Replacing Bust of Roger Brooke Taney with Bust of Thurgood Marshall
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, first and foremost, the Confederacy was a fundamental attack on our Constitution and the founding principles of our Nation, and it should never be romanticized or lauded.
I have got no problems with removing, lawfully, any monument that specifically honors this rebellion, but that is not what this bill does. Rather, it begins by removing the bust of Roger Taney from the Old Supreme Court Chamber.
Now, it is true he wrote the absolutely worst decision ever rendered by the Supreme Court, the Dred Scott decision, but let's not forget he also presided over and joined in one of its better decisions, the Amistad slave case.
If we remove memorials to every person in this building who ever made a bad decision--and his was the worst--well, this will be a very barren place, indeed. It is only by the bad things in our history that we can truly measure all of the good things in our history.
Now, this bill also removes the statues of Confederate sympathizers sent to the Capitol by the States. Well, that is not our decision. That is a decision that has always belonged to the individual States, and several of them are already making these decisions. We should let them.
The only other one is John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who is honored not for his service to the Confederacy but, rather, for his service as Vice President of the United States. And, granted, we have had some absolutely terrible Vice Presidents through our history, and I am sure we will in the future, but if we are going to start down that road, we are going to be swapping out statues like trading cards at the whim of the moment. Our Nation's history should be made of sterner stuff.
Perhaps we would all be better advised to practice a little temporal humility and heed the wisdom of Omar Khayyam: ``The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.''
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