On Wednesday, two Republican senators joined avowedly communist activists in declaring their support for abolishing Columbus Day and replacing it with “Juneteenth” on the federal calendar.
The proposal from Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford follows the introduction of a bipartisan bill last week to establish Juneteenth as a federally recognized holiday on June 19, marking the anniversary of the last emancipated slaves in the Confederate States. As of Wednesday afternoon, 51 senators had co-sponsored the bill.
Johnson and Lankford’s names, however, remain absent from the legislation. Instead they are proposing the government go one step further, endorsing Juneteenth as a federal holiday and removing Columbus Day. Johnson emphasized in a statement that the focus of the bill is to keep the nation from going “further in debt” through the creation of a new holiday that would give federal workers another day off.
“We support celebrating emancipation with a federal holiday, but believe we should eliminate a current holiday in exchange,” Johnson said. “We chose Columbus Day as a holiday that is lightly celebrated, and least disruptive to Americans’ schedules.”
“Throughout our history, we have strived to become a more perfect union, and Juneteenth was a huge step in attaining that goal,” Lankford said in a statement. “We should celebrate these strides on the federal level while remaining cognizant of the impact the existing 10 federal holidays have on federal services and local businesses.”
The attempts to erase Columbus Day come as woke mobs launch a scorched Earth cultural revolution to rewrite American history. As part of this attempt to delegitimize the United States, they have launched misguided outrage at the pioneering explorer Christopher Columbus, chastising the European trailblazer as a genocidal imperialist.
In cities across the country, protestors have desecrated Columbus statues in a cultural purge, toppling a monument in Richmond, Virginia and beheading another in Camden, New Jersey. In Columbus, Ohio named for the world-changing explorer, a statue to the man it memorializes was removed from outside city hall early Wednesday morning.
A spokesperson for the Wisconsin senator told The Federalist that despite the optics, Johnson’s “sole motivation” in his proposal for a holiday trade-off is to spare taxpayers from footing the bill for an additional holiday, meaning no disrespect to the early discoverer.
“Senator Johnson is not deprecating Christopher Columbus’ achievements or expressing any value judgement regarding his place in history,” a spokesperson said. “As he stated in his interview with the Milwaukee Press Club last Friday, he does not support efforts to erase America’s rich history – not the good, the bad, or the ugly.”
A 2017 report from the government spending transparency group Open the Books found that taxpayers dole out more than $524 million for each federal holiday. There are ten of such holidays, which give government workers more paid days off than most in the private sector.
An additional holiday to commemorate the nation’s second independence day with the celebration of Juneteenth, however, seems like pocket change compared to the more than $2 trillion in deficit-funded bailout money Congress has already scattered across the country this year. If Johnson and Lankford really want to save much needed taxpayer funds, they could propose slimming federally funded days off without sending a message of capitulation to the mob.
Lankford is up for re-election this fall. Johnson is not.
