New US Congressman will take oath with Superman comic book

UpdateOn Tuesday, the new members of the US Congress were to be sworn in. However, because no chairman of the House of Representatives has yet been appointed, that did not happen. Yet one congressman-to-be promised to use a very special object for the ceremony.

The members of parliament usually swear to respect the Constitution while laying their hands on the famous law code. But the Representatives and Senators are free to use other items in the ceremony, for example… a comic book.

Democrat Robert Garcia promised to take the oath with the Constitution. Underneath, however, he had some other symbolic objects placed, including a photo of his deceased parents, the certificate of his citizenship and an original copy of the very first ‘Superman’ comic book. Garcia reports this on his Twitter page.

Garcia, a self-professed comic book fanatic, had borrowed the comic from the library of the United States Congress. The first edition of the comic book appeared in 1939 and is very popular among collectors. The album’s value is estimated at several hundred thousand dollars, depending on its condition.

Immigrant

The comics fanatic is one of 34 Democratic congressmen who will be sworn in for the first time. However, his political career began as a Republican militant. He had joined that party because Republican President Ronald Reagan had signed a bill in 1986 giving the Garcia family the much-coveted U.S. citizenship. Garcia was born in Peru in 1977 and moved to the United States when he was five.

In 2007, Garcia switched to the Democrats, saying he no longer felt at home with the Republican party “because I was gay and had reservations about the war in Iraq,” Garcia said in an interview with the American Press-Telegram ‘.

In 2014, Garcia was elected mayor of Long Beach, a municipality just south of Los Angeles, California. This made him the first Latino and open member of Long Beach’s LGTBIQ+ community to hold that office. He eventually served two terms as mayor of the city, which has a population of nearly 500,000.

However, for the next two years he will represent his constituency in the House of Representatives, which is comparable to the Belgian Chamber of Representatives. Together with the Senate, the two chambers form the United States Congress.