Cornyn should try again with Juneteenth proposal

Last week, Sen. John Cornyn proposed a bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. The proposal failed, but we expect it to succeed when Cornyn tries again. And we hope he will.

Juneteenth remembers June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, with news that President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had abolished slavery more than two years earlier. Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston has proposed a similar measure in the House, where more than 150 members have signed on as co-sponsors. Cornyn teamed with Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, to write the bill, and requested its adoption on July 22 by unanimous consent in the Senate.

The unanimous consent piece was what got it in trouble.

That procedure allows the

Senate to move more quickly than the process used to bring many bills to the floor. It’s a shortcut, a way to fasttrack something that should be uncontroversial. But it also means that one senator’s dissent can prevent the bill’s passage. In this case, the dissenter was Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Johnson acknowledged the importance of Juneteenth but objected to the cost of adding a paid holiday for federal workers. To his credit, Johnson proposed swapping Juneteenth for Columbus Day, a federal holiday that has come under fire in recent years.

Roadblocks of this sort are not unusual in legislative bodies. And we’ll note the fact that this is a delay in the adoption of a holiday that, itself, marks the delivery of long-delayed news. The right thing to do now is push it forward again. It’ll pass if it comes to a vote.

The Dallas Morning News