House Votes to Remove Confederate Statues From U.S. Capitol

Also targeted for removal are the statues of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the former vice president who led the pro-slavery faction in the Senate; John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, a former vice president who served as the Confederate secretary of war and was expelled from the Senate for joining for the Confederate Army; Charles Brantley Aycock, the former governor of North Carolina and an architect of a violent coup d’état in Wilmington led by white supremacists; and James Paul Clarke, a senator and governor of Arkansas who extolled the need to “preserve the white standards of civilization.”

Each state is allowed to send two statues to the Capitol to be featured in the National Statuary Hall collection, which is typically visited by thousands of tourists every day. Federal law gives state leaders, not members of Congress, the authority to replace them. Because Republican lawmakers have long argued that states should retain that right, House Democrats, even though they are in the majority, have been unable to remove the statues.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, is unlikely to allow the bill to receive a vote in the Senate, calling the move “clearly a bridge too far” and an attempt to “airbrush the Capitol.” He has also contended that the decision should be left to the states, though in 2015 he called for a statue of Jefferson Davis displayed prominently in front of Kentucky’s State Capitol to be moved to a museum.

But in a striking display of bipartisanship, 72 Republicans voted in favor of the measure on Wednesday, arguing that it was an important symbolic step toward reconciliation.

“The history of this nation is so fraught with racial division, with hatred,” said Representative Paul Mitchell, Republican of Michigan, who supported the bill. “The only way to overcome that is to recognize that, acknowledge it for what it is.”