Sometimes, history is just not pretty.
You have things that happen throughout the course of history that, to be honest, are just plain awful.
It does not mean that we should wipe what happened or an reminders of what happened off the map because sometimes a statue of an awful person is the only way we have to reminds ourselves that we should probably do things better than we did yesterday.
Confederate statues would be removed from the Capitol under a provision in the Democrat House Appropriations Committee’s 2021 legislative spending bill draft released Monday.
The nearly $4.2 billion funding proposal would mandate the removal of monuments to Confederate generals and would also call into question those statues of people who have “unambiguous records of racial intolerance,” according to a news release from the Appropriations Committee.
The architects of the bill consider 19th-century vice president John Calhoun, as well as Roger Taney, the 5th chief justice of the United States, to be emblematic of racial intolerance, and called for their statues to be returned to donor states, the release said.
House Democrats have also set their sights on removing statues of early-20th-century North Carolina Gov. Charles Aycock and former Arkansas Senator James Paul Clark.
The statues, all located within Capitol bounds, would be returned to the states that contributed them, according to the bill.
The 2021 funding bill also includes a nearly $255 million salary boost to House officers and employees, a $1.5 million payout to the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and $464 million to Capitol Police — the same as the current budget year — with the stipulation that they increase transparency.
Language in the proposed bill allows for the hiring of DACA recipients in the legislative wing of the House, according to the release.
