Let’s not make Capitol another monument to the Lost Cause
As a member of the U.S. Senate, I had the opportunity to serve for several years as a member of the appropriations subcommittee on the District of Columbia. During that time, I had the pleasure to work with members of Congress from both political parties and a variety of strong and visionary leaders from D.C.
Through this work, I became more fully aware of the special significance of our capital city, not only to the people of our nation but also to the people of the world. In addition to the more than 700,000 residents who call D.C. home, this unique city is visited annually by millions of people from around the world as the epicenter of freedom and democracy. The physical contours of the city, its buildings, its libraries, its monuments, its parks and its spirit of inclusiveness pulse as a beacon of hope to the world.
It is in this spirit that I urge my former colleagues to fully remove the offensive barricade that surrounds the Capitol complex. This barricade is not a sign of strength; it is a sign of weakness. It is not a sign of protection and hope; it is a sign of division and despair. Surely, we can employ new technologies and new abilities to design a more appropriate “shield of protection” for the members of Congress and these historic buildings.
Many of us have had the unsettling experience of traveling abroad to places where democracy does not flourish. In these places, it is indeed disturbing to see similar barriers and fences erected to separate the people from the men and women who rule them and fear them. Perhaps in these places, such barriers are necessary to keep order, but in a democracy, the people themselves are the government and the government itself is made up of the people. As such, any fence or barricade is not only offensive, it also undermines the very principles of our democracy.
We all certainly appreciate the need for the safety and security of members of Congress and the thousands of staffers who are more like family than employees, but does a seven-foot fence topped with razor wire provide real security, or does it provide a false sense of security while sending the exact wrong signal to those who perpetrated the attack on the Capitol in the first place?
Maintaining such a permanent fence would indeed send a signal to those few thousand violent protesters who surrounded the Capitol, including the hundreds who breached it, that they have somehow won this battle, when in reality their attempts to stop the peaceful transfer of power failed miserably.
In the past few years, all around our country, monuments erected to amplify and promote the Lost Cause of the Civil War are being removed by more compassionate and enlightened local and state governments. Today, the new Big Lie is that the 2020 election was stolen and the state voting systems corrupted, when, in fact, the truth was made clear in more than 60 court cases that resulted in the rejection of these lies and with the ultimate congressional vote certifying the presidential election on Jan. 7.
Do we really want to maintain a massive fence around our Capitol to permanently serve as a type of monument to this colossally failed attempt to subvert our democracy? We should say emphatically no. The best way to defend democracy and to promote it, the best way to defend the Capitol is to de-fence the Capitol.