Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise in support of this bill. This bill, which passed the Senate by unanimous consent last week, directs the Joint Committee on the Library to remove the bust of Chief Justice Roger Taney, which now sits in the Old Supreme Court Chamber and to add a bust of Justice Thurgood Marshall here in the Capitol complex. S. 5229 is the Senate's version of H.R. 3005, a bill which, for the second Congress in a row, passed the House in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote. The United States Capitol is a beacon of democracy, freedom, and equality. It is visited by millions of people each year. What and who we choose to honor in this building should represent our values. Chief Justice Taney, who in the infamous Dred Scott decision declared that African Americans could never be citizens of the United States and had no constitutional rights, does not meet this standard. As Senator Charles Sumner said during the 1865 debate on the bill originally authorizing the Taney bust, and I quote Senator Sumner, ``I speak what cannot be denied when I declare that the opinion of the Chief Justice in the case of Dred Scott was more thoroughly abominable than anything of the kind in the history of courts. Judicial baseness reached its lowest point on that occasion.'' More than 150 years later, those words still ring true. Who better to add to the Capitol complex than Justice Thurgood Marshall?…”