Johnson fights Columbus Day proposal criticism
Senator said reporting mischaracterized idea
When conservative Republican Sen. Ron Johnson recently suggested dropping Columbus Day as a federal holiday in order to add Juneteenth, he made a point of saying he wasn’t denigrating Christopher Columbus. But soon he was accused by conservatives of doing just that, and Johnson abandoned the idea a few days later.
Honoring Columbus has come under renewed debate over the explorer’s treatment of indigenous people. On Tuesday night, city officials in Columbus, Wisconsin, voted to take down its statue of the city’s namesake.
Johnson and fellow Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma had originally suggested amending a Juneteenth bill by taking away Columbus Day’s federal holiday status to keep costs down. On Friday, Johnson retracted the amendment, proposing instead to “reduce the number of paid leave days federal employees receive.”
Fox News host Tucker Carlson criticized Johnson in a July 1 segment about how city governments and protesters have been removing statues of Christopher Columbus as part of the “outbreak” and “pandemic” of what he called “hysteria.”
“Today (Johnson and Lankford) introduced legislation to abolish Columbus Day. They want to delete it from the national calendar and replace it with Juneteenth,” Carlson said. Johnson’s initial amendment did not call for ‘abolishing’ Columbus Day.
Carlson later claimed that Johnson and Lankford were “hoping to quietly eliminate Columbus Day and then to move on to the next item on the rioters’ list of demands” without their rightwing constituents noticing.
In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday, Johnson
said that he had sent Carlson his initial news release about the amendment and was surprised by how the host reported on it.
“I think there’s just a misunderstanding and mischaracterization in how this whole thing was reported, like it was my idea to make Juneteenth a federal holiday — it wasn’t . ... I was being told that (the senators cosponsoring the bill) were going to try and pass that by unanimous consent, meaning no discussion, no debate, not even a vote,” he said.
Johnson said he doesn’t object to celebrating emancipation.
“What I was objecting to was giving federal government employees an 11th paid holiday, and making the rest of America pick up the $600 million tab,” he said, and that it should be debated and voted upon.
In earlier interviews with conservative media figures and outlets after the Carlson segment, including with Wisconsin’s 1130 WISN radio host Jay Weber and Breitbart News, Johnson had also pushed back against Carlson’s words, saying that he was not “deprecating Christopher Columbus” or “siding with the mob ... I’m being true to my conservative principles.”
Breitbart also reported that Johnson said he plans to hold hearings about how protesters have been toppling statues during protests.
In the interview with the Journal Sentinel, Johnson clarified, “What I was trying to convey is, our committee (the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs) has been looking into outside groups, radical behavior, in the full political spectrum — from the far left to the far right.”
He added that in addition to his and Sen. Gary Peters’ “joint oversight letters,” his committee staff is researching “what groups may be hijacking the protest movement and turning these things into more divisive riots . ... If we come up with enough substantive information, a hearing on it to highlight what we found might be entirely possible.”