Robert E. Lee Statue Removal Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Huffman) for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in favor of H.R. 970, and I salute my colleague, Congressman Brown, for his exemplary leadership on this issue.

Mr. Speaker, I cannot find a single case of any other country on Earth where monuments and memorials are put up to honor the generals of enemy forces in a civil war or any other war. Maybe another such case exists, but I can't find it. And there is no denying that there is something freakishly unusual about this practice, but you cannot blame Americans from the 19th century. In this case, you can't even blame Americans from the 20th century.

This statue of Robert E. Lee went up in 2003, not even 2 decades ago. The bizarre and stubborn impulse to honor Confederate military traitors to the Union on the very battlefield where they fought to destroy our Union and to kill our soldiers waving the Union flag reflects the hold of the so-called ``Lost Cause'' ideology, the myth which returns in times of resurgent racism, that the Confederate cause was heroic and noble, that slavery was a benevolent institution, and that treason was somehow justified.

This kind of derangement from reality and from American constitutionalism has set the pattern for a paranoid style in American politics, which continues to this very day.

Mr. Speaker, in 2020, we have a President of the United States who refuses to accept his defeat in the election by more than 7 million votes and by a margin of 306-232 in the Electoral College--a margin he declared ``a landslide'' when he won by that very same amount.

A big defender of the Confederate statues, the President from New York is busily constructing a new romantic ``Lost Cause'' mythology about his loss, despite the fact that more than 40 courts have rejected all of his claims about the election.

Mr. Speaker, let us put an end to this strange practice of honoring the military enemies of the United States. Let us put an end to the ``Lost Cause'' mythology, which has been such an abscess and such a danger to the Republic.

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