House Passes Juneteenth Bill, Sends It To Sleepy Joe’s Desk

I’m actually impressed that the House took this up so quickly

Congress approves bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday

The United States will soon have a new federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery.

The House voted 415-14 Wednesday to make Juneteenth, or June 19th, the 12th federal holiday. The bill now goes to President Joe Biden’s desk, and he is expected to sign it into law.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas — two months after the Confederacy had surrendered. That was also about 2 1/2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the Southern states.

It’s the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created in 1983.

“Our federal holidays are purposely few in number and recognize the most important milestones,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. “I cannot think of a more important milestone to commemorate than the end of slavery in the United States.”

Now we just have to wait for China Joe to wake up and get some of his cognitive facilities back to understand what he’s doing to sign it without saying anything really stupid during the ceremony. Some Republicans missed a big chance to stick it to the Democrats, though, failing to see the political benefit in passing the bill

Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., said that he would vote for the bill and that he supported the establishment of a federal holiday, but he was upset that the name of the holiday included the word “independence” rather than “emancipation.”

“Why would the Democrats want to politicize this by coopting the name of our sacred holiday of Independence Day?” Higgins asked.

Rep. Brenda Lawrence, D-Mich., replied, “I want to say to my white colleagues on the other side: Getting your independence from being enslaved in a country is different from a country getting independence to rule themselves.”

She added, “We have a responsibility to teach every generation of Black and white Americans the pride of a people who have survived, endured and succeeded in these United States of America despite slavery.”

Republicans should be pointing out that it was the Democrat Party which supported slavery, which seceded over slavery, who fought to keep slavery, which enacted all sorts of anti-black policies and laws, which had anti-black policies in their party platforms, and that it was the Republican party which supported the exact opposite of Democrats.

But, the GOP has rarely been very good at that kind of messaging.

Also, we haven’t had slavery for about 150 years, and there’s no one left alive who was a slave. And probably almost no one, if any, whose parents were slaves, or even grandparents.