After the members of the 110th House of Representatives were sworn in en masse, Ellison was the first Representative scheduled to have his picture taken with the new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Though the Library of Congress is directly across the street from the Capitol, Thomas Jefferson's Qurʻan took fifteen minutes to arrive as it was brought through "a long, winding underground route via tunnels ... to protect the Quran from the elements".[1] Once inside the Capitol, the Qurʻan was placed in a rectangular box, and handled with a green felt wrapper when guards ran the book through security x-ray machines.