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The House Floor Was Filled With Children Today & It Was Incredibly Cool

nancy pelosi congress house children kids

Today, the 116th Congress was sworn in, and it was a beautiful thing to see. In addition to seeing Nancy Pelosi reclaim that Speaker gavel (and Hakeem Jeffries’ moving speech officially nominating her), there were a lot of powerful moments in this swearing in of the most diverse group in the history of the House.

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For me, the coolest part of the day was seeing the House floor filled with children. Now, this isn’t a new thing. Children under the age of 12 have been able to accompany lawmakers on the floor for the opening day ceremonies for quite some time. But given the amount of attention that’s been on the unprecedented number of women entering Congress this year and the changes that have to be made to make politics more accessible for parents, it was really moving to see such a huge number of kids present today.

It wasn’t just women in Congress who had their children with them, either.

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Men’s involvement in childcare is essential to the fight for gender parity, and it’s absolutely beautiful to see so many fathers bring their kids onto the House floor on a day like this.

Across the aisle from this joyful celebration was a different scene, though. Now, I know Republicans lost their majority and they have to be bummed about that, but still, the difference in the tones is striking. This is what the other side of the room looked like:

Embed from Getty Images

Earlier this year, the Senate voted to allow newborns on the Senate floor after Sen. Tammy Duckworth became the first Senator to give birth while in office. The lawmakers have to be physically present to participate in votes and those schedules often don’t allow time for new mothers to feed infants. That wasn’t the kind of thing Senators had to think about when they made those rules but as more and more women enter politics, those old practices become inadvertently discriminatory and they have to change.

The House, though, already allows children under 12 on the floor, not just on the first day, but apparently all the time. They just have to be accompanied by a Member. With so many women joining the ranks of the House–some of them mothers, and some single mothers at that–it will be interesting to see how the dynamic on that floor changes.

(image: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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