Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has already been outspoken about removing statues and busts of Confederates from the U.S. Capitol and now she says that “there will be legislation that will come forward” on the issue.
Asked during a Wednesday interview with CNN if she wished that she had removed the statues during her first tenure as speaker, Pelosi said “Well, I removed Robert E. Lee I put him down … into the crypt.”
She continued, “Right now the mood in the country is so completely different and the desire to rid ourselves of any of these symbols of bigotry and hatred is much stronger. There will be legislation that will come forward and hopefully it could pass the House and Senate and be signed by the president.”
Pelosi said that she will have announcements about potential legislation on Thursday.
She added, “There are, I think it’s eleven statues in the Capitol. Now, they’re sent there by their states and so their states determine who represents them in the Capitol. But I think now with the mood in the country, it is such that these states are going to have to rethink.”
The Speaker said, “They can send them, but I don’t know that we have to display them. That’s the discussion we’ll be involved in. I decided that we weren’t displaying Robert E. Lee when I was speaker.”
She noted that Rosa Parks and Sojourner Truth are statues in the Capitol, saying, “We tried to, shall we say, diversify the manifestations of the American people that are in the Capitol.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi discusses the past decision to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from the Capitol and her more recent calls to remove other Confederate statues https://t.co/PQ7z8StgB4 pic.twitter.com/7JMHDoByAI
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 17, 2020
This is not the first time that Pelosi has pushed for the removal of Confederate statues under the Capitol dome. In a recent letter to the Joint Committee on the Library, she wrote “Their statues pay homage to hate, not heritage. They must be removed.”