Robert E. Lee may be gone, but other Confederate statues survived House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to oust them from the U.S. Capitol collection.
Mrs. Pelosi and fellow Democrats had written a provision into one of the House’s spending bills earlier this year that would have set a 45-day deadline for ousting all Confederal statues and Confederate busts from public areas in the Capitol.
But that demand was stricken from the final coronavirus spending bill Congress passed Monday.
The statues are part of the Statuary Hall collection, under which each state is allowed to place two statues of whatever figures that state deems worthy of inclusion in the hallowed halls of Congress.
A number of states are now grappling with their choices, particularly those with ties to the Confederacy, and the debate has grown more intense in recent months with racial justice protests that have swept the country — in many cases leading to vigilante urban planning, as mobs tear down statues.
In June, as the protests were at their most intense, Mrs. Pelosi announced she wanted 11 Confederate figures out of Congress’s collection.
“They committed treason,” she said at the time.
She specifically named Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy who was in fact charged with treason, though the case was dropped, and Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president.
Democrats first tried to have the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress, which oversees the statues, act. But the top Republican on the committee, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, rebuffed her attempt, saying it’s up each state to decide its two statues in the Statuary Hall collection.
Democrats made several more attempts in July.
They passed a stand-alone bill through the House on a bipartisan 305-113 vote to remove the statues and busts, but it never saw action in the Senate.
And led by Rep. Tim Ryan, Ohio Democrat and chairman of the subcommittee that oversees Congress own internal budget, they inserted language into the 2021 spending bill setting the 45-day deadline for extirpating the Confederates.
Mr. Ryan went further, though, and also called for ouster of others like John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina politician who died in 1850, more than a decade before the Civil War, and Charles Aycock, who was only a year old at the outset of the war but who, as North Carolina governor in the early 20th century, oversaw segregation.
And Mr. Ryan called for removal of a bust of Roger B. Taney, a former Supreme Court chief justice who authored the Dred Scott decision denying citizenship to Black persons and finding they could be legal property under the Constitution.
“The placement of statues in the Capitol commemorating men who tried to overthrow the government of the United States or who were white supremacists has been controversial for years and offensive to many of the visitors who come to the Capitol each year. The committee believes their removal is long overdue,” Mr. Ryan and his colleagues said in the report.
His bill cleared the House Appropriations Committee, and was stacked up in the late-year spending negotiations against the Senate’s version, which lacked those provisions.
In this week’s final compromise, the Confederate language was dropped.
“A similar provision was not included in the Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill, and it was not included in the omnibus package approved by the Congress this week,” one aide confirmed.
Mr. Ryan’s office didn’t respond to an inquiry from The Washington Times on Wednesday.
No action from Congress means that the decisions still lie in the hands of the states.
Virginia has already acted, pulling its statue of Lee, the top Confederate general, last weekend. A state panel has recommended that civil-rights-era figure Barbara Johns be sent as Lee’s replacement, to join the state’s other statue — George Washington.
Mrs. Pelosi, during her first stint as speaker a decade ago, had the Lee statue removed from its high-profile location in National Statuary Hall, the one-time chamber of the House that’s a centerpiece of congressional tours, and placed in a less-trafficked location.
The speaker’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday, but after Lee’s removal, Mrs. Pelosi said she’s still intent on ousting the others.
“The Congress will continue our work to rid the Capitol of homages to hate, as we fight to end the scourge of racism in our country,” she said in a statement cheering the removal of Lee. “There is no room for celebrating the bigotry of the Confederacy in the Capitol or any other place of honor in our country.”
Congress did take another swipe at Confederate commemoration in the annual defense policy, approving a directive to rename military bases that bear Confederate names.
President Trump on Wednesday vetoed that bill, and Capitol Hill will attempt to override it later this month.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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