House votes to remove Confederate statues from Capitol
The House has approved a bill to remove statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders from the U.S. Capitol, as well as a bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that declared African Americans couldn’t be citizens.
Besides Taney, the bill would direct the Architect of the Capitol to identify and eventually remove from Statuary Hall at least 10 statues honoring Confederate officials, including Lee, the commanding general of the Confederate Army, and Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. Three statues honoring white supremacists — including former U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina — would be immediately removed.
“Defenders and purveyors of sedition, slavery, segregation and white supremacy have no place in this temple of liberty,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said at a Capitol news conference ahead of the House vote.
The House approved the bill 305-113, sending it to the Republican-controlled Senate, where prospects are uncertain.
Hoyer, D-Md., co-sponsored the bill and noted with irony that Taney was born in the southern Maryland district Hoyer represents. Hoyer said it was appropriate that the bill would replace Taney’s bust with another Maryland native, the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the high court’s first Black justice.
The House vote comes as communities nationwide reexamine the people they’re memorializing with statues. Bills to remove the Taney bust and the statues of Confederate leaders have been introduced in the Senate, although they would require separate votes.
Even if legislation passes both chambers, it would need the president’s signature, and President Donald Trump has opposed the removal of historic statues elsewhere. Trump has strongly condemned those who toppled statues during protests over racial injustice and police brutality following the May death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The 2-foot-high marble bust of Taney is outside a room in the Capitol where the Supreme Court met for half a century, from 1810 to 1860. It was in that room that Taney, the nation’s fifth chief justice, announced the Dred Scott decision, sometimes called the worst decision in the court’s history.
“What Dred Scott said was, Black lives did not matter,’’ Hoyer said. “So when we assert that yes they do matter, it is out of conviction ... that in America, the land of the free includes all of us.’’