Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas introduced a resolution on Thursday to ban the Democratic Party or any other political party that supported slavery.
Gohmert’s resolution also calls on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to have all items removed from the House of Representatives wing of the U.S. Capitol or the connected House office buildings that name any political party or organization that supported slavery.
The move came a day after a measure supported by Pelosi regarding Confederate statues passed the House. That bill calls for the removal from the Capitol statues of those who backed the Confederate States of America, Politico reported.
Gohmert explained in a statement regarding his resolution that “a great portion of the history of the Democratic Party is filled with racism and hatred.”
“Since people are demanding we rid ourselves of the entities, symbols, and reminders of the repugnant aspects of our past, then the time has come for Democrats to acknowledge their party’s loathsome and bigoted past, and consider changing their party name to something that isn’t so blatantly and offensively tied to slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination, and the Ku Klux Klan,” he said.
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The conservative stalwart went on to argue that in light of calls to rename schools, military bases and city streets, the Democratic Party should follow suit.
“Whether it be supporting the most vile forms of racism or actively working against Civil Rights legislation, Democrats in this country perpetuated these abhorrent forms of discrimination and violence practically since their party’s inception,” Gohmert said.
“To avoid triggering innocent bystanders by the racist past of the Democratic Party, I would suggest they change their name. That is the standard to which they are holding everyone else, so the name change needs to occur,” he concluded.
Do you agree with Gohmert regarding the Democratic Party changing its name?
In his resolution, Gohmert pointed out that the Democratic platform in the 1840s and ’50s, before the outbreak of the Civil War, explicitly called for Congress not to interfere with the institution of slavery and warned to do so would “endanger the stability and permanency of the Union.”
The document further highlighted that Democrats in Congress did not offer one vote in support of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment, guaranteeing the newly freed slaves equal protection of the law, and the 15th Amendment, granting them the right to vote.
Gohmert noted the Democratic President Woodrow Wilson introduced a segregation policy in the U.S. government in 1912.
Additionally, it was Democrats who waged a 75-day filibuster in the Senate in an attempt to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Republicans supported that legislation in higher percentages than Democrats in both the Senate and the House.
In contrast to the Democratic Party, the Republican Party was founded to halt the growth of slavery in the 1850s.
The party’s first president, Abraham Lincoln, oversaw slavery’s demise.
It is no wonder abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass was a staunch Republican.
Democratic politicians in the Southern states responded to blacks Americans’ new freedoms by passing Jim Crow, segregationist laws starting in the late 1800s.
They also populated the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan, formed to terrorize African-Americans and keep them in subjugation.
Lest one think this is ancient history, the nation’s longest-serving senator, Democrat Robert Byrd, led a Ku Klux Klan chapter in his native West Virginia when he was a young man.
When the former Senate majority leader died in 2010, Hillary Clinton lauded him as her “mentor” and “the heart” of the Senate.
Meanwhile, in the years since the Civil War, Republicans stayed true to their roots of supporting the rights of African-Americans.
President Ulysses Grant, a Republican, sent the Army into the Southern states to protect African-Americans from Klan and other white supremacist-inspired violence.
He also championed the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870 guaranteeing black Americans the right to vote as a means to help them secure political power.
Decades later, it was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first such legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1875 under Grant.
Eisenhower also sent the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which mandated integrating public schools.
By way of comparison, Joe Biden in the 1970s opposed student busing programs, which was a primary means used to desegregate public schools.
Gohmert’s right. The Democrats have a troubling record on race, and it’s time for a reckoning.
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