Republicans want to bring back ‘illegal alien’

WASHINGTON — At issue was nearly $3.5 billion in spending for Capitol Police, lawmaker salaries, government printing and basic operations of the House for the next fiscal year.

But more than an hour of the debate in Wednesday’s Appropriations markup was devoted to a two-word phrase the Library of Congress is trying to excise from its lexicon: “illegal alien.”

The Legislative Branch subcommittee’s decision to insist that the federal library continue using the phrase prompted the panel’s ranking Democrat to vote against the appropriations bill.

“We’re appropriators,” said Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who cast the lone no vote. “We’re supposed to be deciding how much money we allocate for each of these agencies. It is not our place to be debating the two halves of a particular term.”

Chairman Tom Graves, R-Georgia, said the subcommittee was merely requiring the library to use words consistent with U.S. Code, which includes the terminology to describe immigrants in the country with out proper authorization.

Graves suggested that if lawmakers had an issue with the term, they should make attempts to change the code’s language. The amendment, he stressed, was “just asking the library to maintain that consistency.”

Activists claimed victory a few weeks back after swaying library staff to eliminate subject headings such as “aliens” and “illegal aliens,” markers that administrators decided should be replaced with “noncitizens” and “unauthorized immigration,” respectively.

But last week, 20 House Republicans backed a bill by Rep. Diane Black, RTenn, calling for reinstating the language.

Congressional bickering notwithstanding, library staff were unable to put a dollar figure on how much it would cost to implement the anticipated changes.