House passes bill to remove Confederate statues from Capitol

WASHINGTON — A measure seeking to remove the bust of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney — who wrote the opinion in the high court’s Dred Scott decision that ruled Black people were not U.S. citizens — along with other racist and Confederate statues in the Capitol passed the House on a 305-113 vote Wednesday.

It is a legislative response to nationwide calls for statues that honor the country’s discriminatory past to be relocated from prominent locations.

The bill, HR 7573, introduced by House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, would direct the Architect of the Capitol to replace Taney’s bust with another Marylander: Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice. It would also remove all statues of people who voluntarily served the Confederacy. The Joint Committee on the Library of Congress, which has oversight of statues and art in the Capitol, would move to place Marshall’s bust in the Old Supreme Court Chamber within two years.

Rep. G.K. Butterfield, a former North Carolina state judge whose great grandmother was a slave, said at a news conference Wednesday the decision authored by Taney is the worst in Supreme Court history.

“I would argue that the Dred Scott decision, in 1857, was arguably the worst opinion that the Supreme Court of the United States has ever, ever handed down,” the North Carolina Democrat said.

Charles Aycock of North Carolina, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and James Paul Clarke of Arkansas, although not members of the Confederacy, were white supremacists and are specifically named in the bill as statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection that would be removed. The bust of John Cabell Breckinridge, a Kentucky senator and vice president in the Buchanan administration who was expelled in 1861 for joining the Confederacy, would also be removed.

“It’s time to sweep away the last vestiges of Jim Crow and the dehumanizing of individuals because of the color of their skin that intruded for too long on the sacred spaces of our Democracy,” Hoyer said.

States represented by statues tagged for removal would be required to pay for their return. If the state doesn’t want to pay to bring the statue back, the Architect of the Capitol would move the statue to the Smithsonian Institution. Toward that end, $2 million would go to the Architect of the Capitol to execute the removal process and $3 million would go to the Smithsonian.

The bill now heads to the Senate.