House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) on Wednesday announced that the chamber will vote on making Juneteenth a federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S.
Ron Johnson will support Juneteenth as a Federal Holiday in exchange for Jan 6th becoming Martyr Day.
A damn good thing and what a lovely fuck-you to traitormitch.
It passed unanimously in the Senate?
Not exactly. Schumer asked for unanimous consent and nobody objected.
And there will be 21 votes against it.
And ol’ Mitch didn’t get Tom Jefferson’s Birthday on April 13th in exchange for Juneteenth!
And House to take it up today. With Juneteenth literally around the corner, will be interesting if they move to signing and instant implementation, would make a bit of a mess for the Feds.
My kind of mess.
“Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) initially blocked the bill last year, arguing that making Juneteenth a federal holiday would cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.”
And yet, he remains curiously silent about the taxpayer cost of religious holidays like Christmas.
I am surprised that this had no opposition AT ALL in the Senate. Can anybody tell me why? In broad terms, I mean, not RoJo’s rationalization. R’s always oppose new federal holidays, and have in the past been very vocal in opposing federal holidays for MLK & Cesar Chavez. What is different about this? What is the political calculus for Senators of the Racist party?
I’ll take my answer on the air.
Something I did not learn until recently is that as Grant and Sherman started taking the fight to the Confederates on their own turf, a bunch of slaveholders sent their slaves to Texas to avoid emancipation. So General Granger’s announcement resulted in freeing a lot more people than had been enslaved by Texas alone.
You mean New Christmas, so he can celebrate it at the same time of his Russian overlords.
IIRC, Juneteenth commemorates not emancipation, but the date the law was actually enforced in Galveston. Perhaps Senators on both sides of the aisle could use the holiday to reflect on the meaning of inalienable rights without enforcement , perhaps while re-reading HR/SB 1.
Good question. Another shocker - RonJon’s objection last year apparently was based on the number of holidays and he said he might be willing to trade Columbus Day for it. I figured that was almost a religious holiday for right wingers, so add it to the list of surprises about this.
Voting against a holiday celebrating the historical emancipation of enslaved people is a little too on the nose for them. They still pretend to be the Party of Lincoln, after all.
No win in it for them. Holidays are quite popular, even if people getting them don’t give a shit about whatever the holiday is for and it’s just a chance to drink and barbeque.
And anyone going against a Holiday celebrating Emancipation, in the wake of BLM and all that’s happened, is going to be hard cancelled and take a lot of heat.
Plus, will give them yet another chance to take weeks off from work every year, and this time during that all-valuable summer time when the weather is nice at home, but it’s hot and muggy in D.C.
It is pretty surprising that none of the professional assholes in the senate were willing to be id’d as the one blocking unanimous consent. Lee and Paul have blocked unanimous consent of plenty of urgent bills with broad bipartisan support, so why not this one?
Or they’ve just decided that they can have their own, quiet day of mourning on Nation Stolen Property Day, similar to how early Christians celebrated Christmas during pagan holidays so nobody would know what they were up to.
Oh, you mean Traitors for Trump?