The peaceful transition of power in the world's oldest democracy is a national moment of celebrations, head of the presidential inaugural ceremonies said today as he welcomed the new President Donald Trump at the US Capitol for his swearing in.
"We come to this place again, commonplace and miraculous, a national moment of celebration, but not a celebration of victory, a celebration of democracy," Senator Roy Blunt, Chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies said.
In his welcome remarks, at the US capitol overlooking the majestic National Mall in front of hundreds and thousands of people, Blunt said it is the peaceful transition of power in the oldest democracies that the entire world is watching.
"The legislative, the executive, the judicial branches of our constitutional government come together for the 58th inauguration of the President of the United States. Millions of people all over the world will watch and will listen to this event," he said.
Thirty-six years ago at his first inauguration, it was also the first inauguration on this side of the capitol, President Ronald Reagan has said that what Americans do here is both commonplace and miraculous.
"Commonplace every four years since 1789, when President George Washington took this exact same oath; miraculous because we've done it every four years since 1789 and the example it sets for democracies everywhere," Blunt said.
Washington, he said, believed the inauguration of the second president would be more important than the inauguration of the first.
"Many people had taken control of a government up until then, but few people had ever turned that control willingly over to anyone else," he said.
And as important as the transfer of power was, many historians believe that the next election was even more important, when in 1801 one group of people, arguably for the first time ever in history, willingly, if not enthusiastically, gave control of the government to people they believed had a dramatically different view of what the government would, should and could do," he said.
After that election that actually discovered a flaw in the Constitution itself, which was remedied by the 12th Amendment, Thomas Jefferson at that inauguration, beyond the chaos of the election that had just passed, he said, "We are all Republicans, we are all federalists."
After four years of civil war, Lincoln's second inaugural speech tried to find reason for the continued war when he pointed out that both sides pray to the same God, Blunt said.
"He'd earlier written about those fervent prayers that one side must be and both sides may be wrong, but in 1865, he looked to the future and the memorable moment in that speech was, 'with malice toward none and charity for all'," he noted.
In the middle of the Great Depression, the country was told that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.
And President Kennedy talked about the obligation in democracy to country, the great question that day was, "Ask what you can do for your country," the Senator said, as he called on his eminence Timothy Michael Cardinal Dolan, Reverend Dr Samuel Rodriguez and Pastor Paula White-Cain to provide readings and the invocation.
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