Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in firm opposition to this retrograde, revanchist amendment. Today is not the 1920s. It is not the 1950s. It is so disheartening to see a lost-cause amendment come before the House in the year 2024.

Mr. Clyde has proposed today that we return a monument to treason to our national cemetery without any accompanying context or education.

The monument in question is a basic ode to the Confederacy, to romanticize the lost cause. More troubling than that is that it also glorifies slavery. It is not an emblem of a reconciled people.

An enslaved woman is depicted as a mammy. She is holding the infant child of a White officer, and an enslaved man is following his owner to war. It is very difficult to see how the humiliating portrayal of a slave woman and a slave man represents reconciliation.

The Arlington National Cemetery, on Congress' orders, not President Biden's orders, removed this monument on December 22, 2023. This amendment is four, if not four score, years too late. The NDAA for 2021 required that Arlington National Cemetery remove the Confederate States of America monument.

I think it is important to remember why we removed the memorial in the first place, because treason in defense of slavery is no virtue.

This is a monument to a cause that killed hundreds of thousands of American servicemen in a doomed attempt to tear this country asunder to preserve the practice of keeping our fellow humans in bondage. The cause of the Confederacy is no more honorable today than when Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Let it lose today as it did then: With a whimper.

The monument has been handled responsibly and respectfully according to the National Historic Preservation Act. This would also be a horrible waste of taxpayer money, and in no way does it support our national defense. It would only make the families and visitors to the Arlington National Cemetery, including our current servicemembers, rightfully uncomfortable or hurt by the association of the monument.

This NDAA should be focused on supporting the servicemembers currently dedicating their lives to this country, not those who came closest to destroying it. I urge Members to vote ``no'' if they believe they represent the United States of America, not the Confederate States of America, and if they oppose glorifying slavery and treason.

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