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Republican Congressman Calls On Democratic Party To Change Its Name Or Be Kicked Out of U.S. House of Representatives

July 24, 2020

A Republican congressman has introduced a resolution calling for the Democratic Party to change its name “or be barred from participation in the House of Representatives” because of its past support for slavery, the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow laws denying blacks civil rights.

U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) introduced the measure “Raising a question of the privileges of the House” in response to House Democrats’ actions against portraits and statues in the U.S. Capitol that portray men who took the Confederate side during the Civil War.

For instance, Gohmert noted, the four 19th century Speakers of the House whose portraits current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered removed from the legislative building were all Democrats.

The Republican’s resolution quotes the platforms of the Democratic Party of 1840, 1844, 1848, 1852, and 1856 claiming that the efforts of abolitionists of the time to get Congress to reduce or limit slavery “are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences; and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend of our political institutions.”

The resolution also notes that the Democratic Party platform of 1860 expressed support for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and attacked legislatures in the free states of the North that tried to lessen its efficiency at getting runaway slaves seeking freedom captured and returned to their owners.

Democrats in Virginia also put together and passed a state constitution in 1902 that led to the number of blacks eligible to vote there from 147,000 in 1901 to about 10,000 in 1905, the resolution notes.

“Since people are demanding we rid ourselves of the entities, symbols, and reminders or the repugnant aspects of our past, then the time has come for Democrats to acknowledge their party’s loathsome and bigoted past …” Gohmert said in a written statement Wednesday, July 23.

The resolution states, in part:

 

Resolved,

    1. That the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall remove any item that names, symbolizes or mentions any political organization or party that has ever held a public position that supported slavery or the Confederacy, from any area within the House wing of the Capitol or any House office building, and shall donate any such item or symbol to the Library of Congress.
    2. That any political organization or party that has ever held a public position that supported slavery or the Confederacy shall either change its name or be barred from participation in the House of Representatives.

 

Among political parties currently represented in Congress, the resolution would affect only Democrats,

Gohmert spoke in favor of his resolution on the floor of the House on Thursday, July 24:

 

 

 


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