close and personal. The room in which they were kept was very dark, as light tends to bleach and break down the documents, and flash photography is not allowed (one woman’s flash went off accidentally and the guards got all over her).
By the time we finished there, not only were my feet hurting from having walked all day, we didn’t have enough time left to see anything else before our flight left, so we headed for the airport, driving by the infamous Watergate Hotel on the way out.
By the grace of God, that’s three years I’ve been able to cover the Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C., and hopefully by God’s grace I’ll be able to continue doing so in years to come.
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