Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

Inauguration Boycotts Are an American Tradition

It's not a big deal for some Democrats to skip Donald Trump's swearing-in. John Adams started it.

January 20, 2017 at 1:00 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

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The news media is making a huge fuss over the several dozen Democrats who are planning to boycott the inauguration of Donald Trump as president. But there is less here than meets the eye. Politicians skipping the swearing-in ceremony of a candidate they opposed is a tradition almost as old as the Constitution.

In 1801, John Adams did not show up for the inauguration of his successor, Thomas Jefferson, and although Adams said the reason was that his son had just died, some historians believe he was angry and wounded by the election outcome. So was Theodore Sedgwick, who with the Federalists out of power suddenly was no longer speaker of the House. His decision to attend to urgent business elsewhere can be put down to nothing but political pique.