Yup, I visited the Supreme Court building. The court, of course, isn't in session. The newsroom still had the status of the decisions from the last day of the term – the day DOMA was overturned.
There are various displays around the ground floor with such things as the history of the building (opened in 1935), important justices through history, and an extensive display on Sandra Day O'Connor as the first woman justice. There was also a lot on William Howard Taft who, after serving as President, became Chief Justice and it was under his leadership the current building came to be.
There was also a half-hour movie describing what the court does and how they go about doing it. We hear the justices describe the purpose of oral arguments. We see their conference room where the justices discuss cases (with no one else present). We see the court library, off limits to the public. We hear Thomas speak (which he doesn't do in court). We hear about some of their rituals. We also hear Scalia say that he really likes writing dissents because he can say exactly what he wants without worrying about what anyone else thinks, which is different from writing the court opinion because it has to be something another four people agree with.
After I left there I went to the Smithsonian Museum on American History. It gets lots of hype (We have Archie Bunker's chair!) but I wasn't all that impressed. Yes, there are some cool displays – such as the one which discussed five different families (among many others) who lived in one house over 200 years. But many others weren't that interesting to me or could have been so much more.
There was one artifact that caught my attention: a copy of the publication of the Mattachine Society, a gay group that formed in 1950. I was also pleased that in the display about the 1963 March on Washington they acknowledged Bayard Rustin's homosexuality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattachine_Society
What really impressed me was an event. One of the displays is a piece of the lunch counter with four stools from the first Woolworth's store hit by a sit-in protest in 1960. In the middle of the afternoon a worker started placing small seats around and facing the counter. A few moments later a young black woman came to recruit us into the protest and to teach us how to do it. She is an actress hired by the museum to reenact this little piece of history. She did a fine job. That included a good discussion of separate is not equal. One thing we don't hear much about is what the protesters did to prepare themselves so they could maintain their nonviolent roles. We also don't remember much about how these young people were attacked in subtle ways (white people crowding around them) to more obvious ways (milkshakes and worse poured over them). It took six months of daily sit-ins before Woolworth's integrated their lunch counters.
One of the displays had pieces of paper that one could write on and then hang on a panel. The question was what kinds of things should the museum try to acquire? I asked for more on gay history.
After leaving the museum I sat for a few moments on a bench on the Mall. In front of me was an amateur softball game. Not too far away was a game of kickball. And, of course, lots of walkers, runners, and bicyclists going by.
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