The House voted Thursday on a Republican amendment to restore Arlington National Cemetery’s Confederate Memorial. The century-old monument, which was removed in December, features an enslaved Black “mammy” holding the infant child of a White officer, as an enslaved Black man follows the officer off to war. The monument references the “Lost Cause,” a mythology about the Civil War era favored by apologists for the Confederacy.
The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), did not pass, but it got very strong support in the House GOP conference. While 24 Republicans voted against restoring the monument, 192 voted in favor — nearly 89 percent of voting Republicans.
That’s significantly more GOP support for a Confederate symbol than we’ve seen over the last decade.
After the tragedy in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, it wasn’t just then-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) moving to take down the Confederate flag in her state; the House soon held votes on whether to also remove the flag from some federal graveyards. In 2016, 84 House Republicans voted in favor of the proposal.
After Floyd’s murder, congressional Democrats turned to an attempt to remove Confederate statues from the Capitol. The proposal was combined with an attempt to replace a bust of Roger B. Taney, the author of the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court decision preserving slavery, with a bust of the first Black Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall. It got the support of 72 House Republicans in 2020 and 67 in 2021.
(The GOP-controlled Senate didn’t take up the proposal either time. The Taney-to-Marshall switch eventually passed both chambers by voice vote and was signed into law by President Biden in 2022, after the Confederate statues piece was stripped from the proposal.)
There was also a big clash over these issues late in Donald Trump’s presidency, when he vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act.
He did so because the legislation contained a plan to remove Confederate names from Defense Department property, including military bases. Both chambers ultimately overrode that veto shortly before Jan. 6, 2021, by overwhelming votes. Those votes didn’t specifically pertain to the Confederate proposal, but 109 House Republicans voted not to toe Trump’s line and to override his veto.
The latest vote is also significant because of who voted in favor of the Confederate symbol: Republican leaders.
Back in 2016, then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and other Republican leaders allowed the vote over objections from many members. Ryan, House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and GOP Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) all voted in favor of removing the Confederate flag from some federal graveyards.
McCarthy and Scalise also voted in favor of removing the Confederate statues from the Capitol after Floyd’s murder, with McCarthy spinning the move thusly: “All of the statues being removed by this bill are statues of Democrats.” (The South was dominated by Democrats during Civil War times; it’s now overwhelmingly Republican.)
But on Thursday, among those voting in favor of restoring the Confederate Memorial at Arlington were every single top House GOP leader, including Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Scalise, who is now House majority leader.
It’s difficult to make direct comparisons between these votes, because they deal with distinct instances. Republicans who might have thought the Confederate flag didn’t belong in federal graveyards or that Confederate leaders didn’t deserve to be memorialized in the Capitol of a nation they fought against might feel differently about the Confederate Memorial at Arlington.
Supporters of the monument have indeed pitched it as a symbol of reconciliation and unification after the Civil War, rather than celebrating the Confederacy. They instead call it the “Reconciliation Memorial.” Clyde didn’t mention the words “Confederate” or “Confederacy” once in his speech supporting the amendment Thursday.
“Let us unite against the destruction of our history,” Clyde said. “Let us fight for the principles of healing and unity, which is exactly what this memorial was created to accomplish.” (For more on the history of the memorial, see here.)
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) responded: “The monument in question is a basic ode to the Confederacy, to romanticize the Lost Cause.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) promised Friday to make sure voters knew about the “shameful” Republican votes ahead of the 2024 election.
Whatever the merits, it’s difficult to separate the vote from an increasing tendency in the Trump-era Republican Party to be unapologetic about issues related to race, as perhaps best exemplified by the party’s growing push against diversity policies.
Party leaders have clearly worried over the past decade about such votes on Confederate issues and how they would look. On Thursday, the party not only brought such a vote on its own; it decided to stop worrying.
