Herb Jackson

Washington Correspondent, @HerbNJDC

Some gave them out first-come, first-served. Others held lotteries. Sen. Cory Booker did a little of both.

There were really no rules about how members of Congress from New Jersey gave out the roughly 2,900 tickets, combined, they were allotted for President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration Friday — except that they be provided free of charge.

So when some online broker websites began listing tickets for sale, Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson, was incensed.

Pascrell, who for several years has sponsored a bill to regulate ticket sales that includes a requirement that brokers have the ticket in hand before it is listed for sale, called for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inauguration Ceremonies to take action.

“Despite the tickets being non-transferable, there is no law which prevents paper tickets form being bought and sold in this manner,” Pascrell said in a letter to the committee’s chairman, Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. “In the past, the committee has implored responsible ticket marketplaces and online classified websites to not permit swearing-in passes to be sold on their sites.”

Pascrell also said he was concerned the sites might be selling “speculative” tickets they do not yet have in hand. One site visited Friday by The Record, stagefront.com, had a ticket described only as being in sections 5 to 12. It was listed for $14,445.

In all, the joint committee printed 240,000 tickets for seats on balconies and grandstands on the Capitol’s west front, the rows of folding chairs set up on the plaza and lawn, and a standing area beyond the reflecting pond. People without tickets can also stand on the National Mall further to the west, where large video screens will show Trump taking the oath of office at noon Friday.

Under the plan developed by the joint committee, House offices got about 175 tickets each and senators got 390, members said. Other tickets went to Trump to distribute, and some go to the media to cover the ceremonies.

Tickets to other events, including seats in grandstands along the parade route Trump will follow after he is sworn and attendance at the official balls he will attend later, are distributed by the Presidential Inaugural Committee.

Within New Jersey, Republicans reported much higher demand for tickets to the swearing-in than Democrats, but one Republican press secretary also reported that citizens calling his office thought tickets would only be available from Republicans.

In Rep. Donald Payne Jr.’s district, which is dominated by Newark, Trump got about 13 percent of the vote. And people who had been clamoring for inauguration tickets before Election Day changed their minds after Hillary Clinton lost, Payne spokesman Michael Burns said.

“We had more tickets than demand,” he said. “We will be giving some tickets to other members.”

One Republican member who was getting extra tickets from colleagues did not want his name printed because he was concerned the information would only lead to more people making requests.

Rep. Thomas MacArthur, a Republican from Ocean County, got more than 2,000 requests for the tickets, and he picked the recipients by lottery. Winners were notified on Friday.

Booker, a Democrat from Newark, gave away about 250 of his tickets to the first people who asked for them, then held a lottery for the rest, spokesman Tom Pietrykoski said.

Every member of the delegation but one had plenty of time to plan for the ticket distribution. Indeed, MacArthur announced in December people could enter his lottery.

But Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-Wyckoff, defeated a Republican incumbent in November in a Bergen County-dominated district that Trump also won. He was only sworn in on Jan. 3, and announced on Tuesday he would award the tickets by lottery. By Friday night, he already had twice as many requests as tickets to give away, spokeswoman Melissa Miller said.

“We’re going to use a random number generator to decide who gets them,” she said.